Media Planning Group aims to advance communications planning
Opinion
Not-for-profit body, the Media Planning Group (MPG), in partnership with the Account Planning Group (APG), brings together senior figures to help navigate today’s complex media planning landscape. IMA’s director of media explains the rationale.
Today, we are officially launching the MPG (Media Planning Group) at an event hosted at VCCP’s offices in Berners Street as part of the APG’s ‘Noisy Thinking’ series, where a selection of the MPG steering group (Sally Weavers, James Shoreland, Lucy Verby and David Wilding) debate the topic that ‘The black box is the future of media planning’.
Our journey began last summer, when Weavers, Shoreland, Paul Gayfer, Pippa Glucklich and I joined forces to discuss the state of media and comms planning today and what needed to be done to improve standards and make it a more interesting and desirable career for those coming through media agency land.
We have all been in the industry for way more years than we’d like to share, but that experience quickly led us to the view that quality media planning is less commonplace today than it was in the past.
Terminology is misunderstood, roles and responsibilities muddled, media and creative are increasingly developed in isolation, and ultimately, it feels like there has been a slow deterioration in the craft of media planning since media and creative agencies went their separate ways many moons ago.
That’s not to say it was perfect in the 90s, but the landscape at the time offered greater opportunities for media people to create intelligent plans powered by human insight, with creative and media signing from the same hymn sheet.
As the media landscape shifted, several factors drove the trends we are seeing. One of those is the rise in specialist agencies focused on one element of the media mix that are experts at one thing but work in a silo without worrying about the holistic approach.
This trend is further reinforced by the greater weight of spend going towards the walled gardens or being traded programmatically, leading to an overreliance on bottom-up, short-term planning designed to optimise CPA rather than encouraging audiences to think, feel, and do something.
Frankly, there is a problem at every stage of the journey, from poor briefs and limited collaboration to a lack of available time and the reliance on technology to make decisions. As we rush into the AI era, we feel that now is a good time to act, but what can we do about it?
A safe space to inspire and educate
We started with the ambition to create a safe space where the craft of media planning was championed and where the community of media planners and strategists could come to be inspired and educated, ultimately delivering real value to their clients when they return to their agencies.
We knew what we wanted to create, but didn’t really know where to start, so we sought the help of a proven partner who has achieved this for account planners and strategists in advertising/creative agencies, the APG.
Following its lead on naming conventions, we decided to create the Media Planning Group (MPG) to sit alongside the Advertising Planning Group (APG) as the ‘home’ for media planners and strategists, where they can come to develop, connect, and celebrate their work.
It’s a not-for-profit organisation run by volunteers from across a range of networks and independent agencies. Our aim is to get agencies to sign up their planners as members so they have access to both the APG and the MPG training and events designed for them.
Our first MPG training session starts on 19 May, during which the steering group will guide them on media planning fundamentals, budget setting, engineering the plan, media creativity, and measuring for success.
Media Planning Group launches to train next generation of planners
Ben Cunningham is the director of media at IMA