It has been fascinating to watch how the area of Media Planning has developed over the past few years, as the sheer variety of media available to buy has increased. What used to be seen as relatively straightforward decisions about media buying, i.e. TV and Press for awareness, direct mail for 1-to-1 communications, is now so much more complex – particularly with the rise of the digital world of email, web and search. With each additional media channel, it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor, measure and understand the inter-linkages between each medium.

As well as the range of media available, the actions you want to measure are also increasingly complex, involving not just enquiries and sales, but also hits on your website, dwell time on the site, the level of interaction, as well as the buzz in the social media space.

With such a wealth of information to interpret, the challenge for media planners and agencies will be to review the platforms they use to manage this data asset. Planners need to pose themselves three questions:

• Does my existing tool of choice (very often, complex Excel spread sheets) struggle to cope with the sheer volume of data that is now available?
• Do I spend too much time pulling together pieces of data, and not enough time interpreting key patterns and trends?
• Is the process of manually pulling together data prone to human error?

During the past few months, we’ve found many media planning teams who answer “yes” to each of these questions. Some of them are now switching to new tools and changing their way of working, and they are already starting to reap the benefits, having more time to interpret rather than manipulate the data. In one of these cases, the loading of media used to take hours to do, yet it now happens automatically in less than two minutes. As a result, they now have much more time to interpret media trends and understand the best mix of engagement strategies.

Are you happy with the way you plan media at the moment – or the way media is planned on your behalf? Or, do you think it makes sense to re-evaluate your current approach to see if there are opportunities for improvement? Are there any major hurdles which are preventing you changing? We’d love to hear your opinions.

About Roger Luxton

Roger Luxton has written 5 post in this blog.

Roger Luxton is a Principal Business Solutions Consultant with Alterian, and he works with partners and clients to help them optimize the use of marketing software across different channels. His particular passion is using data to drive insight and ultimately deliver better marketing activity.

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