Holistic media planning grew out of the difficulties facing media planners arising from the explosion of new outlets, digitization, and the limitations of traditional audience measurement research. The concept for holistic media planning came from looking at media from the consumers point of view – specifically how they experience it and what role it plays in their life and decision making process. Although many studies suggest that several media often work better than one, holistic media planning is more complicated than just including more channels. The key to a solution lies in understanding the roles different media play for the target consumers and how they interact. This should be established prior to the creative development of the campaign, which should then proceed in tandem with the media plan and be integrated with it.
Marketers are increasingly interested in deepening their understanding of all channels through which consumers experience brands, and not merely the traditional media channels. Collecting channel preferences from customers is not enough: marketers need a much better collaboration between agency partners. If no-one can be expert across all channels, a ‘channel generalist’ is needed to bring the experts together. As such, a new breed of channel planner and media buying agency needs to emerge, familiar with the whole range of quantitative and qualitative toolkits, and with an understanding of how to exploit customer data from a channel perspective.
Holistic Media Planning Will Start The Revolution
The historically used measures of reach, frequency, share-of-voice, and cost-per-point are very factual, but unfortunately they lack an evaluative assessment of the quality of attention to the advertising, the brand impact, efficiency, and value to the brand. Advertising recall does not follow media consumption. High share-of-voice is not efficient.
Now there is a new tool to make holistic media plans smarter: LogicLab. LogicLab delivers on-demand access to powerful analytics backed up by advertiser and media data to calculate both campaign planning efficiency as well as efficacy of campaign results. Check out a 90-second video at www.logiclabinc.com.
