Planning in a fragmented age: Make media coherent again
Opinion
In the second part of a mini series, Caroline Manning shares four steps to bring coherence to chaos in a fragmented media world.
Sometimes I feel like a media planner and a jigsaw puzzle expert are the same person. One’s trying to match messages to moments; the other’s trying to make 1,000 tiny pieces form a coherent picture.
Welcome to the age of fragmentation.
The average consumer journey today? It’s a whirlwind. A TikTok here. A podcast there. A scroll. A skip. A walk past a bus stop. A chat with Alexa. We’re living in media chaos — and yet we expect consumers to make sense of it all and come away loving a brand.
That’s the challenge facing planners today. Our job isn’t just to “be where the audience is”. It’s to be there with purpose — and in a way that builds a consistent, compelling story.
So how do we bring coherence to chaos?
From media planner to business advisor: The expanding role of planning
Step 1: A strategic spine
Every brand needs a unifying idea — one that transcends channel, budget and format.
Not a tagline. A strategic organising principle. The thing that defines our body language, tells us what we say, how we say it and why it matters. If we don’t have this, no amount of retargeting wizardry will save us.
Step 2: Flex the message
TikTok might want playfulness. Print might want poise. That’s OK. But the message should still point to the same truth.
The job of the planner is to act as creative interpreter and media diplomat, ensuring every execution is tailored but tethered.
Step 3: Conductors, not soloists
It’s not enough to plan paid media in isolation. The real coherence comes when we orchestrate all media together — owned platforms reinforcing paid, earned media amplifying shared content and so on.
The same goes for fame-driving activations and those that are flowing consumers on the journey to conversion.
In today’s world, everything fuels everything. Planners must think like conductors, not soloists.
Step 4: Don’t be dictated by numbers
Each platform may offer different KPIs, but we mustn’t let the numbers dictate the narrative.
Planners should define a common North Star for effectiveness and translate KPIs accordingly, not blindly optimise towards the loudest metric.
I’ve had the luck to work with some brilliant planners and I’ve seen them turn chaos into clarity by:
• Mapping every brand touchpoint to a simple comms framework
• Aligning paid and owned content through shared creative guidelines
• Building media plans around people and behaviour, not platforms
When this happens, consumers don’t just see ads. They experience a brand. They move fluidly through the journey, feeling like every message builds on the last. That’s when media starts to feel less like noise and more like music.
So if fragmentation is the problem, coherence is the new currency.
Planners? We’re the ones holding the sheet music.
Caroline Manning is chief design officer at Initiative