Media and Marketing Blog

What is Media Planning and Buying?

Thursday, Sep 15, 22 By Nartak Media

What is Media Planning and Buying?

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?”

What is media planning?

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”:

1. What is your advertising strategy?
2. Who do you want to reach?
3. How do you want to communicate?

Some benefits of media planning include improved efficiency, saved resources, better budget tracking, improved ROI, and a better understanding of your audience.

What is media buying?

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:

1. Direct Buy
2. Programmatic Buy
3. Manual Bidding
4. Real-time Bidding

Media Planning vs. Media Buying

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:

Media Planners

• Conduct both internal and external market research:
  • Media planners need to conduct internal research to understand the client they are working with. Internal research includes things such as the client’s brand identity, positioning, and unique selling points. 
  • External research is important to understand the overall advertising landscape, competitors, target audience, and most effective media channels.
• Set campaign goals:
  • Based on information gathered from research, media planners are tasked with setting goals for their advertising strategy.
• Determine budget:
  • This is important for ensuring the profitability of a campaign. Media planners work to decide what percentage of the budget will be spent on advertising in each channel.

Media Buyers

• Leveraging relationships:
  • Media buyers must leverage trusted relationships within the industry to help them drive impressive ROIs.
• Negotiating with vendors:
  • This task helps to bring down the price of media placement pricing to stretch the budget further and run cost-effective campaigns.
• Tracking and tweaking active campaigns:
  • While media planners build the strategy, media buyers track their performance in real time. This allows media buyers to make quick adjustments when needed to help the media planners achieve campaign goals.