5 Important Questions To Ask When Reviewing Media Plans
Seeing your campaign’s media plan can feel like getting a present from a distant relative. It’s an exciting moment; and upon unwrapping you might see that you got exactly what you expected, or something that fits you perfectly, or maybe something you aren’t quite sure what to do with. They’re family, though, so you’re going to make it work no matter what!
Whatever shape and size your media plan comes in, here are some smart questions to help better understand how to develop campaign creative from it, as well as how to be a better and more integrated partner overall.
1. When you see a general catchall term like digital / social / mobile on the plan, ask “What are the specific channels you’re recommending?”
What does “social” mean in 2017- is it paid media on Facebook, an Instagram Marquee takeover, or something else? Is “digital video” running on skippable sites? You get the idea. Ask these questions early, and keep working with your media strategist to get the details your creative team needs to execute.
It goes without saying that tailoring the creative to the channel is vital (the Advertising Research Federation has shown that tailoring creative to the channel shows an 57% increase in ROI). To properly adapt creative, you need details on the specific channel and placements from the media plan.
2. When evaluating a plan that includes new recommendations from the previous year, or many channels, ask “What is the monetary split between the channels?”
Asking this question gives you a sense of where the creative priorities will be. If your media budget includes a massive spend in one area, you likely will produce custom creative for that channel. If the spend is relatively small in one area, you might need to re-purpose a creative asset there- or even have a frank conversation to see if the budget is sufficient at all.
Note that at the early stages, your media agency may not have specific budget breakdowns. In that case, they may be able to provide what last year’s spend looked like and indicate it might change in the next year. Or, they could ballpark what percent of the media budget each channel is.
3. When a channel is new to your creative team, or one that allows for experimentation, ask “What does best in class creative look like on those channels?”
Often, representatives from the channels may have already shared these examples with your media partners as part of their pitch deck or offered to do so. In that case, it’s as simple as having your media team forward an email that helps illustrate the potential of the channel and share creative inspiration with your team. Inspiration is always appreciated!
4. Using your messaging framework as reference, ask “How are we measuring these channels?”
Fully integrated campaigns depend on integrated metrics. Aligning on a messaging framework, as well as goals for each channel, will make sure that the creative that is being made aligns to the way that the media is being bought and optimized.
5. When media publishers/platforms are on the plan, ask “How can the creative agency work with the media partners to ensure creative integration?”
Some great work at BBDO has come from working with media publishers/platforms, like Bacardi and Instagram. Instances like that took careful collaboration to make sure that the creative idea was baked in to the content and integrated to the campaign. At BBDO, we use Blueprints to work out the role of the media publisher/platform in the plan and what we must communicate from that. This helps bring strategic rigor to the recommendation.
Plus, it also created less rounds of review with the client since all agencies were involved and aligned. So, set up calls and meetings to get creative + media + partners all together, as early as possible.
Using these questions as talking points, you’ll better understand your media plan and what you need to do to have a successful campaign. In this case, it’s actually better to look a gift horse in the mouth! But as good manners dictates when you are a gift recipient, be sure to follow up with sincere gratitude and thank you’s to your media partners.
