Report: Media planning under pressure

There was a metaphor continuously carried through the debate at the latest Mediatel conference that might make anyone think media planning was done for.

It suggested the discipline had been walloped by so many catastrophic asteroids it was hard to imagine it had a future at all.

The impact of digital, adtech, data, the rise of global pitches, algorithms, Google, Facebook, the separation of media and creative, aggressive procurement departments…the list of near-apocalyptic events raining down, one after another, seemed almost endless.

Against such a dire backdrop, could media planning ever hope to return to the top table? There was certainly little disagreement that the glory days were firmly in the past.

“The highest role of planning today is the one it’s always been,” says Laurence Green, founding partner, 101. “It’s to be a strategist and make choices for the client. It’s also to be the long-term brand guardian.”

Yet we’re in danger of losing that second part, Green says.

Planning is also in danger of losing its curiosity adds Marie Oldham, head of strategy, Fresheyes Consulting. “The role of the planner is to be the voice of the consumer. Today, however, this increasingly means knowing what they are doing, not why they are doing it.”

Likewise, says Simon Daglish, group commercial sales director, ITV, there is such a drive for efficiency from clients and media agencies today that the answer is often given to the planner before they have found it.

“The tools planners are given today restrict their ability to be curious,” Daglish says, citing the rise of the algorithm and programmatic advertising as major contributing factors in this change.

“Planning is about putting together a strategic plan that changes human behaviour; that makes us do something different,” Daglish says.

“My worry about programmatic – not in totality, but where it is now – is that it’s about only reaffirming human behaviour, not changing it.”

Data based on previous behaviour can only, in the long term, lead back on itself, he argues – there is no room for advertising serendipity.

Liz Workman, managing partner of Workman Partnership, BBH’s Jason Gonsalves and VisualDNA’s Jim Hodgkins give their thoughts on what the future holds for media planning.

All of this leads to what Green, a planner whose clients include the BBC, Byron, Heineken, innocent, Tango and Wagamama, calls a “pipes and plumbing narrative” – something that seeps through the entire media industry.

“It’s a narrative being written by Google and Facebook and it’s squeezing out the debates about ‘why?’, about anthropology, behavioural economics and creative,” he says, pointing a finger at Ad Week 2016 which is dominated by three issues: digital, social and programmatic.

It is as if planning has been sidelined by wider debates.

Enreach’s founder Brian Jacobs, an ex-planner who has worked in advertising for 35 years, agrees and argues that the media agency community has failed to promote planning in this adtech and data-driven era and therefore maintain client buy-in.

“If media agencies spent a bit more time talking about and promoting the fact that there are tremendous business benefits in great planning and the rest of it is just plumbing, then I think clients would buy into that,” he says.

Marie Oldham and Laurence Green

Jacobs thinks promoting the best of planning could even help usher in a tipping point for “media agency salvation”.

Others think better training, bringing media and creative closer together and finding a new structure to match a changed media landscape can all help revitalise the discipline.

For Tom Laranjo, a trained anthropologist and managing director of Total Media, if planning wants to rediscover its mojo and cut through the hubbub, the industry needs to get excited about the possibilities.

“We now have such a rich opportunity from data and tech to be able to reinforce and improve on our planning,” he says.

For Laranjo planning has been stuck in a rut because it has been hard for the industry to fully understand all of the new data and tech that has enveloped it.

However, the industry is “almost over the hump”, he says.

“We’re now better at understanding and using data and tech and we’re going to be able to channel that much more effectively and use it to make our planning that much more exciting.

“It’s actually about to get really good.”

Video interview with Simon Daglish, Laurence Green and Brian Jacobs