In an agency-client relationship, it is common for the media planning process to be split into two stages: media approach and media recommendation.
The media approach is a way for media agencies to share a high level understanding of the media plan with their clients to get feedback on whether the client believes it will help them achieve their business goals. This allows media agencies to proceed with their media recommendation with confidence that there will be minimal issues with the final output. The media recommendation is the final fleshed out media plan that is ready for execution.
Media Approach
Think of the media approach as a wireframe for the final media recommendation. At this stage, you will be prioritising your media objectives, identifying your target audiences, and selecting the most relevant channels and publishers that would fit into the media strategy.
Media Objectives
The first thing we have to do is identify the media objectives from the brief. These are often grouped as Awareness, Consideration and Direct Response (DR). Refer to the module on Media Objectives for a detailed rundown on these and how they fit in a traditional sales funnel.
Depending on the brief, we could have one or multiple objectives in the one campaign. If there are multiple objectives in one media campaign, we have to prioritise them based on the main goal stated in the brief. For example, if the main goal of our media campaign is sales, we should prioritise DR activity. Alternatively, if the main goal is building brand recognition, then we need to focus on Awareness activity.
Prioritisation is done by determining a rough split of the total media budget with a higher weightage usually allocated to the main objective (e.g. 30% of budget for awareness, 20% for consideration and 50% for DR in a sales focused campaign).
Audience
Once we have identified the media objectives for our campaign, we will need to think about who we want to talk to for each objective. Remember to always think ‘audience first’. At the end of the day, that is the sole objective of advertising, to talk to our intended audience. The channels and placements we use are influenced by the audience selection.
While we might have some ideas of the audience that we want to reach, we have to translate these to available targeting functions in the digital media space. Refer to the module on Target Audiences for a detailed view of how audiences are defined and the kind of targeting capabilities you can leverage with digital media.
Using the understanding of how we can identify audiences online, we can begin putting together an audience profile for each objective. The general approach is to loosely identify audiences at the top of the funnel (awareness), and become more specific with our audience as we move down the funnel (DR).
Channel and Publisher Selection
Now that we have identified our audience, the next step is to identify which channels and publishers would be most appropriate in reaching this audience and delivering our message most effectively for each objective.
In order to do so, we would need to consider these questions,
Where is my audience likely to be?
What channels/platforms do they use? Which websites do they frequent?
Which channels and publishers would give me the ability to best reach my audience?
What targeting capabilities do each of these publishers have?
Which channels would allow me to deliver my message best?
What formats would my audience be most receptive to?
How effectively can I measure success with each channel?
Are there any tracking/measurement limitations?
Here is a beginner’s cheat sheet* of typical channels used for each objective,
Awareness: Video, Audio, Display, Social
Consideration: Display, Native, Social
DR: Search, Affiliates, Social
*Do note that these are not fixed channel allocations, but commonly used channels for each objective. With a firmer understanding of audiences and objectives, channels become more fluid across objectives and creative considerations are incorporated into channel selection.
Rationale
Once you have outlined the audience and channel selections for each objective, we need to tie this back to the media strategy and the brief. To do this, you will need to answer these questions for each element,
Why is this the chosen media objective? (i.e. why awareness/consideration/DR)
Is this the right audience for this campaign/objective?
Why is this the chosen channel for this audience and objective?
Is this media approach in line with the media strategy?
Does this media approach solve the business/media challenge?
The idea here is to leave no stone unturned. To build a solid media approach, you need to interrogate your every decision until you can confidently posit that this is the best solution for the media challenge.
Media Recommendation
After a media approach is agreed on, we will need to flesh out the media plan with greater detail and specificity in our media recommendation. At this stage, we are planning for execution.
Here is a list of elements that we will need to incorporate into our media recommendation,
Placements/Creative Formats: We need to be specific with where exactly we want our ads to show. This means picking out the exact publishers that you will be working with and the specific sections of their platform or site where we will be placing our ads. While doing so, we will also need to specify the creative formats that we intend to use for each placement as this will guide creative production.
Targeting: We will need to list out the exact targeting that we will be using for each publisher and placement based on their targeting capabilities and available audience segments (e.g. Demo, Geo, Dayparting, Audience)
Budget Assignment: Once the placements and targeting are detailed out, we can begin assigning budgets to each placement. This exercise can occur multiple times through the planning process based on our forecasted results. At the end of the day, we want to assign budgets in a way that maximises our desired outcomes.
Buy Model: The buy model refers to the way in which we pay for our online media activity. There are many options, but the key ones are Fixed/Flat Cost, CPM (Paying on Impressions), CPC (Cost Per Click), CPE (Cost Per Engagement), CPV (Cost Per View) and CPA (Cost Per Action). You can find more details in this article on Media Buying.
Media Rates: While confirming the buy model, we will also need to have the actual or estimated rates for each activity (e.g. $2 CPC, $12 CPM etc.) to give the client an understanding of how expensive the media activity will be. At the end of the day, we want our media activity working hard for us and our budgets to stretch as far as it can to give us the greatest media value.
Expected Delivery: With the budget, buy model and media rates in place, we will be able to work out the expected delivery of each placement. For example, if we budget $10,000 for a placement that we have bought on a $2 CPC, then we should expect 5,000 clicks to be delivered (i.e. $10,000 / $2 CPC = 5,000 Clicks).
KPIs: Media KPIs are our measure of success. We want to identify the metric that will be the best indicator of whether we are achieving our media objectives and business goals (e.g. Completed Video Views for Awareness, or Acquisitions for DR). Refer to the article on KPIs and Measurement for more details.
Forecasted Results: KPIs alone are not substantial enough. We need to share some indication of how we expect to perform. This can be a tricky exercise and will take some practice and experience to master. The basic principle of forecasting is to use past data to predict future outcomes. While it is unlikely we can predict the future with absolute accuracy, we can deliver a logically sound forecast by considering as many variables from past data (e.g. past results, offers, seasonality, budget, media mix etc.) to paint a fairly accurate picture of future results. These forecasted results must be aligned with our KPIs to form our goal markers to hit.
Flighting: Flighting simply refers to the assignment of dates to our media activities. You may only want to run certain placements for a specific period of time based on your offer or based on seasonality. An additional layer to this is budget flighting. Budget flighting is the assignment of specific budgets to placements based on the dates. You may have data that suggests certain months or weeks of the month perform better, so you may want to upweight the budget allocation during those months to maximise your desired outcomes.
Executional considerations: There are other elements that we should plan out at this stage to ensure that the execution of the media plan and measurement of our campaign are seamless. One of the key elements is having the right tracking requirements in place so that we can monitor performance and optimise accordingly. We do this by visualising the consumer journey from ad to final action for each media placement to ensure that everything can be tracked. We should surface gaps in tracking to know where we will have to find alternative measures of success. Another key element is ensuring that the creative is executable and that the message fits the medium. At this stage, this is still being worked out, but it is always good to raise this early to avoid a situation where certain placements can’t run due to creative limitations.
Rationale: As always, we need to have solid reasoning behind all our media recommendations. The easy way to do this is to essentially ask 'why' to every element mentioned above. This ensures every aspect of the media plan is purposeful.
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