Love great media planning? Then charge for it
Opinion | The Future of Planning, Strategy and Innovation Week in Focus
If pitches are making way for ‘closed reviews’, this could be planning’s great opportunity, argues Omar Oakes.
Advertising has spent 40 years giving away its best media thinking to win the right to sell something else. The death of the pitch means it now has to choose.
“The media was handled by [insert agency name here].”
For years, that perfunctory line ended almost every story I wrote about a brand’s new ad campaign.
Here’s how it worked: a creative agency sends a release about a celebrity-fronted 60-second spot debuting during Gogglebox on Friday night. I would watch a rough cut and spend a hundred words describing every twist of the plot, like a cheapo Mark Kermode. Copy-and-paste some self-congratulatory quotes from the creative director, the film director, and the production company. Then, finally, slip in that mention of the media agency, or someone would complain.
File, publish, done.
I was part of the problem. I helped sustain a flattering fiction – that creativity was the all-conquering superpower deciding an advertiser’s fortunes. That story masked how important media planning is.
Now, pitches are changing. The way we see media planning must change with it.
The pitch is dying, and nobody is mourning it
Something has changed in the last 18 months, and in our obsession with “winners and losers” narratives in business reporting, it has been covered almost entirely as a story about holding-company rivalry.
Publicis took Coca-Cola’s North American media business from WPP in a closed review in March 2025. It took Microsoft’s global media account from Dentsu in April without a pitch. Then, this month, PepsiCo handed over its global media account from Omnicom – around $1.9bn in 2025 billings according to COMvergence – again, without a pitch.
CEO Arthur Sadoun told analysts last October that half the reviews Publicis had won in the previous six months were secured without a pitch. He explained that clients increasingly prefer to spend time with one partner testing capabilities rather than sitting through a PowerPoint pitch.
As Nick Manning has argued, Publicis is leading where the other holdcos will follow. Strip out the pitch, and you strip out the one occasion on which an agency has to prove, from scratch, that it can think.
Oddly, it could also be the best thing that could happen to media planning.
The pitch was never proof that planning mattered
Some of the sharpest strategic minds in the country spend six to 12 weeks building bespoke thinking for a brand they do not work for.
As part of a pitch, they interrogate the category, find the cultural angle, and build a case. They do it at night and on weekends, alongside the day job, often for no added incentive beyond ‘feathers in caps’ and ‘doing it for the team’.
All that work. And then, if your agency actually wins, they invoice the advertiser for something else entirely: the buying. Volume, principal media, rebates, commissions on execution.
In a world where audiences live across many media environments, a media plan becomes frozen by the need to spend X dollars on Y formats, because some schmoozing investment director (or even a group CEO) has ‘done a great deal’.
We’ve told ourselves for decades that the pitch is where planning gets its moment in the sun, when it’s the opposite.
The pitch is the industry’s most elaborate demonstration that planning has no price.
Closed reviews force a choice
Which is why, if pitches are making way for ‘closed reviews’, this could be planning’s great opportunity.
Pitches usually happen every few years. So yes, they might have devalued planning, but they only did it periodically, on one account, with a start date and an end date. The pitch bounded the giveaway.
Remove the pitch, and you remove the boundary.
If there is no single moment to prove yourself in, you have to prove yourself continuously – to prospects who may never brief you, to incumbents who want reassurance, to procurement teams “testing capabilities” on a Tuesday afternoon in March. The free sample stops being an event and becomes a permanent condition.
Which leaves agencies with a fork, and only two prongs.
Give planning away all year, to everyone, forever. Or work out what it is actually worth and put a number on it. They need to do the latter.
What exactly are we giving away?
A great media plan can take a bog-standard creative treatment and generate enormous returns.
Not through the dumb, expensive, wasteful hypertargeting that has colonised so much of the digital landscape. Through planners trained to think in a peculiar and highly commercial way: which cultural moments should change where a brand shows up, which audiences are worth interrupting, what company an advertiser keeps.
Not just reach and frequency. Context.
Yet no one has ever priced it. Planning is given away as the reason to award the buying, and the buying is where the money gets made.
For years, you could almost defend that. If the buying margin came from honest arbitrage – buying well, at scale, and keeping a slice – then free strategy was a loss leader on a legitimate trade.
Principal media changes the character of the arrangement entirely.
When the margin comes from inventory the agency owns, the free strategy is being funded by a decision the planner also makes. The plan pays for itself, in the plan. Free planning isn’t free. The client pays for it in the media choice, and pays twice if the choice is wrong.
Difference costs money – research, argument, the willingness to recommend something harder to buy. When the thinking is the giveaway and the execution is the product, you get plans optimised for execution. Cheap to build, easy to buy, indistinguishable from each other.
Media owners should be making this argument, too. Unfunded planning means worse plans, and worse plans drift to the algorithmic default every time.
Championing is not charging
I’m proud that The Media Leader still takes media planning seriously. Two recent pieces on this site – on planners who give a shit, and on why your plan looks like everyone else’s – are best read together, because both circle the same question: why so much money ends up in algorithmic places nobody would defend out loud.
Annoying, harmful, crap. Handled by [insert agency here].
But championing is not enough. Celebration is not a substitute for knowing what you’re worth and charging for it.
So here is the question the death of the pitch finally forces, after many years of successfully avoiding it.
What is a media plan worth, once you take the buying out from underneath it?
Omar Oakes was the founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years.