Commentary
Why Are You Embarrassed To Be A Media Planner?
- by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, October 16, 2024
Media planning and buying is an art form, but it sounds as though the industry no longer recognizes it as such.
First, when did “head of investment” become a title for ad agency folks? I have been hearing this title over and over the last year or so, and I finally had to ask who these people were. When I first heard the titles, I assumed (incorrectly) that these were people in the agencies who headed up investment in start-ups, publishers and other areas of return for the holding company.
Nope. It turns out these are simply media buyers. There are also other titles like “head of strategy” or “head of strategic planning,” which are held by people who were simply media planners, separated from the media buyers. At what point did the agency world think it made sense to separate the left brain from the right brain? At what point did it make sense to have twice as many people doing the job that half that group can do extremely well and had done for many, many years?
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I think the answer lies in a different question. When did we start forgetting that creative media planning is better than simply buying everything as efficiently as possible? I started out my career with a job in media. I was taught from the beginning that what is presented to you as options to buy are simply a starting point to think of something better.
It is not just a mathematical formula to simply try and drop the price 50%. You can get the price down by negotiating on base. You can create added value. You can craft experiences and new ways of working together.
You can always layer on frequency-oriented media, but the best media plans were the ones that truly broke through and did something different. These were what captured the attention of the audience, and these were what drove business success.
It was never about simply putting together a spreadsheet with a couple of ideas and handing it to someone acting as a glorified money manager, whose job it was to just get the effective CPM down to a number they could live with. Somewhere along the programmatic journey, we lost the creativity inherent in a great media plan and spent time coming up with creative titles to rationalize hiring more people to do what truly amounts to less work.
I have run ad agencies, and I know the primary way to get your clients to pay properly is not based on media commission, but to allocate heads and do an FTE+ model where you ask them to pay for certain people. Those people are where the negotiation lies.
I know that agencies have “investment groups” and people who do buying in bulk. I understand that not every agency operates this way, but the ones who do bum me out a bit. Doing it this way takes all the room for creativity out of the media planning and buying process, because it’s about the hours and not the talent being applied. The best people in those groups are spread thin and tasked to accomplish more than is truly possible to do at a high level.
In this way, smaller shops have a strong opportunity to do away with titles like “Investment” and get back to creative media planning solutions. In a perfect world, the media team and the creative teams are working together and having input on the entire mix as well as the message. In these larger shops, it feels like specialization and creating silos are making for less interesting media plans. That also bums me out a bit, too.
Cory, you raise some interesting questions.
As one who was there ---and very involved---in the development of the media planning function, at the outset there was hope by agency management that this might offer another way to promote the agency function to advertiser clients and those being pitched in new busienss solicitations. This was a time when the audiences of most media were very poorly measured if at all. But by the early 1960s that was changing with the major agencies like BBDO, Y&R, J.Walter Thompson, etc--leading the way. It was assumed that a new breed of planners could sift through all of the emerging new audience sources and find better ways to spend an advertiser's dollars. So agencies like BBDO--developed computerized media selection models to support this assuption.
The problem was that the media weren't priced against eachother, so as the computers huffed and puffed cheaply priced media--daytime TV, radio,magazines, outdoor posters, etc. always beat media the client insisted on using---prime time TV, sports sponsorships, TV specials, etc. Invariably, the must buys overrulled the computers' "recommendations" until, finally, the agencies gave up on their quest to promote media planningin this manner.
The problem still lingers today. The buyers---TV time buyers, in particular---keep the planners at arms length as they---the planners don't understand the complexities of buying national---and local--TV---or so the buyers claim. And the agencies ---who are crunched by client bean counters to keep their fees as low as possible have created person-power efficient work silos---like media buying---to accommodate their clients. Exceptions notwithstanding, the must buys still rule and a very high proportion of the buys are made on a corporate basis where the overall CPMs are lower. While planners can still make real contributions--if allowed to---in far too many cases the entrenched fee-earning buying systems--mostly operating as self-contained silos----work against this. And, I'm sorry to say this but most CMOs don't seem to care.
Bravo, well said the art of the media mix is gone agencies are to silioed ...Finding that one thing to drive a plan the idea that drives a deeper connection, that usually required a premium but makes the whole plan better. Will not happen in the lowest CPM world that drive plans (if you want to call them that) today...Again bravo