Poor Media Planning Costs Advertisers Billions
UK advertisers are losing between £4 billion and £10 billion in revenue because of their short-sighted approach to media planning, according to a major study from the Centre for Integrated Marketing.
The research shows that agencies could make their marketing communications 10% to 25% more profitable, from a brand perspective, if they adopted a media neutral approach to the planning process.
Professor Angus Jenkinson, who has spent fourteen months compiling the study, explained that agencies currently have a level of bias towards certain types of media, which is causing them to miss out on lucrative business.
He said: “Media bias acts as a barrier to optimising communication, generating good creative work and planning effective insights. The agencies that succeed in resolving this problem will attract a lot of clients.”
Jenkinson, professor of integrated marketing at Luton Business School, claims to have identified a recognition on both the client and agency side that advertising works best when it is managed in an integrated, consistent and harmonised way.
He is urging agencies and their clients to adopt what he calls an ‘open planning’ approach to advertising. This involves agencies looking beyond the most popular types of media to use any discipline, in any medium, to achieve their campaign objectives.
The professor said: “Media neutral planning is a name that is around in the market today to describe the challenge and what we’re hoping to achieve. But I think the term lacks a certain passion.”
He added: “There’s a whole raft of media that agencies can use to make their marketing communications more effective. We’ve come up with a set of recommendations for senior marketers to help them do this.”
The recommendations, entitled Open Planning – Media Neutral Planning Made Practical, seek to change the way marketing departments are structured and the way agencies work with their clients. They also put forward a new planning process across the agency mix and suggest a new way to evaluate advertising effectiveness.
Jenkins said: “We’re saying that it’s possible to plan marketing communications using the same framework of objectives from the very top of a campaign right down to very bottom. The open planning process works best when you get good creative ideas and work out the best way to executive them across the media and discipline landscape.”
Media neutral planning has become something an industry buzz word over recent months, but the idea of putting the consumer at the centre of the communication process is still viewed with a high degree of cynicism. A recent poll carried out by the MRG suggests that the majority (58%) of media researchers believe the concept to be nothing more than a new name for an old idea that has been around for years (see Researchers View Media Neutral Planning With Cynicism).
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