• by Chris Novak , September 26, 2024

It’s that time of year, the annual inflection point, when you look at business performance, marketing, and media, and ask whether you’ll meet your numbers for the year. If things don’t look great, you know finance will come calling for claw-backs. Someplace in the business needs cash, and they want to take it from the media budget. And the media team will likely double down on efficiency measures as a result.

In other words, they’ll intensify a saving approach to media buying. By doing so, they’ll likely miss the growth needed. And they will perpetuate a bias toward saving on media.

What really needs to happen is a shift to how you can spark sales through year-end and stay competitive. There’s less time than you may think, especially if there’s new creative involved (which takes weeks). Since this fall will be supercharged by heavy election spending, prime media positions will require more advanced commitment.

Restart, don't revise. Major growth won’t come from micro-optimizations. It requires a complete strategy and effective execution. If you missed your first half targets, the same media foundation will repeat the process. Adding another channel into the mix isn’t a major revision. It’s time to retrace the initial steps taken and choose a different path altogether.

Play offense. Zero in on where more investment can yield outsized results. Nielsen found that 50% of planned media channel investments were too low to achieve maximum ROI. While the simple rule has been to spend between 5%-10% of revenue on marketing, it's possible to go one step further and look at your audience. What is the size of your target audience? What percent have you reached over 1H? What level of frequency did you achieve weekly, monthly, and quarterly?

Consider creative.Upping your investment in the message can make a disproportionate impact on media returns. Rather than simply spreading creative assets over more media, look to develop new ones. I’ve seen marketers increase performance 50% by incorporating media testing into the creative budget. Using a panel to evaluate and adjust creative saves the waste of using actual media buys to determine what messages will resonate. And you can do it for a fraction of the cost.

Do the math for the CFO. CFOs need to see media results in the context of business performance. Make the case for fueling the consumer engine of the business by comparing spend to actual sales. Platform metrics help with optimization, but can’t accurately reflect the magnitude of media’s impact on the business. Sales are real dollars that can be reinvested in media. That’s asset language finance execs appreciate.

In most cases, media savings plans don’t accomplish what CFOs think they do. By contrast, spending powerfully through year-end sets up the first quarter in consumer attention, sales, and recruiting. It’s the top time to bring in prime talent. Those people are keenly affected by the momentum in your business.