Not a lot of people know that Sally Weavers, the founder of Craft Media London, swam competitively when she was little. Practice was brutal because there were numerous swimmers in each lane, and in each lane, the fastest swimmer set the pace. It was swim or be swum over.
One lane, however, was reserved by the coach for swimmers who wanted to hone their technique, or to stand on the diving board and observe the swimmers in other lanes from above. It was from that diving board that Weavers became a better swimmer, by watching how others performed turns and other skills, without having to worry about keeping up or being overtaken.
The Media Planning Group (MPG) will be a kind of practice lane for media strategists, said Weavers at the body’s official launch event in VCCP Media’s Fitzrovia offices last night (29 April). Formed as an off-shoot of the Account Planning Group, a non-profit organisation, the MPG will provide training and a forum for senior and junior practitioners to debate openly and honestly the challenges they are facing.
Goodness knows the industry could use such a place. As Weavers pointed out, the number of media planners is declining, those that remain are stretched across too many accounts, and AI is taking all of the oxygen from the industry.
MediaCat should probably admit to a bias here. We’ve set out our stall as a publication for people who are interested in how media can help build brands. If all that thinking is relegated to black boxes, there’s not as much smart thinking for us to cover, celebrate and facilitate. So we’re very much in favour of a resurgent media planning discipline.
Not that black boxes are the enemy. As one senior industry figure who spoke at the MPG’s inaugural debate pointed out, they’re a democratising technology that allows SMBs that can’t afford agencies to market themselves more effectively. Rather than chucking verbal sabots at black boxes, media agencies should be thinking more about building their own.
The problem, said another speaker, is that when you put ads into algorithmic feeds, you surrender the ability to control the context. You can control impressions but not where the communication is placed, beyond appearing in one feed or another. And as two of the three speakers last night reminded the audience — by way of references to Fanta Limon and a singalong to Black Box’s 1989 hit Ride On Time — media is all about context. The same message in different places and at different times can mean completely different things. That context changes constantly, too.
It seems obvious by now that AI, regardless of what it actually understands, amounts to more than the ‘stochastic parrot’ that the technology’s detractors make it out to be. But the models we use now rely on pattern recognition and trial and error. They do not operate like human brains, which create a model of the world inside our heads that we can then explore and imagine differently. That world model — which for now remains outside of the abilities of machines — is essentially just context, and it’s still our superpower.
As for how agencies assert that superpower, one speaker at the MPG event suggested planners should start briefs by giving themselves the creative constraint of imagining what they’d do if they couldn’t use the feeds. ‘Imagine what beautiful things might come out of that,’ he said. Another thing planners can do, he said, was to think about target contexts instead of just target audiences.
Agencies, too, must do their bit to encourage innovative thinking, said another speaker, who remarked that it was only possible to build expertise within a business when that expertise contributes enough to the margin, and the people who provide it are commensurately rewarded.
Of course, none of this will matter unless agencies can get clients on board with this vision, and that won’t be easy. Press Gazette estimates that two thirds of UK ad spend went to Google, Meta and Amazon in 2025. I’ve also been asking as many agencies as possible about whether they had fielded any concerns from clients about using Meta and Google following the outcome of the addiction court case in the US, and the resounding response so far has been ‘not really’.
Fortunately, the people I heard speak at the MPG’s inaugural event demonstrated exactly the kind of enthusiasm, expertise and charm that will be required to convince brands that excellent media planning needs a human touch.
