When will media planners start linking what with why?

It has been a bug bear of mine for nearly 30 years- almost the entire time I have worked in media- that there are very few complete media planners. Most fall into one of two groups, divided by the intellectual equivalent of the Grand Canyon.

There are the traditional “above the line” or communications planners. Focused on consumer insight they ape the anthropologists- spending hours intellectualising consumer motivations, and asking why a consumer might behave in a particular way. Have created their intellectual construct they rarely seek experimental data to prove that consumers actually did behave the way they predicated.

Across the Canyon we find the “below the line” or data planners. With their “my data is bigger than yours” datasets they can tell you to 5 decimal places what is happening in the world, but rarely why.

And its this latter group who are running the media mad house this week. Neilsen published their monthly online media usage figures for February on March 28^th. A harmless set of numbers that tell us how many unique visitors used the web per se, and then top ten sites within the major categories such as broadcast, entertainment. We learn that 41.7 million people went online during the month, and 8.5 million adults visited Sky.com. All very jolly.

But less so were the headlines that accompanied the release. “online numbers at lowest level for a year” “online uses down by nearly 1 million from January”.

No s**t Sherlock.  The shortest month of the year- 10% fewer hours of surfing than Janaury, and we are surprised when reach falls by 2.5%.  When, oh when will we manage to create a rounded media planner?