Neutrality in media planning is becoming a lost art
Ask yourself a simple question about your last media plan. Why did each channel make the cut and how were the budgets allocated?
If the answer is “because the data said so”, that’s brilliant. If it’s closer to “because it was in last year’s plan” or “because we were able to access cheaper rates”, you’ve got a neutrality problem. You’re also far from alone in this scenario.
Neutrality used to be the whole point of a media planner. You hired someone to look at every option on the table and tell you honestly where your money would work hardest. Somewhere along the way it has got muddied. Here’s some of the issues that the industry continues to face, as well as what good looks like when it comes to neutrality.
Start with the audience and objectives, then pick the channels
The order matters. A neutral plan starts with who you’re trying to reach, how they actually behave and what you’re trying to get them to do.
Understanding things such as; where they live, what lands on their doormat, what they watch (and how they watch it), which messages they’ve responded to and how they feel about the current economic climate are key. Audience insight like this should drive decision making when it comes to media planning and be front and centre of your mind well before you start to allocate budget to channels.
When it runs the other way round, with a channel chosen first and an audience found to justify it, you get a plan that looks tidy on a slide and underdelivers in the real world.
You can’t be neutral about a channel you don’t understand
A planner who only really knows paid social will, unsurprisingly, continue to recommend paid social.
Whilst there are strong arguments and great examples for channel specific planners working well in the agency environment, an understanding across the full landscape allows for more transparent conversations around budget deployment, flighting and optimisations.
That’s why our planners work across all channels – from door drop to digital, programmatic to press and all the ever-changing channel acronyms. They know what a realistic response rate looks like for a cold insert, and they know when a channel is simply the wrong fit for the job. That breadth also makes them comfortable telling a client that the channel they love isn’t earning its place.
Trade deals have a habit of writing the plan
Large network agencies often buy media through group-level trading agreements. On paper, that’s about buying power and offering the best value rates to their clients. In practice, volume commitments to media owners must be met somewhere, and that somewhere is usually a client’s plan.
The industry has known this for a while. Ebiquity’s Media Agency MSA Transparency Report put rebates and undisclosed incentives firmly on the table, and the conversation hasn’t gone away since. It also discusses a lack of auditing ability and visibility into agency holding groups with no real clarity around rebates and mark-ups.
Cheap cost per mille (CPM) may have an immediate impact in helping with short term return on investment, but that often only tells half the picture. Other channels may be delivering a higher quality customer, and that often requires looking beyond the media costs.
We don’t do trade deals. Nothing on a Join the Dots plan is there because we owe a media owner volume. If a channel is on the plan, it’s because the numbers back it up.
Internal targets and operating models create bias too
This one gets talked about less. Plenty of agencies run separate profit and loss lines for each discipline – or give channel teams their own revenue targets. Perfectly sensible from a finance and growth point of view. Far less sensible if you’re the client, because your budget becomes the thing those teams compete over.
Most of the time you’ll never see the internal targets your agency is working to, so you have to look out for signals instead.
Look out for budget that drifts towards one discipline year after year without a clear reason in the results. Be wary when a new channel gets pitched hard but nobody can tell you how it’ll be measured or what success looks like. Finally, pay attention to how your agency reacts when you suggest cutting something or reallocating spend. A planner working for you will want to see the data behind that suggestion. A team with a number to hit will usually justify it without the insight to back it up.
It’s also completely fair to ask your agency directly whether their planners or channel teams have revenue targets tied to channels or disciplines, and whether anyone is rewarded for where your budget ends up. A good agency, with neutrality at their heart, should answer that without flinching.
Plan for outcomes beyond short term indicators
Click-through rates and cost per click are easy to report and easy to improve. They’re also easy to improve in ways that do nothing for the organisation paying for them. That’s why they are often referred to as “vanity metrics”, especially when it comes to performance and direct response.
A neutral planner fully understands how the campaign they are planning ladders up to organisational goals. For a charity, that might be supporters who are still giving in three years’ time, so lifetime value matters more than the cost of the first gift. For a commercial client, it should be profitable customers rather than cheap ones.
Anchor the plan to that and channel decisions get much clearer. Sometimes the channel with the higher upfront CPA turns out to be the best value on the whole plan.
Internal pressures within an organisation can sometimes make this difficult to justify – but that’s where an effective planner, with attribution and robust data in their arsenal, really earn their stripes.
So where does AI fit in?
AI is already part of how media agencies work. It crunches response data in minutes and spots patterns that could take a person days to find. We’d be daft if we ignored it.
The risk is that the industry swaps one kind of bias for another. A model trained on what the market has always done will tend to recommend what the market has always done. Innovation gets lost and everything becomes kind of “meh”.
AI planning won’t fully understand that your trustees are nervous about tone, or that one region matters more for reasons that never made it into the data. Appetites for innovation, risk and results are difficult for the machine to fathom and plan for.
That judgement is the planner’s job, and it’ll matter more as agencies lean on the same tools and start producing plans that look suspiciously alike. Building a bespoke plan around one client’s goals still requires a skilled person who understands that client, as well as their competitors and wider social and economic factors. AI helps take the grunt work off our desks, so planners have more time to think. When AI does all the thinking, that’s when we have a real problem.
Final thoughts
Neutral planning is sometimes a harder sell than a trade-deal discount. It means saying “we don’t know yet, let’s test it” more often, and occasionally telling a client to spend less on something they’re attached to.
The most obvious suggestion is that your money should go where it works hardest. When there’s no trading agreement to honour and no internal team chasing a target, the only thing left to argue about is performance. Every channel on the plan must justify its place with the numbers, and the ones that can’t, can get in the bin.
If your planners stay neutral, you get a plan you can defend. If your CFO or board asks why 30% of the budget is going into offline channels this year, the answer should be sitting in the audience data and the test results, not in conversations you weren’t privy to. We’re passionate about showing the maths behind every recommendation for exactly that reason. It means the decision belongs to you as much as it does to us.
Neutral plans develop over time. Because each channel is judged on what it delivers, every campaign feeds the next one. Tests get read properly and underperformance gets spotted early. Over a few years that compounds into a plan built around how your bespoke audience genuinely behaves, which is very hard for your competition to copy.
Most importantly, there’s trust. When you know your agency has nothing to gain from steering you one way, you can take their advice at face value. That makes for faster decisions and more honest conversations, including the awkward ones about what isn’t working and how to fix it. None of this is complicated. It’s what media planning always was before commercial structures and algorithms got in the way. Put the audience first, know every channel properly, keep the plan free of anyone else’s targets and tie every decision to what the business needs.
