It's All About the Strategy, Stupid!
Media and marketing plans need to start with and always reinforce the business strategy.
Media and marketing plans need to start with and always reinforce the business strategy.
I recently attended the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Innovation Days conference. While the main theme of the conference this year was “Screens,” as in all the screens we now look at in our daily lives and upon which advertising is served – computer monitors, mobile devices, tablets, televisions, movie theaters – I couldn’t help but pick up another theme repeated among several of the speakers: media and marketing plans need to start with and always reinforce the business strategy.
Now this might seem like an obvious statement, but clearly somewhere along the way this line of thinking has gotten lost. It’s not hard to see why, though: there are many – perhaps too many – stakeholders involved in the ongoing process of advertising and marketing; each stakeholder trying to protect and grow her own little fiefdom. Throw into this mix the fast pace of changing ad technologies like social, mobile, video, and local and you can begin to see a pattern of chasing bright shiny objects instead of staying the course.
What the Internet Did to Media Planning
When the Internet came along, it threw a wrench into media planning as we had previously known it. Advertising mediums had been standardized so creative thinking led the pack: just come up with a really cool idea and then produce standard print, television, outdoor, and radio spots around that idea.
When Internet advertising arrived, creative’s lead got short-circuited – not only was it hard to get a truly creative idea executed in a relatively small space (a banner, button, or text ad), but in the earliest days we didn’t even have ad standards upon which to develop and deploy ad creative. That’s where the IAB came in and helped save the day with its standardized Ad Unit Guidelines.
That said, in our fast-evolving world, even the IAB finds itself in the position of perpetually creating new guidelines to accommodate new digital ad platforms like mobile, social, video, gaming, and interactive TV. This means that taking one idea and repurposing it for all of these new and traditional advertising platforms still doesn’t necessarily work. Sometimes the media placement itself has to dictate the creative thinking, so which side of the house now steers the ship?
Strategic Thinking in a Brave New World
The answer has to be the strategy, and in order for strategy to be the beacon, a few things have to happen:
For the digital media planner, this brave new world means never sitting back on your laurels. Past experience is not necessarily a predictor of future behavior in this ever-changing world. It means not being afraid to challenge the ideas and thinking of the other stakeholders because you have high accountability – the executed media plan is where the rubber meets the road so you need to know these roads very well and share your opinions with the team. Always think big-picture, not insularly. You might get less budget this go-around, but it’s your thinking and opinions that cannot be commoditized and they will ultimately carry you farther than this quarter’s media spend.