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What is Media Planning?

​If your editors, production managers and sales management are using Excel spreadsheet to organize and manage their workflow, they are wasting time and working
too hard to do their jobs.  If you hear complaints about not having enough time to do……..there is a better way.


According to a Digiday survey, up to 76% of media planners still use Excel. Why? Turnover and demands of meeting deadlines support the use of Excel and are compounded by having little to no training of new hires. To the professionals using Excel, it’s flexible, even if it takes a while to figure out formulas and troubleshoot errors. And when media planners are paid for hourly work, why work faster?

As publishers face programmatic buying and multi-channel media optimization demands, this inefficient way of media planning has become outdated. That same Digiday survey also found that close to 60% of media planners are dissatisfied with their tools. Quite simply, Excel’s functionality is unable to meet the value-added expectations required by brands today.

There’s a new approach to media planning and here’s why it’s important to publishers and agencies.
Download your free guide: 5 Ways to Drive New Revenue for Publishers

​Complexity

Media planners using Excel for direct mail marketing and baseline analytics seemed to have everything they needed. These days, however, brands are expecting multi-channel ad buys &  editorial postings, facing skeptical consumers and looking to optimize their spending in real-time. Excel is not able to handle the increasing complexity of digital brand marketing.

Too Many Mistakes
Excel templates and hundreds of formulas could be used in a media plan. Templates could also be easily broken due to inflexibility and there is no guarantee that all media planners would use the same template or use a template in the same way. Calculation errors could be devastating to a client’s budget and damaging to the business relationship. Imagine getting client budget approval only to find out later that a single Excel formula messed up the entire calculation. Would you want to go back to the client with this bad news?

Missed Opportunities
When using an Excel spreadsheet, media planners aren’t able to quickly assimilate data analytics to find real-time buying opportunities for their clients or measure clicks on editorial stories designed to entice reader engagement.  Publishers know their audience and can offer this information to their clients to build a powerful media strategy. Cross-channel campaigns can only be measured with access to the tools that provide the data. All of the big data obtained during campaigns are rapidly changing all the time. It cannot be handled within an Excel spreadsheet.

Simplify with Digital Tools
Media planners must streamline and simplify or get lost in all of the data. They are looking for an innovative solution to offer optimized and efficient results to their clients, available anytime and anywhere. The new approach to media planning should also include accurate insights, targeted audience profiles and increased speed of deployment of bold, multi-channel strategies.

Launchpad Media Management offers centralized media planning that meets media planners in the 21st century. With efficiency built into the product for editors, media changes, supporting documentation, notifications and customizable reports can be accessed from any web browser.

A new approach to media planning requires digital tools that allows publishers to build campaigns based on real-time data insights. Media companies can’t afford to make mistakes or miss opportunities for their clients. The LaunchPad Media Management tool can help build efficiency into media planning. Learn more by requesting a demo - click here.

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