The future of media planning
As the media industry continues to consolidate and evolve to keep up with changing tech, media agencies chat to Graham Medcalf about their visions of what’s to come.
As the media industry continues to evolve, Graham Medcalf asks what media agencies are doing to keep up.
There’s a challenge facing marketers. The media market has been in a state of accelerated change more than ever in the past five years. Media has never been more complex and required greater specialism across data, technology and analytics.
Marketers are looking for trusted agency partners who can not only guide them through this ever-changing media landscape, but also provide experience and expertise, not just lip service. There’s an ever-increasing need for media expertise, but at the same time marketing needs integration between message and moment. It needs simplifying and unifying around consolidated data sets and technology.
“Media planning is becoming – perhaps paradoxically – more data-science-driven yet also more creative, strategic and collaborative,” says Managing Partner at Together Rufus Chuter. According to him, the hallmarks of successful media planning in the future will be the ability to plan holistically and with genuine impartiality. There will be a need to develop unique and valuable audiences, while building custom algorithms at scale, to buy programmatically based on specific audiences or external events. Media specialists will have to work more creatively and collaboratively with media partners, technology platforms and creative agencies to amplify ideas, build unique audiences, share insights, test, learn and co-create distinctive formats that capture attention.
Deeper audience analysis and insights are the keys to successful media planning.