The future of media planning depends on better data foundations
Opinion
You cannot build modern media planning on unstable foundations. Data engineering fixes this, says Project5’s MD for data and tech.
The pressure on today’s CMOs is intense. Marketing budgets are under scrutiny, growth targets are rising, and every pound spent is expected to prove its worth. That pressure doesn’t stay neatly within client walls. It rolls downhill to agencies, who are expected to provide not just ideas, but certainty. Confidence. The ability to say, “spend here, not there” and know it’s the right call.
But increasingly, that confidence depends on the quality of the data foundations underneath modern media planning.
Why data engineering is now a frontline media capability
Over the past two years, the industry conversation has become remarkably consistent on one point: brands are drowning in data but starving for clarity. According to Supermetrics’ 2026 Marketing Data Report, 52% of marketers say their data isn’t reliable enough to make confident decisions, and 49% still struggle to unify data across platforms.
DemandScience’s 2026 State of Performance Marketing report goes further, showing that poor data quality silently wastes around 25% of marketing investment through disconnected systems, misleading signals, and inefficient optimisation.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s millions.
And this is where data engineering stops being a back-office function and becomes a strategic advantage. Clean, structured, connected data is the only foundation on which modern media planning, measurement, optimisation, and AI-driven insight can stand. Without it, everything else, including MMM, attribution, audience modelling, and creative optimisation, becomes guesswork dressed up as analysis.
The media industry talks a lot about AI shaping better decisions. But better decisions only happen when the foundations underneath them are trustworthy.
The point is simple. If the counting is wrong, the decisions will be wrong.
The pressure transfer happening inside modern marketing
CMOs are being asked to justify every decision with evidence. Not anecdotes. Not dashboards. Real commercial evidence. And that pressure is now being transferred directly to agencies, who are expected to prove where the budget should be spent, prove where it shouldn’t be, change course quickly when the data demands it, forecast outcomes with increasing accuracy, and explain results with clarity and confidence.
But none of this is possible if the underlying data is fragmented, duplicated, or inconsistent. And right now, too much of the industry still relies on manual stitching, spreadsheets, and platform exports that don’t align.
You cannot build modern media planning on unstable foundations. Data engineering fixes this. It creates the pipelines, governance, and quality controls that ensure every number is trustworthy before it ever reaches a strategist, planner, or CMO.
AI is only as good as the data beneath it
The industry is sprinting toward AI-powered analytics, but the risks are rising just as fast. DemandScience’s 2026 report shows that two-thirds of marketing leaders see dashboards telling a success story that never shows up in revenue, driven by AI amplifying unreliable upstream data. And they’re right to be worried.
AI doesn’t correct bad data. It scales it.
Data engineering ensures AI is built on bedrock, not sand.
The best clients already know this
The most sophisticated brands are investing heavily in data engineering because they’ve done the maths. They know the cost of building clean, automated, AI-ready data infrastructure is tiny compared to the value it unlocks. It leads to more efficient media spend, faster decision cycles, better forecasting, clearer attribution, and ultimately stronger commercial outcomes.
They’re not paying for pipes. They’re paying for confidence in decision-making.
Why this matters for modern media planning
At Project5, we increasingly see this as a media planning challenge rather than simply a technical one.
As media becomes increasingly shaped by AI, automation, and data-driven optimisation, the role of media planning becomes even more important, not less. The advantage no longer comes from simply having more data. It comes from having cleaner, connected, decision-ready data that planners and clients can genuinely trust.
The future of media planning belongs to agencies and brands that combine stronger data foundations with senior judgment that stays closer to the work and closer to decision-making.
Data engineering isn’t a “nice to have” anymore. It’s the price of entry for modern media performance. And the brands that embrace it early will be the ones who move faster, spend smarter, and outperform their competitors.
In the end, it’s simple. The brands that invest in clean, connected, trustworthy data will make better decisions, move faster, and waste less. The ones that don’t will keep guessing.
And in a market this pressured, guessing is no longer an option.
Leena Vara-Patel is the MD, Data and Tech at Project5