Before the brief: Media owners on where planning conversations really need to happen
You need weird human brains to push the work on – there’s nothing smart about only looking backwards and across; you need to look forwards too.
Outcomes-based planning has changed what agencies are asked to prove. It’s less clear what media owners are supposed to do in response.
We asked senior commercial figures across TV, audio, outdoor, cinema, and news broadcasting three questions: what agencies consistently underestimate about their platforms, where they believe they add the most value in the planning process, and whether AI tools are making decisions smarter or just faster.
What’s one thing agencies consistently underestimate about your audience or platform when they’re planning?
Caroline Clear, client strategy and planning controller, ITV
For the viewer, TV is all about visual spectacle and main character energy – we don’t really think about the crew behind the set. And I think the same can sometimes be true for media agencies.
By which I mean, as an industry, we are great at celebrating and enjoying the campaign results that are in front of us, but we aren’t very good at shining the spotlight on what is going on behind the scenes.
Having sat on the agency side for many years, I know very well the importance of the dreaded client PCA. What I’ve realised since working at ITV is just how much outcomes data, and the symbiosis of channels, is missed in that analysis.
For instance, when someone sees a TV ad, only about a third of their subsequent actions happen directly on the brand’s website. The rest of that consumer response is hidden in organic searches, app opens, marketplace purchases, social media follows, or, increasingly, AI chatbot interactions,. Yet we are an industry still obsessed with visits to site.
Furthermore, the day a TV ad airs delivers just 12% of the web traffic it will ultimately generate, with the remaining 88% arriving over the next three months. This never stands a chance of being picked up in the Christmas PCA that needs to be delivered before you start planning the Easter campaign.
More often than not, TV is making other channels look great too; in recent analysis we consistently saw paid social traffic run at roughly three times the normal level when supported by a TV campaign.
Amy Jenkins, sales leader, Channel 4
I think agencies still underestimate the scale that TV delivers. We spend so much time talking about fragmentation that we sometimes forget what genuine mass reach looks like.
Channel 4 reached 45m adults across total TV in the first half of this year. That’s around 14m more than the ad-supported tiers of the major SVOD platforms combined. That’s not a niche audience or a hard-to-find segment. That’s Britain.
Another often-overlooked point is that TV doesn’t work in isolation. We know from Thinkbox’s research that TV has the strongest multiplier effect of any medium. It doesn’t just deliver reach; it makes everything else work harder too.
As planning becomes increasingly focused on optimisation and precision, my concern is that we sometimes undervalue broad reach, trust and cultural impact. Yet those are often what drive long-term business growth.
Sarah Gale, director, insight data and outcomes, Global
In a world of media abundance and choice, it’s easy to underestimate the power of audio and outdoor to reach millions of people in the real world, while still feeling personal, relevant and timely.
Audio is woven into the rhythm of everyday life: at breakfast, in the car, at work and in the moments in between. It builds trusted, emotionally rich relationships with familiar brands, presenters and shared experiences. And outdoor complements that intimacy with unmissable public presence, reaching audiences as they move through cities, high streets and transport networks.
Sarah Jones, director of planning, Sky Media
I think we often get put in a TV ‘corner’, when in reality Sky has a much broader multi-platform proposition. We engage audiences across big and small screens, from broadcast TV and on-demand to digital, audio and social.
Sport is a great example where we produce around 3,500 clips a week, combining live highlights with debate and analysis from professional pundits and creators. So we’re not just broadcasting live events, we’re engaging sports fans 24/7, 365 days a year. That gives brands the chance to connect with highly engaged audiences in premium, brand-safe environments.
Simon Kilby, managing director, Bauer Media Advertising
I think the biggest underestimation is the value of trust and the quality of the attention we can deliver. Too often, planning starts with a question of reach and the environment becomes secondary. But where and how someone encounters a message can fundamentally change its impact.
Our audiences are listening to stations and podcasts, reading brands and engaging with content they have actively chosen. That creates a different relationship between audience, environment and advertiser. Bauer Media currently reaches over 25 million consumers across audio and publishing, with audiences built around some of the UK’s most established media brands.
That trust also gives us a responsibility. The advertising industry has spent decades building relationships between audiences, media and brands, and we shouldn’t take that for granted. The environment in which advertising appears is part of the product.
The question shouldn’t simply be, ‘How many people can we reach?’ It should be, ‘What relationship do we have with those people, what mindset are they in, and what can this environment do for the brand?’
That is where media becomes more than inventory.
David Wilcox, commercial director, News UK Broadcasting
I think agencies can sometimes underestimate the value of context when they’re planning around audiences. There’s a tendency to focus heavily on who someone is, their demographics, behaviours or data signals, without giving enough consideration to why they’re engaging with a particular piece of content, and what that means for the impact of the advertising around it.
For us, that context really matters. Our audiences are actively choosing to engage with trusted, relevant journalism, often at moments when they’re highly attentive and interested in what’s happening in the world around them. That creates an environment where advertising can benefit from genuine attention rather than simply being delivered against a particular audience segment.
I would also say, on a personal level, that the complexity and diversity of our audience delivery is also ignored. We’re often thought of as a portfolio of Radio Stations, when the lion’s share of our audience lives in our other channels. Again, we can deliver contextual positioning and align with audience segmentation through our digital channels.
So, when planning, I’d encourage agencies to look beyond the audience definition and consider the mindset and environment in which that audience is being reached. That’s where media owners can add real value.
Davina Barker, chief revenue officer, Digital Cinema Media
If you thought cinema was hard to measure, think again. Ebiquity’s best-practice framework revealed cinema’s rich audience dataset and how it can be evaluated, down to the date, time, location and number of impressions. And agencies are using this data to great effect. Just last week, we judged the new Cinema Effectiveness category at the DCM Awards, and regardless of whether a brand was new to cinema or well-established, every entry clearly demonstrated ROI.
Has the shift to outcomes-based planning made it easier or harder to have a genuine strategic conversation, and where in the planning process do you think media owners add most value?
Sarah Gale, director, insight data and outcomes, Global
Harder to have, but stronger once you’re in it. Outcomes-based planning pushes advertisers, agencies and media owners to align more closely around shared objectives and a clear understanding of what a campaign can and should deliver, which raises the bar for the conversation rather than simplifying it.
A purchase rarely comes from exposure to one ad on one channel – it’s the cumulative effect of many touchpoints that build awareness, shift perceptions, encourage exploration and, ultimately, action. Different channels play different roles across that journey, and the best plans consider how they work together.
That’s where I think media owners add the most value: not just at the point of buying reach, but in helping prove what that reach actually did. Global offers advertisers enormous scale across audio, video and outdoor (we reach 95% of the population!) and tools like Global:IQ and Outcomes let us bring evidence into the conversation rather than assumption.
Amy Jenkins, sales leader, Channel 4
A bit of both, if I’m honest. The positive is that we’re all much more focused on business outcomes than media metrics, and that’s absolutely the right direction of travel.
The downside is that sometimes the desire to hit a specific outcome means decisions are being made before media owners are properly involved in the conversation. Planning models can be incredibly useful, but they’re only as good as the data that’s fed into them.
What we often see is that when you bring in broader evidence, whether that’s the impact of short-term disinvestment, the role of trust, or the contribution that brand building makes to long-term profitability, the strategy can look very different.
For me, media owners add the most value at the beginning of the process, not the end. The best partnerships happen when we help shape the thinking rather than simply respond to a brief.
David Wilcox, commercial director, News UK Broadcasting
Outcomes-based planning can improve the strategic conversation because it pushes everyone to be clear about what we’re actually trying to achieve. The challenge comes when outcomes become too narrowly defined by what can be measured immediately or most easily.
The most productive conversations happen when agencies and media owners agree on the role media needs to play before getting into channels, formats or buying mechanics. That’s where media owners can bring something different: a detailed understanding of our audiences, environments and the ways people actually consume content.
The value is often greatest earlier in the planning process. We can help challenge the brief, identify opportunities within our environments and explain how the combination of audience, context, attention and creative can contribute to the desired outcome.
Ultimately, outcomes-based planning works best when it’s a genuine partnership rather than a process of simply assigning a KPI to a media buy.
Caroline Clear, client strategy and planning controller, ITV
I’ll point to my answer to the first question to help answer this – I think it’s gotten harder because of increased media fragmentation – TV is influencing all of these new touchpoints, just not in ways that any of us can uniformly measure (yet).
At ITV, for example, I sit in a team of cultural researchers, media planners, creative strategists and measurement experts, all plugged into the wider commercial floor – so we have something for every stage of the planning process.
My team plays best, though, before the brief even comes in.
We have some really cool proprietary tools that can help inform the thinking – such as our content similarity tool, which paints a vivid (and often wonderfully weird) picture of an audience via their viewing habits, or our soaps subtitle analysis tool, which we used recently to explore how the nation’s relationship with finance has changed over the last 70 years.
Often that’s when you get the purest and most unrestrained partnership thinking – essentially the earlier and deeper we can get in with a client team, the more we can throw the ITV doors open to true strategic integration.
Davina Barker, chief revenue officer, Digital Cinema Media
No great planning strategy starts with the results – clients still want interesting briefs that take the medium’s context into account. Media Owners must demonstrate the unique value of their platform. In cinema, we know campaigns purpose-built for the big screen are highly effective and appeal to the cinema audience. In the long run, putting creativity and media context first will deliver better outcomes.
Sarah Jones, director of planning, Sky Media
I think outcomes-based planning is a good thing, because it forces a clearer conversation about what we’re trying to achieve. But we need to be careful that we don’t become too narrow in how we define success. A car brand might use TV to maximise test drives, for example, but that same campaign could also be building long-term brand strength and making every other channel work harder.
That’s where media owners like Sky can help. Our Norman databank captures learnings from more than 2,500 campaigns, giving us a strong understanding of the different outcomes media can drive. And as TV becomes more agile and addressable, we can use that insight not just to evaluate performance at the end of a campaign, but increasingly to optimise outcomes while the campaign is still live.
Simon Kilby, managing director, Bauer Media Advertising
Outcomes-based planning is a positive development because it forces everyone to be clearer about what success actually means. The challenge is making sure we don’t confuse what is easiest to measure with what is most valuable.
Outcomes-based advertising is the territory that platforms are increasingly pushing, but brands were built and products were successfully sold long before ‘outcomes’ became the latest thing.
Media owners add the most value when they are brought into the conversation early enough to influence the strategy. We know our audiences, our environments and the ways people engage with our brands. We can bring that knowledge together with data, research and creative thinking to identify new opportunities for advertisers to reach consumers.
Bauer Media’s Own Every Moment approach is rooted in understanding the different moments in which audiences engage with our brands, and how those moments can create value for advertisers. That is important because the role of media isn’t always to deliver an immediate response. Sometimes its job is to create attention, build trust or change a perception that ultimately makes an action more likely further down the line.
Are AI planning tools making agency decisions smarter or just faster?
Caroline Clear, client strategy and planning controller, ITV
Faster. Excellent planning has and always should be a foundation of what we know works along with a very healthy layer of brave and innovative thinking.
AI planning tools run the acute risk of being a great leveller – raising the floor on what I’d call the planning groundwork, but collapsing the ceiling on blinding insights and interesting tensions.
You need weird human brains to push the work on – there’s nothing smart about only looking backwards and across, you need to look forwards too.
David Wilcox, commercial director, News UK Broadcasting
At the moment, probably both, but speed is the easier benefit to deliver. AI can process huge amounts of information, identify patterns and make planning workflows much more efficient. That has real value, particularly when teams are under pressure to move quickly and manage increasingly complex datasets.
But faster doesn’t automatically mean smarter. The real opportunity is for AI to give planners more time to think, question and have better strategic conversations, rather than simply producing an answer more quickly. That’s where human judgement remains important.
AI can help identify an audience, model scenarios or surface an opportunity, but understanding the nuances of a particular environment, audience mindset, or brand challenge still requires experience and context.
So the question isn’t really whether AI replaces planning expertise. It’s whether we use it to remove some of the more mechanical parts of planning and create more space for people to focus on the things machines are less good at – curiosity, creativity, challenge and strategic thinking.
Sarah Jones, director of planning, Sky Media
I’m sure AI is making agency decisions faster. When audience signals are in one place, rather than planners having to seek them out, it saves a huge amount of legwork.
But whether it makes decisions smarter depends on the quality and breadth of the data being ingested and on whether that data risks creating bias in the planning process. It also depends on how well the tools are trained to think like a planner.
The smartest planning I’ve seen comes from insight that feels different, not from work that looks the same as everything else. The risk is that AI could homogenise planning to the point where media is no longer a competitive advantage. So, for me, the answer is a blend: use AI to speed up the slow stuff, and use people to create true differentiation.
Simon Kilby, managing director, Bauer Media Advertising
AI will make planning faster. Whether it makes it smarter is down to how we choose to use it. For media owners, this means making our data and platforms easier to use without losing the intelligence behind them. Bauer’s audioXi proposition, for example, combines first-party data, targeting, contextual opportunities and measurement across audio environments.
An algorithm can identify a pattern or recommend an audience; it doesn’t automatically understand why an environment matters, why an audience trusts a particular brand, or what makes an idea culturally relevant. That is why I see AI as an enabler of human creativity rather than a replacement for it. Technology should free brilliant people to do more brilliant work, rather than remove the human judgement from the process.
Amy Jenkins, sales leader, Channel 4
Definitely faster. Smarter depends on how they’re being used.
AI is brilliant at processing huge amounts of information, spotting patterns and creating efficiencies. But like any planning tool, it’s only as good as the data that’s being fed into it.
If AI is making recommendations based on a partial view of the market, then there’s a risk it’s optimising within a limited set of options rather than identifying the best opportunities available. That’s particularly important when media owners haven’t yet had the chance to contribute audience insight, category expertise or new commercial opportunities that may not be reflected in the underlying data.
The strongest planners aren’t using AI to do the thinking for them. They’re using it to free up more time for strategic thinking.
For me, the sweet spot is human expertise combined with AI efficiency. AI can do the heavy lifting, but curiosity, commercial judgement and collaboration are still what turn data into genuinely smart decisions.
Davina Barker, chief revenue officer, Digital Cinema Media
The reality is, AI can’t make smart agency decisions alone and, like any great tool, it’s how it’s used that matters. There’s no doubt the right person can use AI to become more effective, but there’s no reason to believe it’s significantly improving decision-making just yet.