• 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?

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.