How Comms Planning Works Best With Media Agencies
Effective, awarded advertising is dependent upon cross-channel integration.
Recently, I lead a group session with comms planners on the best practices for working with media agencies. Initially, I feared it would become a group therapy session for the growing pains of the comms planning role.
But instead, we used our collective experience to identify the ways we’ve found success in working collaboratively, across agencies and hope to share that with you today.
Media Agencies And You: Planning for Success
1. Education
Educate your team in the media side about what you do as a comms planner. This is especially important because the advertising definition of a “comms planner” can differ from the media definition and mean different things to different people.
Educate your own team about your role so they can best support you.
Educate everyone, including your clients, with the finding you come across along the way, or best practices you learn from vendors/media partners.
1½. Educate on Measurement
Creative comms planners measure differently than media agencies do, because we’re looking to measure creative effectiveness. So while a media agency may be looking at something like impressions, we’re looking for impact. Educate about what those different metrics are and collaborate on how to use the data we can get.
Finally track and educate about general comms planning metrics. This will help gain even more support for comms planning in and across your agency (“doing it this way lead to us having 3 fewer creative rounds of review”.)
2. Client Goals Above All
As two agencies beholden to the same client, it’s helpful to use client objectives as the starting place to gain cross-agency alignment. When needed, client involvement is useful to oversee and encourage collaborations.
3. Relationships
Even though we’re working at different companies, we’re all on the same client team. That can feel difficult and daunting, but it’s effort that pays off. The bigger the presence, the bigger the impact.
Whenever possible, meet in person. We have some accounts where we have a media agency strategist work in our office one day a week, and some where we have comms planners work in the media agency’s office once a week.
Work together, but also try to get out of the office together. Many a relationship can be formed over dinner and drinks, and this is certainly one of them.
4. Collaboration
To really facilitate collaboration, create new opportunities to work together, like workshops and shared documents. As a comms planner, pioneer the collaboration by being be open and generous with your thoughts.
Share and appreciate individual expertise. Use it to create better, smarter documents (comms frameworks, briefs) that everyone’s aligned on.
Offer to take ownership over integration projects so you’re not creating more work for the teams. Making things easy to participate in is a great way to encourage adoption.
All in all, start by being proactive in your collaboration and keep it going.
