A few years ago while I was in the midst of presenting a multimillion dollar online media plan for a high profile client, I was interrupted by a question as I moved from the Strategy portion of the presentation to the actual media plan and site list. The client had a simple comment – while she loved how we had included the best performing sites on the plan, she wondered how this had any connection with the upfront strategy we had just finished presenting.
While the strategy concentrated around audience insights, consumer journey, media consumption habits and recommended media mix and approach, the site list and the actual media plan placements were purely based on just historical performers.
We realized back then that the inconsistency occurred mainly because we had two entirely different teams working on the plan. While the communications planning team put together the strategy based on research, the media planers put together the actual site list simply based on historical performance.
Even today, you will be surprised that this is still a fundamental issue with most agencies and clients. While planners may simply optimize to the best performing sites and placements, there may be strategic reason to be still present on sites that you think will not perform instantly for your campaign.
Below are some tips to effective media planning and buying:
- Media buyers should be inherently involved in Strategy: It is important to include media planners and buyers right from the word go. Strategy and buying should complement each other. The entire media buy should directly link back to the overall strategy. This can only be achieved by partnering at all levels of planning.
- It is ok to have different Metrics (KPIs) for the same campaign: Audience insights may tell you that your target spends the majority of the time on social networks, while campaigns results may indicate that you have the least ROI from Social networks. From a strategy perspective, it may still be critical to maintain presence in social media. Therefore it is important to set measurement goals at the beginning. While social media may be measured in terms of reach, earned impressions etc, your online sites may be measured in terms of conversions / sales. Social media may not directly tie back to instant sales, but may definitely be helping in terms of long terms sales.
- Smart buyers can sniff Bargain deals: How you buy media is critical! Because of the way budgets and Insertion orders work, most buyers may tend to buy media upfront. Smart buyers will time their buy. Much of the media today works on the principle of natural forces of Demand and Supply. Most unsold premium inventory is available on ad exchanges and DSPs. So you can either buy inventory directly from the publisher by paying a premium, or if you can wait, you may be able to buy the same inventory via an ad exchange for much less CPMs. You can also partner with data companies like BlueKai and buy “audience” Vs. content. Meaning, you essentially track the user via cookie, and buy media when he is on a less premium site Vs. when he is on say, the home page of Yahoo!
- Optimize, optimize and optimize: While most buyers optimize their campaigns based on traditional metrics such as CTR and CVRs, it is also important to look into more advanced metrics such as Frequency. You may very well find out that you are reaching 70% of your users at a frequency of 10+, while 70% of your revenue is generated at a frequency level of 4+. In this instance, by controlling frequency, you may be able to save up to 70% of your $$ if you are able to control your exposure / frequency
- Measure like a Tailor: The way most advertisers measure performance today is fundamentally flawed. Most ad servers used for reporting will attribute your sale or lead to the “last” ad that was viewed or clicked. However a deeper analysis will reveal that the user may have actually viewed the ad on several other sites before they finally clicked and converted into sales. Therefore it is important to assign proper value to each of these sites that finally helped with a conversion. You need to be smart about how you measure performance.
- Rep relations go a long way: It is important to have good relations with your sales rep. Not only can they give you good deals, but maintaining a good relationship will often result in the rep paying the much needed attention to your campaign.