Media Planning & Brand Strategy for Advertising

Welcome to the course Media Planning.

Today we will talk about

1. Media Planning Introduction

2. Key Campaign essentials

3. What's fits where – here we will talk about Formats and relative KPIs

4. Inventory – ways to buy certain inventory

5. Media Mix & sell rates – here we will talk about budget allocations across strategies/ formats and their rationales behind them.

6. Next we will talk about the most important aspect that is – Target Audience

See you in the next video!

Hi Welcome back to Chapter - 1

What is Media planning?

Media planning is the process of strategizing and purchasing ad placements by determining the best combination of media to achieve marketing campaign goals. The media plan might split advertising spend and resources between various online and offline channels such as broadcast, print, Display ads, video ads or native content.

You might ask --

What's the need of a Media Plan?

In today’s competitive marketing landscape, marketers need to serve users with the right message, at the right time, on the right channel in order to see engagements. That’s why there is a dire need of an effective media plan which helps the advertiser to reach the potential user at the right place and at the right time without missing an opportunity.

While create media plans, lot of times I heard different myths about Media planning so I thought I would share few of them with you today -

Myths of Media Planning –

Two media plans would be same –

The Truth is no two media plans would be the same because there isn't any fixed approach to create a media plan but there are only best practices. There could be multiple ways you can reach the same user, so ideally it all depends on your rationale behind selecting each element in your media plan.

A perfect Media plan = reaching goals –

the truth is, a perfect media is only a first step in reaching the goals/ KPIs, while the next steps would be effective optimizations which would give the final results.

Media plans should have few/ specific formats –

a lot of times when people ask me should we include certain formats or certain types of inventory, I would always say there are no mandatory formats which YOU should ideally be including but It depends more on how your formats are complimenting each other in-order to achieve the end result.

So don't worry about these things while you create a media plan.

See you in the next video!

Hi Welcome back to Chapter - 2

Before we start on with the essentials, let me tell you a story -

My mom once gave me $100 and handed me a list of items to prepare a dish (banana cake) over the weekend.

She said, get me a few top quality and highly recommended ingredients to bake a banana cake.

So as a first step

1. I researched about what are the best ingredients I should buy for baking a banana cake

2. Next, I listed out stores where I can buy them, after listing out stores, I would check prices in each of the store without compromising the quality of the product

3. Once I made a list of all stores nearby and finalized the best rates. I filtered what ingredients should be bought from which store.

4. All this I have to do before the weekend.

I hope this story is relatable and simple, Media planning is pretty similar, let me relate this story to media planning.

1. My mom told me she wanna prepare a banana cake - this is the goal (you can call it Business Goal)

2. My mom also handed me $100 which is the BUDGET

3. Next I listed out stores from where I can buy these ingredients, in advertising space, these stores are your publishers (could be print, offline, online media sellers)

4. And then we have a timeline - which is your campaign flight dates.

5. Finally Audience - well the audience here is everyone who enjoys the delicious banana cake.

Please remember this story and we would be linking this story in every step of Media planning moving forward.

So the key campaign essentials are

• Business Objectives

• Budget

• Flight Dates

• Target Audience/ Geo

See you in the next video!

Hi Welcome back to Chapter - 3

Whats fits Where?

We have several formats in the advertising space, be it Audio, Video, Display, Connected TV, Print, Native and so on.

And we have different goals related to costs like CPM, ROI, CPA and others while there are several other performance goals like Click Through Rate, Viewability, completion rate and several others.

So how do we know which one to choose and what fits where?

So going back to the story, we were able to get the ingredients only because we know the dish. In the same way, we will be able to select KPIs and formats when we know a business Goal.

Lemme share couple of examples

Example 1 -

if there is a Car advertiser who is a new entrant into the market, it would be wise to choose a Video Format Advertising preliminary focusing on completion rate.

This is because, Video is an excellent format for informing and educating the user. Because it incorporates audio and visual elements that appeal to multiple senses, the user can get the full story of your product.

They’re especially effective when used for product demonstrations or explaining about the uniqueness of your product.

Example - 2

If there is an established product in the market, trying to increase sales, then it would be wise to choose Native or Display content with focus on clicks and then Conversions.

As the brand is not relatively new and it already penetrated into the market, you can shift your KPIs related to sales.

To create a successful media plan you need to understand the business objectives and pick the relative formats and KPIs as we can't measure the effectiveness of a media plan unless we set clear goals from the start!

See you in the next video!