Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Brana Kosanić – Group Account Manager, Direct Media Srbija
Media planning is such a specific professional activity that one of the biggest challenges you face doing this job is explaining to your cousin sitting next to you at a family gathering what is it that you actually do. While treating yourself to appetizers, hoping that Knjaz Miloš (sparkling water) will help as you gorge yourself with cabbage rolls and roast, and over a mouthful you clumsily try explaining to your aunt from Glogonj what it is that you actually do, all talk about GRPs and the like is useless. In that situation an explanation in pure Serbian is required. Fortunately, this situation, here and now, is different, but unfortunately, there are no cabbage rolls, no roast and no Jelen beer.
Everyone wants to know about those celebrated TV ratings. I’ve answered many questions about how many million viewers actually watch “shameless reality shows”, and whether it is really possible that almost nobody watches our favorite documentaries. While every individual thinks that everyone else watches the same things that they and the people in their micro universe watch, the data tell a different story. You probably think the same thing if you are an average media consumer. But, you certainly are not “ordinary”.
You – unlike my aunt – know that the impact of the internet, the wealth of data obtained there, and Google and Facebook have forever changed media planning. Global pitches and aggressive procurement departments have perhaps redefined media planning even more drastically, and overshadowed the assumptions on which it was based in previous decades – whereby, along with other marketing activities, it was more oriented towards growth of the brand and generating added value, both for the economy and for customers.
In a time when everything can be measured or estimated, short-term goals have taken the lead, and instant measurements have started hindering creative effectiveness. Unfortunately the internet emphasizes this trend, while the long-term effects of branding are ignored despite the fact that this approach brings more profit to companies in the long run. This environment, this world of new technology, internet and data, is so brilliant and shiny, and bedazzles us so much, that we have completely stopped talking about integrated media planning.
We should talk more about how planning brings benefit for businesses, that besides it being fun to know how many millions of people watch some program, we should be mindful about the media mix that delivers the most new consumers to advertisers. We should talk about what will bring more profit to advertisers: more new customers or increased consumption among existing ones? We should talk about how market share is boosted by increasing the advertising share among competitors.
Media planning – which we in the Direct Media agency started doing 15 years ago – relied on the long-term strategies of brand development, and I believe that one of our greatest achievements is the fact that we have not only managed to maintain this approach, but that we have developed and upgraded it, despite the challenging environment that demands instant results.
Long ago we realized that we need to develop our own tools to measure the impact of media on the local market, with all its particularities. In cooperation with relevant research institutions, we conducted single-source research, while entrusting the analysis of complex data to experts. This has given us a powerful program to optimize spend across media.
Encouraged by the results of this endeavor, we have continued to build expertise in this area by running new projects. We have also developed the attribution model, which establishes a mathematical correlation between media spend and sales. The essence of this process is in monitoring results and drawing conclusions and making recommendations for future campaigns, finding what works best and then gradually perfecting that approach.
This attitude is also reflected in our work through the 7L model of media strategy setup, where analysis is both the initial and the final step, and the entire process is iterative, which means that it seeks the best solution that can be further improved in each subsequent iteration.
It is most interesting when we make investment simulations, and then we realize that with a different media mix we can achieve budget savings!
That is how we do media planning, between celebration feasts, from one season to the next.
