Diverse planning means the whole country, not the whole demo

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Reaching all category buyers is the most settled finding in marketing science, yet plans keep converging on the media the industry itself consumes. Ross Sergeant argues that incrementality, not familiarity, should decide what makes the longlist.

Byron Sharp does not do gentle. “Media buyers buying according to what they watch, or what their friends watch, is an abrogation of their duty to their clients,” he wrote to me recently. The line stings because it describes something real.

The evidence on how brands grow is about as settled as anything in marketing science gets. Growth comes overwhelmingly from reaching all the buyers in a category, including the light buyers who barely think about it.

Penetration beats loyalty; mental availability is built broadly or not at all. Most planners can recite this in their sleep, and most briefs nod to it on page one. With 2027 budgets being set now, where the last pound of reach comes from is not an academic question.

When the plan gets built, something quietly narrows

Media planners are not a mirror of the people media plans are meant to reach. The IPA’s census, now in its 66th year, puts the average agency employee at 35.6 years old, several years younger than the working country, and the industry’s centre of gravity remains a few postcodes of London.

None of that is a criticism (I fit firmly in that group); it is a description. It becomes a problem only when the plan starts to resemble the planner: the same familiar environments, the same comfortable titles, the same channels we would happily appear in ourselves.

The usual defence is the demo. The plan that is bought against all adults, by definition, reaches everybody. Except a bought audience is not a reached audience.

A schedule can deliver handsomely against all adults while finding the same easy half of them again and again, because that is where the familiar channels cluster.

Whole segments of society are barely touched: both ends of the social grade scale, most of the country outside the M25, older audiences and plenty of younger ones too, all spending their time in media that rarely make the consideration list.

On paper, the plan bought everyone. In practice, it kept meeting the same people.

This is where incrementality earns its place as a first-order planning metric. Once a schedule has reached a person a handful of times, the next impact buys frequency rather than fresh reach.

Beyond that point, the cheapest reach available to a plan is almost always in the audiences it currently barely touches, and the most expensive is the final decimal place squeezed from a channel already saturating its regulars. Duplication analysis tells you which is which. It is the difference between media that extends a plan and media that merely thickens it.

So diverse planning, properly understood, is a hard commercial discipline: work out which parts of society your current plan under-serves and go and find them, in the media they use, whether or not those media are fashionable in a planning department. It treats every category buyer as worth the same money, which is exactly what the till says.

There is a fair objection

Environment matters, quality matters and no planner should add reach at any price. Quite right. But those judgements deserve evidence: published criteria, measured audiences and, where one exists, a regulator’s decisions.

Familiarity is not evidence. “I do not spend time there” is an autobiography. Some of the most effective environments in the country are ones most planners have never personally used, which is precisely why the reach there is still cheap.

Here is the practical test. Take your current plan and ask for one number: what share of the people it reached last quarter had already been reached three or more times before the impact was served. Then ask which media on the longlist would have converted that spend into people the plan had never met. If nobody can answer quickly, that is the finding.

None of this is new, and none of it is a swipe at the craft. Planning has never had better machinery for the mix: econometrics, duplication analysis, models that weigh each channel’s contribution more honestly than any instinct. But a model can only choose between the channels it is given, and the narrowing happens earlier, on the longlist, before the data gets its say.

So the fix is not to bolt on reach line by line. It is to let the unfamiliar environments into the model on the same terms as the comfortable ones, and to accept what comes back. Plan for the country as it is, not as it looks from the office.

We reach for what we know; the models do not have to.

Ross Sergeant is chief revenue officer at GB News.