Media for planners who give a shit

Opinion

Craft Media is planning a get-together for like-minded media planners this autumn. Hadyn Millar explains the thinking behind it.

 Surely media can do better than this?”

It’s a conversation my colleague Theo Rubins and I seem to have weekly now.

Starting out in this industry feels like a huge privilege but also a little bit mad. Suddenly you’re behind the scenes on the media you see every day — socials, news, ads, TV, you name it. It’s like being given the keys to a shiny new sports car without a map or a destination and being told to drive. Except it’s not a car we’re driving; it’s mainstream culture. 

I’ve always felt this job comes with a lot of responsibility. After all, it’s our choices as planners that directly fund the media that thrives and the campaigns that deliver results for our clients. So when we’re surrounded by headlines about rampant misinformation and social issues coming from platforms our industry chooses to fund to the hilt, it’s easy for us newer media recruits to feel angry and powerless. 

Both Rubins and I are lucky: we’re proud to be part of the team at Craft Media, whose full-throated advocacy of anti-ultra-processed planning (to the point that we wrote a book on it) gives us the freedom to make positive media choices for our clients and wider society.

We’re also Craft’s representatives in The News Alliance, a coalition of brilliant industry minds working to put news media at the heart of solving advertising’s biggest challenges. 

But when it came to our feelings about the direction of media at large, we felt like we couldn’t be alone. There had to be more planners like us, those who had joined the industry in the last few years and refused to accept that prevailing industry habits had to be the rules of the game forever. To find out, we sent out a survey with a very clear target audience: ‘young planners who give a shit’. 

Our hunch was right — we got responses from more than 50 planners who care about what their media investment says about our industry’s direction. What they had to say showed a group starkly aware of the challenges but prepared to make a stand. 

Those planners saw an industry under threat by AI. But far from worrying about being replaced, our respondents worried that relying too much on AI would homogenise output—error-filled, oversimplified, a ‘grey sea of the same’. They wanted an industry where planners think like creatives, getting out of the AI-dictated middle lane to find the real gems beyond. 

They saw a fractured media ecosystem that consumers are trusting less than ever. With major platforms uninterested in tackling misinformation and wider social harm, our planners wanted an industry that questions what impact its media investment has on the ‘real world’. 

They also saw an oncoming attention crisis, with media plans increasingly exposing themselves to the dangers of high-scroll, low-attention media. Placing advertising in environments people are ignoring isn’t just ineffective — it makes us more likely to be all out of jobs sooner rather than later. 

Accountability at the forefront of effective planning

All those findings gave us a clear idea of what our ‘planners that give a shit’ really wanted: an accountable industry that puts proof, curiosity and relevance at the forefront of effective planning. We agree wholeheartedly. 

But it’s not enough to want an industry like that. Change happens only when those prepared to challenge ingrained beliefs and try new approaches make it happen. 

That’s why Rubins and I are throwing an event later this autumn, bringing together like-minded planners to get inspired, meet people with the same goals and together make the industry we want to see closer to reality. Plus, it’ll be in a pub. 

Are you also a media planner who gives a shit? Click here to register your interest in the event. We’ll see you there. 

Hadyn Millar is the senior planning manager at Craft Media.