The challenges facing strategic media planning, in an era of media fragmentation and proliferation and increased audience choice and control seem to be ever on the rise. Although strategic media planning professionals have responded with an array of solutions from integrated marketing communications to redefining communications planning to supplement with marketing public relations and social media – gaps remain in the strategic media planning process.
The basic mathematical concepts involved in strategic media planning and buying, including the calculation of audience ratings, media share, reach and frequency, gross rating points have remained fairly constant. So too have the data sources traditionally used in media planning and buying, such as Simmons, MRI, Nielsen, comScore, etc.. What has changed are the habits of consumers themselves, and how quickly consumption patterns are evolving – leaving many of the historical ways to strategically plan and buy media with gaps in both visibility and accountability.
Strategic Media Planning Is The Best Way To Succeed
One of the key gaps for today’s strategic media planner is real time data that is able to easily look across all media channels for both the planning and buying of 360 degree communication campaigns. Another key gap is person-level data that allows the strategic media planner to create highly differentiated media plans for different proprietary segments from their marketer client. Both of these are now increasingly possible as the massive datasets from the direct response world are starting to be leveraged for media planning and buying by our media planning agency.
One new tool is now available which is designed to make strategic media buying and planning easier: LogicLab. LogicLab helps fill the gaps in the strategic media planning process by giving 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.
