‘Underrated’ media planners should prepare for ‘golden age’
Media planners are being underrated across the industry but there is light at the end of the tunnel as we are entering a ‘golden age’ for planners, an expert panel comprising Facebook, Tesco, and Craft Media said.
Growing confidence, opportunities to test and learn with new channels and training were pointed to as reasons for this optimism by industry experts Sally Weavers, co-founder and CEO of Craft Media, Nick Ashley, head of media at Tesco, and Peter Buckley, connection planning director at Facebook.
The trio spoke at Mediatel’s Future of Media panel on the question How important is shifting the focus back to the art of media planning?
‘Golden age of planning’
Buckley said: “We should be going into the golden age of planning. One thing that planning could do is take more of an interest, an expertise into these platforms and dig deeper into them because there is a lot of value there. Planning is more important than ever as there are more channels, more formats, more voices.”
Ashley stated he thought the media industry had already entered a golden age of planning, something which he would not have said that four or five years ago.
He commented that effectiveness in terms of ROI has been going up over the last two years according to recent EffWorks Research suggesting that, instead of a crisis about a lack of planning and declining effectiveness, the opposite is true and we have come through “a turning point”.
Risk-taking with innovation and experimentation combined with true understanding of the outcome that a campaign wants to deliver were mentioned as signs of great planners in this “golden era”.
Buckley maintained you cannot rely on algorithms to “just sort everything out”, however, all panellists highlighted measurement as a key tool to optimise, test and learn and experimentation with new channels and mixes.
These experiments depend on different brands, desired outcomes and audiences, there is no one spend or channel that fits all, Buckley told attendees.
Talking about failing, training and confidence in planning is ‘critical’
Ashley and Buckley both talked about how communication about failed test and learn experiments, what worked and what did not work in a media plan, was much more transparent and honest outside of an agency space, both of them having moved from agencies to their current positions.
Weavers commented the problems in consistent training and recruitment in the planning industry is holding it back and causing issues with its image across the space.
Buckley said that currently the planning industry does not have enough confidence in what it brings to the table, a sentiment echoed across the panel as they all agreed media planners have “a bloody difficult job” which is not fully recognised.
Planners are underrated ‘character actors’
Weavers spoke at length at how she sees great planners as “character actors” who are incredibly skilled but rare, “capable of winning Oscars” but whose job is to make everyone else look good meaning they are often undervalued in the moment, and missed when they are not in the room helping coordinate strategy.
Ashley added to this analogy describing planners as the number 10 shirt’s role in football, bringing the best out of everyone around them, being the playmakers that unite teams with a spark of creativity.
He said he is seeing “really good playmakers” aka planners across the industry who deliver a return and make a team better.
Pictured, above: Weavers, Mediatel CEO Greg Grimmer, Ashley, and Buckley