Trying to adapt to the ever-evolving advertising and marketing climate can be a challenge! Whether you are a media planning expert or someone just trying to understand how to navigate their company’s advertising, knowing the ins and outs of media planning and buying is crucial.
To say that media planning and buying have changed significantly over the last 20 years due to technological advancements is an understatement. That takes us to the question, “What is media planning and buying today?”
Media planning is the process of identifying, assessing, and selecting various media channels to reach a defined audience. A media planner works to determine how, where, and why a business will share media content. Through strategic media planning software and a deep understanding of media, media planners can develop efficient, successful advertising campaigns.
One of the biggest challenges of media planning is determining how to serve consumers with the right message, at the right time, on the right channel. Luckily 3 questions can help you to figure out these “rights”:
Some benefits of media planning include improved efficiency, saved resources, better budget tracking, improved ROI, and a better understanding of your audience.
Before we talk about how media planning and buying go hand-in-hand, let’s define media buying. Media buying is the process of purchasing space and time on digital and online platforms to house advertising. These ads can be found anywhere on websites, radio, TV, YouTube, and more.
More specifically, a media buyer is responsible for negotiating with publishers for ad space, managing budgets, and optimizing ads so that they improve overall performance. Typically, media buying is done in 4 ways:
While media planning and buying often get lumped together in the same category, they each have distinct processes within advertising. Media buying typically focuses on purchasing ad space across various channels, while media planning focuses on the strategy behind the campaign. In short, media planning sets you up to buy while media buying does the actual purchasing.
Let’s take a look at the differing roles of media planners and buyers: