Doing Media Planning and Buying Via an Agency: A Guide

You’re a marketer. You’ve spent time and budget creating a stand-out, memorable creative. But where are you going to show it? This, my friend, is where Media Planning and Buying agency expertise comes in.

To be successful, ads must be strategically placed in front of the right audience, in the right format, at the right time.

An advertising agency can recommend and buy advert space for you from across the 0000s of media options out there. From TV, to radio, to billboards, to altogether less traditional places – like giant mural art adverts that brighten up the UK’s major cities, to pocket-size adverts printed on the back of your bus ticket.

There are many benefits of working with an agency for media planning and buying. First, you benefit from the advice of the specialists who live and breathe media every day. (The ones who know a good rate for a well-chosen supermarket billboard when they see one. Or the exact number of hours teens spend browsing social each day.)

The agency media team will also save you a heap of time sourcing and booking each part of the campaign – which can be a lot when you have a campaign that runs in lots of different places.

Many marketers might think these perks might come at a premium. But in-house marketing teams and businesspeople typically buy media cheaper through an agency than they would if they went direct to the media owner. This is because the agency provides the media houses with so much regular business, they command impressive discounts – some of which are passed back to the client as a way to sweeten the deal.

For example, us folks at S3 Advertising for example are pretty pro at saving clients a chunky amount off the ratecard prices. It’s one of the benefits of having an ex-media owner honcho as one of our Managing Partners (big up Mikey Webb).

You will often hear the process in which media planning & media buying are combined referred to as a simple, ‘media plan’. Do not let this fool you. Media Planning and Buying are two very distinct, but complementary jobs that both go into making a media campaign plan.

An effective campaign will have both a Media Planner and Media Buyer on board to plan, launch, run & meticulously manage all media activity. At S3 Advertising this is exactly what you get.

Let us clear up any confusion and start things off with a look into the responsibilities of each role (as remember, they are different!). Then, we’ll move onto all the different stages that go into planning your next media campaign.

Advertising Media Planning is the process of selecting the optimal media mix. The one that’s going to work hardest for your budget. Georgia, our Media Planner, analyses data about your consumers from S3’s huge live library of research and insight reports.

Georgia can tell you slightly scary levels of info about the people of the UK and how they behave. She can tell you where your target audience group get their news, or which postcodes in the UK are most likely to have people who are about to be in-market for buying a new car soon. It’s part super creepy, part super clever, and a big part super useful.

She uses this info to produce innovative strategies to ensure our client campaigns are reaching their target audience, in the most effective possible way. Georgia creates communication planning models for you that assign different media to different jobs.

You might have a TV campaign for example that is designed to make people aware of your brand and associate it with a certain feeling. While a digital display campaign is set to give those who are aware of your brand already the opportunity to buy from your website.

This job requires Georgia to be a critical and analytical thinker. On a day-to-day basis Georgia works closely with clients to thoroughly understand their business, the category in which it operates, and the consumers it serves, as well as their business, marketing, and communication objectives. Interpretating each client’s business or marketing problems and redefining them in a way that uniquely positions media as a solution.

Media buying is the complementary process to suss the finer details the media planned and buy it at the very best possible rate.

Grace, S3’s Media Buyer, starts by using the insights gleaned from the research and begins to find and negotiate the best buying entry points across the intended media channels. For example, with daytime TV slots being less watched but much cheaper than evening, it might make sense to buy TV ads at a balanced mix of both primetime and daytime ads.

Media is chopping and changing all the time – with new innovations always coming through from the media owners, especially as different platforms look to digitise. You can rely on a good media buyer like Grace to have a deep understanding of the market in which media is traded.

She maintains strong relationships with all the different media owners to make sure that she’s the first to know about new opportunities and deals.

These relationships, combined with firm negotiation tactics help the media buyer secure the best price, quality, and placement of advertisements across a variety of platforms.

Well organised in nature and with a keen eye for process, Grace has the key skills required to seamlessly execute client’s campaigns from start to finish. Alongside this, possessing a clear understanding of clients’ business objectives and strategy allows Grace to ensure campaigns consistently deliver against their objectives and produce exceptional results.

The media plan is the written plan you get as an outcome of all the media planning and buying work. It should detail chosen media channels, the job each element is designed to do, the specifics of how it will be bought, and the rates.

A good media plan should also include details on how your agency will evaluate the media campaign’s effectiveness.

At S3 our media plans comprise of:

• A block plan – a visual illustration of how all the media works together over the time
• A media schedule – a schedule of each item with all buying details and prices
• An accompanying media comms model / rationale deck – detailing the strategy behind the recommendations, including any data or insight that informed them, plus proposed evaluation metrics.

Media Planning: The Specifics

When thinking about your Media Planner, think of them as the first port of call for a soon-to-be launched media campaign. In other words, the Media Planner is responsible for the foundational elements like…

• Conducting Market Research – The planner (in our case, Georgia) will work closely with a business or a brand to thoroughly understand their business, the category in which they operate, their primary consumers, as well as their business, marketing, and communication objectives. They will also garner insights about the market at large, research industry trends, assess the competition, identify target audiences, and understand where those audiences most engage with advertisements. This is a crucial part of the process. It is where the agency will tell you what you need to know about your audience groups. You’ll find out where they spend their time, what they love and what media channels they consume throughout every point of the day. From this research media objectives can be set.
• Establishing Media Objectives – Once the Media Planner has gained valuable insight of the market and audience alike, it will be time for them to dig that little bit deeper. As the media landscape gets more and more diverse, media planners are faced with more choice than ever. More media for advertisers means more media for consumers too – resulting in the extinction of a one-size-fits-all media plan. Instead, this stage establishes the diverse media goals needed to achieve your campaign and business objectives.
• Budgeting Appropriately – At S3, our client’s budget is of top priority. In-depth analysis will equip Georgia with the understanding of how to spend a client’s budget. Should we put 50% into TV, 30% into Radio & the rest in OOH (out of home)? The call is hers, but always be reassured that it is a calculated one!

Media Buying

Media Buying is the act of taking the strategy off the page and putting it out into the world. It is all about negotiations and relationships, making a Media Buyer responsible for…

• Establishing Relationships – One of Grace’s notable strengths (as with any good Media Buyer) lies in her ability to create authentic, meaningful relationships with media owners. Her tactful relationships ensure the best media rates are secured, not only benefitting our client’s pockets, but their audiences as well.
• Negotiating & Buying – Once the media plan is complete & the client is happy, it is time for the negotiations to begin. In the constantly changing media world, it is vital Grace has a deep understanding of the market in which media is traded to achieve the lowest cost for a particular client and campaign.
• Meticulously Monitoring & Optimizing – Once the campaign goes live, the hard work does not stop for the Media Buyer. It is Grace’s job to meticulously monitor each channel over the course of the campaign and make sure each is performing as planned. If it is not, the Media Buyer and Media Planner must come together to react, adjusting the plan accordingly!

Media is getting more and more complex each day. There is more competition than ever, more unique consumers to reach with niche messaging, and more means in which to reach them.

S3 Advertising’s Media Planning and Buying agency team consider this an exciting challenge. It means we’ll never stop learning about the next big thing. And it gives us the opportunity to be inventive and tactical in the bid to help our clients bite big.

If you want to talk to us about creating a media advertising campaign, or want to ask us a question, hit us up.