The future of media planning
Opinion
Meta’s Pete Buckley reveals a consensus of views on the purpose, focus, and evolving role of the media planner.
Why is someone from Meta writing about the future of media planning? Fair question.
A few years ago, many predicted a world where advertising would be almost entirely automated; plug in your objectives and budget, and let the system do the work. For millions of small businesses, that’s increasingly the case. Still, large advertisers—although they also use automated tools—need agencies more than ever. What’s changed is what they need from them and the kind of planning that makes the difference.
Automation has brought efficiency, but not empathy. The real craft of planning lies in understanding people—how they make decisions, what they value, and where their attention truly lies. No algorithm can replace that intuition; it can only amplify it.
To get a clearer picture, I spoke with planning leaders across holding companies and independents in the UK. Despite different philosophies, three strong points of consensus emerged.
The purpose of planning hasn’t changed, but its job has never been harder
At its core, planning still exists to ensure the most effective use of a budget. But that simple goal is now being tested by extraordinary complexity.
According to System1 and Effies, advertisers who use more than five tools for market research achieve better results. Analytic Partners finds that the most effective media plans today use eight or more channels. Kantar reports large advertisers typically juggle four or more measurement systems, and over half say those systems sometimes contradict each other.
In addition, platforms now launch hundreds of new ad products every year, and according to the IPA’s TouchPoints data, media fragmentation in the UK has increased by 60% over the last decade. The result? Greater uncertainty and less predictability, even as expectations for financial accountability have never been higher.
The role of the planner, then, is less about control and more about orchestration. It’s about knowing which levers to pull and when to trust the machine. That’s a higher bar than ever, and it demands both data literacy and creative instinct in equal measure.
The focus of planning is shifting from proxies to performance
Every planner I spoke with agreed that the true north is financial impact. The metrics that once defined success — reach, clicks, even attention — matter less than the outcomes they drive: growth, margins, velocity, market share.
As Caroline Manning wrote recently in The Media Leader, marketing directors care less about awareness and more about business growth, including bigger baskets, faster sell-through, and better profit.
From media planner to business advisor: The expanding role of planning
With roughly 60% of media spend already steered by algorithms (Dentsu Media estimates this will reach nearly 80% by 2027), planners are becoming the bridge between what gets optimised, what gets measured, and what the business truly values.
That means aligning the signal (the thing the AI optimises for) with the real commercial goal. It could be incremental, profitable conversions, growth in specific customer segments, or even managing stock intelligently. Increasingly, how we define the signal will matter more than who we target.
The planner’s craft is evolving. Experiment always, create media
We’ve moved from the ‘one-shot’ age, when teams built the perfect campaign behind closed doors, to the ‘experiment age’, where action beats perfection and learning beats opinion.
As AI reduces creative production costs, the opportunity to test, learn, and scale grows dramatically. Across industries, we’ve found that advertisers who run 15 or more structured experiments a year see roughly 30% stronger returns. The planner’s role is shifting from prediction to iteration: design the test, apply the learning, and build on success.
As creator content becomes an increasingly significant part of advertising, the line between media and creative continues to blur. The creative now impacts CPMs, reach, and overall effectiveness. The best planners don’t just buy media; they help to create it, guiding which creators to collaborate with, which assets to amplify, and how creative choices connect to commercial results.
Looking ahead
Marketers have never needed more expertise in media planning because the landscape has never been more complex. But the future isn’t bleak; it’s rich with opportunity.
By aligning signals to real business outcomes, embracing experimentation as a habit, and seeing creative choices as media decisions, agencies and advertisers can navigate — and even thrive in — this next chapter.
If the past decade was about mastering platforms, the next will be about mastering signals — the art and science of telling technology what success really means. That’s not just a planning challenge; it’s an organisational one.
The rate of change in marketing isn’t slowing down. However, with more precise planning and smarter questions, it can improve our skills across the board.
Pete Buckley is the connection planning director for Meta