A new dynamic in media planning

A basic reason syndicated research plays such a critical role in broadcast and print media is that most advertisers have no good way to judge the effectiveness of their campaigns. Media planners thus frontload most of their analytical time and resources, using demographic data — imperfect as it is — to plot and plan campaigns before they run. To a great extent in traditional brand advertising, once a campaign launched the media planner’s work was done, until the post‐mortem. That media‐planning dynamic is inverted online. Advertising agencies as well as in‐house marketers tend to allocate more resources to optimizing campaigns as they run than to planning them beforehand. Much has been made of the cultural and philosophical shift this required at major agencies, which have had to import the thinking of the much less fashionable world of direct marketing. Source: IAB and Bain & Co., Building Brands Online: An Interactive It is still true that direct‐response advertisers are more likely to use performance‐based pricing online, while brand advertisers gravitate towards CPM. But there are no hard and fast rules, and even brand advertisers have an irresistible stream of data about how their campaigns are doing. Taken to a theoretical extreme, an advertiser concerned only with results would have no need for up‐front demographic data at all, or indeed for media planning as it has traditionally been understood. When the only metric that matters is sales, who sees the ad or how often becomes irrelevant.