Is now the best time to be a media planner?
We’ve heard more than one practitioner say that these are salad days for a discipline that thrives in a rich media environment.
But you could also make a solid argument that there’s never been a more fraught time for media agencies, with the threat of automation and the dominance of walled-garden platforms.
So, which is it? We put the question to James Shoreland and Will Parrish, the CEO and CSO of VCCP Media.
Image: James Shoreland (left) and Will Parrish (right)
Is this really the best time to be a media planner?
Will Parrish: I actually asked one of the people in our team this question, and she quite eloquently put it, ‘Yes… if you’re up for it.’
One of the challenges is that media is such an exciting industry, and yet we do seem to give it a bad name in the way that we plan and buy within it.
We had this unofficial platform [at VCCP Media] that we launched about two years ago, which is that we want media to be less beige and more Beyoncé.
A narrative that we hear is that media planning is occasionally delivered with less panache and aplomb than it could be.
You see the same channels appearing on a plan, and one of the reasons that’s the case is the way that modern media works, it’s no longer in these four or five key channels, and yet we’re still thinking in that mode.
If you were to take a sample of the most affluent older audience in the UK and a sample of the youngest, they’re all going to have an internet connected TV in their living room. They’re all going to have social media that they scroll a huge amount every day. They’re all going to listen to audio to fill the gaps between their day. So it’s no surprise that you get the same four or five channels on every plan.
What is not done as well as I think it could be, is to really understand the new way that media planning should view those channels and what makes one audience different from another within that space, and what makes one brand’s behaviour in that space different to another.
That’s where you get into things like format and context and content, and the fluidity of assets and how they move from one place to the other.
So, I think it is the most exciting time to be a planner; I just wonder whether we’re all doing it the right way.
Is the gap between the potential and the reality of media planning a matter of catching up to new technologies, or do you think the industry has underinvested in training?
James Shoreland: For too long we’ve talked about the mechanics and the algebra behind the data and technology, and we need to reframe that conversation.
It’s funny you mention education because on April 23rd, there’s a not-for-profit industry group launching called the Media Planning Group. It’s in partnership with the Advertising Planning Group, and it was actually born out of the Advertising: Who Cares? Movement. We’re one of the co-founders of it, along with quite a few industry leaders, and we’re championing the idea that the craft of planners should be front and centre of all our thinking again.
That’s not to say that it’s anti-data and tech. But we’re coming out of a phase of the industry where we need to bring back critical thinking alongside data and tech. And the mission of the Media Planning Group is, through a series of events and educational modules, to bring clients and agency folk alike up to speed about how planning can be even better.
Do you worry that any improvement in the craft of media planning will be all for naught if everything becomes automated?
Parrish: If all media planning and buying is going to be algorithmic, that does put new constraints on how you do media planning and buying, [but] it means that there are different variables you have to play with. It leads you to actually having a greater understanding of creative and content because those are variables you can control, and what it also means is that the new generation of media planners and buyers have to be able to be a sparring partner, not just to the executional teams, but also their creative counterparts or to their clients.
A media planner a few years ago might have just looked at the numerical side of a plan, reach, frequency, delivery against a target, CPMs, etc. Now you need to start thinking, well, what are the content types that are performing better or worse? Who are they performing better or worse against? And how do I start to optimise the different creative variables that I’m using to best punch a bubble below the benchmark that the algorithm is deciding?
I don’t think that just because there are more algorithmic systems being used there are suddenly no variables for us to control as media planners.
Shoreland: I think Nick Manning on your podcast a couple of weeks ago said the algorithms don’t work in the favour of most of the advertisers; they basically work in favour of the biggest advertisers, who possibly give Meta and Google the most money. By submitting everything to the algorithms, 99% of brands out there are actually losing their own agency to compete against the bigger brands.
Parrish: The next generation of media planners need to know about costs, they need to know about context, they need to know about all of these other variables in order to provide counterpoints to just putting it into a black-box buying system.
What are the biggest blockers to better media planning?
Parrish: One of the challenges for a lot of people who practise media planning in larger agencies is the lack of connectivity between the people who plan the media and the people who activate it. A lot of people will have the so-called orchestration of a media plan, but you have divisions within divisions who operate different line items within a media plan. So, I think one of the challenges that a lot of people who practise media planning will have is the ability to confidently say to a client, ‘This is what’s happening within each of the channels that I’ve decided that we’re going to invest in.’
Shoreland: I think the biggest barrier is structural, in both the legacy structure of agency groups and the client side as well.
Since 2008 and the explosion of digital data and tech, companies have grown in size because they’ve doubled down on specialisation, so there’s a specialist or a company or a department or for every single thing to do with digital data and tech. What that’s done is removed people’s objectivity because, if you’re a plumber and you’re asked what improvement needs to be done to a house, you’re going to say it’s the plumbing.
The other challenge is the idea of what integration means within those types of structures. We’ve worked for large holding companies before and integration there can often mean, ‘Well, I know that we do something in some department or some building elsewhere.’ That form of integration is what I would call integration via introduction. But with the rapid pickup of AI, you can’t afford to have that specialisation anymore, we all have to be uber generalists and understand how it all works together. And that means flipping the idea of integration to be one of integrated thinking.
Is it possible still to have that generalist knowledge about media when it’s so big and complex?
Parrish: Personally, I think that’s why media will always be a really exciting place to work. To come back to ‘less beige and more Beyoncé’, you shouldn’t really want to work in media if you don’t want to embrace the new. Now, it’s moving so fast, you have to be a generalist because if you decide to specialise in one area of media, it may be gone tomorrow. But it does require your place of work to allow for that fluidity of thinking.
Generalism, I think, is born out of curiosity and conflict — I always say conflict creates the craft — and if you’re in a larger organisation, your ability to constantly learn is slightly hampered by silos and divisions.
So one challenge is, how do you become a generalist? And I think there’s an attitudinal part to that. Am I up for this very scary, always-changing world?
The second part is, how do I bring a client along who has responsibility for much more than media, when they used to be comfortable in the world of reach and frequency and a handful of channels? They now need to know about different data partners, different AI solutions, different delivery mechanics that you might have chosen to beat the algorithms. You know it’s the right course of action, but you have to bring your client along with you. If you do have smart tech systems, let your clients use them. Bring them in. If you do have a media plan to build, don’t go away for two weeks and then come back with the finished product. Bring them along, have them in the office with you.
Media’s exciting, but for most clients, it’s actually just scary to be told to invest in a new space if they don’t understand it.
Shoreland: It’s coming back to media agencies now, but I think we lost the confidence to think critically and have an opinion about what to do, partly because of this monopoly of digital data and tech that suggested there’s a right and a wrong answer. The idea that you can ‘press button, get plan’ was something that made sense financially for all of the bigger agencies, but actually was doing everyone a bit of a disservice, including the clients.
How do you feel about the next generation of talent? Is the industry attracting the best minds?
Shoreland: If you get talking to young people, the first thing they want to talk about is what media they use. How bloody exciting is that? They literally talk about the different platforms they use, what they use, and I think they’re going to be better planners than we ever were because they already, in an untrained way, have this natural language about recognising where the platform interplays with what they’re seeing. They talk to us about how they’re using how the brands or the creators use the platform and how it differs from one platform to another. That is the perfect, beautiful synergy that we’ve always talked about, which is creative and media.
Does the fragmentation of platforms and the spread of attention amongst an almost infinite supply of content make media planning much harder, or is it all the same if you’re buying audiences through platforms?
Parrish: What it does mean is that you have to be a lot better at audience planning, alongside media planning.
If I’m a coffee brand and I want to speak to my audience, previously I would have had to buy the right demographic on linear TV and outdoor, or whatever it might have been. Now, there are sixteen different types of coffee drinker that I might want to speak to, and I’m going to design a list of contexts and content that I want to test and put into the media all in one go, and I’m gonna allow the fluidity and the range of content that’s out there in the media to essentially tell me where the hottest prospects are.
It’s almost a spreadbetting-type behaviour that you should be adopting as a media planner now because there’s just more platforms and more content. But there’s also more potential for me to learn from that.
Cam [Cameron Armstrong, VCCP’s addressable director] has helped me understand that you can use [addressable media] as the best experimentation programme and learning platform in the world because you’re basically putting out different messages against a range of different audience types and, importantly, you’re monitoring millions of different contexts, in the media that you’re showing up against.
It’s just such a great asset for a strategy person in an agency. If we’re running addressable buying through Cam, I can tell you where attention is highest, which audiences are getting that attention and, importantly, I can start to feedback what contexts are actually popping.
That helps me do better media buying, but a really good media planner will take that knowledge to their creative counterparts. What I think is exciting is that media planners can now be amazing insight generators.
The old analogy for media planners was stock pickers who identified under-valued placements. Do you think that time has passed?
Parrish: Not necessarily. Every agency has an AI system they purport to be the best, and we’ve built one that we, obviously, would say is the best. But our system is predicated on aggregated knowledge. Every buy, every impression, we log within that system. So it’s learning what works for your brand versus the category. So every campaign that you launch is built on knowledge that is accruing with every placement, so you’re getting incrementally smarter at spreadbetting.
Shoreland: The analogy is futures trading, right? In the US, it’s called the upfronts, where you might commit 80% of your spend by betting big on a particular media or programme, and sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong. Will that still exist? To some degree yes, and to some degree no. We’re futures trading on cultural trends because social media changes so quickly.
I guess what has changed is the buy-in. Going back to the upfronts, the skill of media buying is always to try and buy something that media owners don’t value as highly as you do. What has happened is you’ve kind of squished the skill of the strategy, the plan and the buy all together because it’s so much quicker. I think in media buying of old, there was a bit more of a separation.
So, what does the future of media planning look like?
Shoreland: There was a really funny moment when we had just joined VCCP and we were sharing with Charles Vallance, one of the founders, a piece of research that we were doing that was looking at the relationship between active and passive attention in media, and what does or doesn’t work from an advertising point of view.
He looked at it and said: ‘Do you know what? It’s really good because we’ve fooled ourselves that we had this wonderful golden period of TV advertising but actually we were spoiled with that. What you’re talking about is life before TV, where we had slivers of attention.’
Now, with the slight erosion of the power of terrestrial TV, you’ve got to plan in slivers of attention. So what improves media planning now is if all of us can have a better understanding of how distinctive brand assets work. We have learned loads from the brand design part of VCCP, we’ve learned loads from the creative part, that now we think about the role of the plan as, ‘How do the various distinctive brand assets of a brand work in all the slivers of attention that people have in their media lives nowadays?’ That is, to me, the future.
Parrish: What I think’s really great about working in this context of putting distinctive brand assets in the media, rather than thinking of one asset to rule them all, is, if you think about having this brilliant brand world that you have to play with as a media planner, you can start to work out whether your brand performs better than another brand through the strength of your assets in a certain environment. If you have a distinctive asset that plays better in audio, you can start to say, ‘Well, actually, I’m willing to pay a higher price point than the average for that particular placement because I know my asset will perform better in that space.’
So, there’s a nice link between the idea of trying to hack the pricing and to hack the attention economy that we put in our research.
So, how should a media agency be set up to deliver in this environment?
Shoreland: We spoke to a lot of clients about what their frustrations are in terms of dealing with various agency models, and the number-one thing that came across was the complexity and the over-specialisation. Trying to get a meeting set up, for example, meant I had to have a room full of 15 specialists, and it was clear none of them had spoken to each about it because you just don’t have the time.
So we’ve simplified it into integrated thinking from lean teams. What faces into the client is the dynamic duo. In the same way that creative agencies have a copywriter and an art director, what we have is a strategy director and a planning director, and they work hand in hand.
At any moment, one of them can step into a planning conversation or a strategy conversation or a buying conversation, and behind that is all the teams that we’ve got, in terms of addressable media, etc.
It’s a different model. It’s not like the classic account lead who has to work the calendars to get everyone in the room for the meeting. It’s literally the two of them bringing integrated thinking.
How do you divide up the role of strategist and planner?
Parrish: The way we divide it is the strategist will own the business intelligence and growth narrative with a client. They’ll spend time understanding what intelligence the business already has, what intelligence sits in the market, and they’ll translate that into what we would call audience opportunities. The planner’s role is to take that audience and that approach for that audience and say, these are the environments, placements and spend levels that we should be putting against those media plan line items to reach those audiences.
Why did VCCP Media choose Beyoncé as the North Star, in its ‘less beige, more Beyoncé’ mantra?
Parrish: So Beyoncé embodies everything that we want to be, obviously. But there is a media case study that we used to typify why we wanted to be like her — the 2024 Super Bowl ad, for Verizon, which we didn’t make.
In the halftime break, there was an ad for Verizon which basically asked Beyoncé to break the internet, by becoming a gaming influencer and launching a lemonade stand. And all the while, this other character in the ad is looking at his Verizon wi-fi coverage and going, ‘Good try, Beyoncé, but you didn’t quite break the internet.’
And in the final frame, she says, ‘OK — they’re ready. Drop the new music.’
And at the same point she launched Texas Hold’em and another single. And in a funny way she did break the internet because there was a whole load of people suddenly searching for her new music, and we just thought that’s a really great example of media thinking. And it’s done with all the right tone of voice, cultural resonance and so on. So be less beige, more Beyoncé.
