Winfield Aleong, my first mentor in the advertising business, used to lament that clients would spend hours haggling over the punctuation in a headline and leave the approval of their media schedule to one of their juniors. Of course the message is supremely important. And who we put that message in front of should be just as important or as Father Cocoran would say, you could be “wasting your sweetness on the dessert air”.
The goal of any campaign should be to develop a differentiated message that’s relevant and then get it to an audience that’s appropriate. In T&T because of the severe shortage of media research that’s current, much of what we do in media planning is art more than science. And as if that did not make it hard enough along comes the digital media (facebook, e-mail campaigns and texting are the main culprits) to add to the confusion.
At pepper we use the MFO media track study as the base for our discussions on a particular media plan. A key part of the deliberations is the budget that’s available. It’s useless, for example, trying to be everywhere with a small budget. We also, generally speaking, choose frequency over reach as we want to hit the right people (not all the people) with the same message. (less people hear the message several times)
And we have also been adding the new media to the brew in increasing amounts; mainly facebook and google ads, facebook fan page development and activation, e-mail campaigns and text messaging. The digital media are far more track-able and accountable than their traditional cousins.
When I worked at KFC there was a rule of thumb that media should be at least 80% of the overall ad budget, with production being no more than 20%. Some companies aim for as high as 90% for their media allocations. Given that media buying is such an important part of our overall ad investment, does it not deserve a place at the table?
So hug your media planner the next time you see them. They are far more important than a full stop (in a headline).
