“Plans are nothing; planning is everything” General Eisenhower

Mike and I often reminisce about the good old days when media planning was a bit of a dark art and press coverage and frequency were calculated using the revered “Sainsbury’s Formula” . We revel in telling the youngsters about blue and green AGB books and how we’ve both got one arm longer than the other because we had to carry BRAD in our briefcase at all times. Media planners of today just don't realise how lucky they are!

But are they? The modern day media planning process is far more complex than it’s ever been and just like O-Level Maths, clients expect you to show the workings out.
So, below are some of the working outs behind our process of planning and buying media activity.

Media plans need context – This means understanding the client’s business, their position in the marketplace, analysing what their competitors are up to and agreeing a strategy for the brand.

Objectives - Before putting a plan together we agree with the client a definition of their communication objectives, cognitive- oriented objectives (awareness), affective –oriented objectives (engagement) and co native- oriented objectives (purchase objectives, customer loyalty).

Target group analysis – This means not just looking at TGI but in-depth profiling of client data. We might look at the profile of their booking data against our own in-house profile classification, Pollen, and we’ll look at things like demographic, psychographic, socio-economic and behavioural characteristics to understand our target audience and how best to reach them.

Strategic media planning – Refers to the requirement for joined up thinking. Far more than just media alignment but integrating messaging and setting coverage and frequency targets by media as well as calculating overall coverage and frequency of the total campaign. How is this going to help deliver the hard metrics? How have we come up with the campaign shape - duration, burst, drip, pulse etc, etc.

Detail planning/optimisation - This is the nuts and bolt of the plan. Within each media there is a multitude of formats, copy and booking deadlines. Airtime deployment considerations detailed here. Data requests and plans are discussed in this section. How are tests such as creative, advertising weight, regional up weight going to be incorporated in the plan? Where does social media fit in? And more importantly, this is where each individual buy has a response/sale/donor/ROI value attributed to it. This is fed into a comprehensive call/lead forecast within agreed time segments. A really important working out is how we’re going to incorporate learnings gathered as the campaign unfolds. Online is pretty straightforward, but how can we optimise other activity, such as inserts, national press?

Buying Strategy/Tactics - More and more clients want to fully appreciate how their media agency is going to maximise media value and how they can help. Part laid down, part distress, payment by results, even barter need to be assessed and a strategy laid down for approval.

The above is by no means is an exhaustive list of workings out and is a lot trickier than O’Level Maths even with the use of log tables (ask your parents!)

It's not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

Commercial radio’s impressive Q2 performance just shows what hard work and innovation can achieve. Quality content that’s accessible across multi platforms is starting to pay dividends for commercial radio. As a result, it is continuing to grow its audience, its listening hours and its market share.

Listening hours at Absolute Radio Network have jumped from 17.6 million per week, to a massive 24 million! With their combined audience creeping towards the 3 million mark it is cause for celebration indeed.

And over at Magic 105.4 they will no doubt be celebrating taking the title of London's biggest commercial station, in terms of hours and reach.

One statistic that has caught my eye is that stations who podcast their shows are also reporting success stories. In particular, Absolute Radio's Frank Skinner Show posted record figures of 5 million downloads in the first six months of the year, and a million downloads in June alone, which for a station with 1.6 million listeners at the latest count is a phenomenal number!

Unusually for a media agency that specialises in direct response we really like radio as a medium. We totally buy into the increased brand browsing argument and for our charity clients, follow-up calls to an SMS brings in quality donors. So it’s great to see the industry experiencing another great set of results.

Ian Prager
Planning Director