A smart media planner will usually be looking for new ways to connect with the consumers, which could be driven by changes in media consumption habits, a great new insight into what triggers a change in target group’s behavior, or a previously missed opportunity to reach out to the target audience.

Media Planning is the process of using available information to identify the most appropriate platforms that we can use to communicate our message. Media planning is the art and science of ensuring that the adverts that brands want to place appear in the right place and at the right time to ensure they reach the correct target group and connect with them.

The core aim of media planning is to reach the intended audience: for tho specific campaign or advertising with the minimum amount of wastage. When we are briefed to plan a media campaign, first of all, we set out to understand as much as possible about that target audience, what motivates them and what types of media they use, why they use, etc.

Media Fragmentation

Today’s consumers are being blasted & overdosed with more and more media options every day. There are many genres of television channels and a constant stream of new publications that hit the newsstand almost every week or month. Media planning is fast becoming difficult by the accelerating fragmentation of the media market and it has become all the more challenging to balance these media options and work out a winning media combination for clients. Consumers have a greater choice of what to watch, listen to, or read. Therefore, advertising has to spread further; covering a multitude of channels to gain the same exposure, which Nepal TV’s Saturday Feature Film or Ramayan/ Mahabharat episodes delivered not more than 2 decades ago.

Today there are over 20 Nepali channels, over 20 National dailies, numerous weeklies, fortnightlies, and monthly magazines catering to niche segments like lifestyles, automobiles, business, women, youth, movies, health, etc and over 300+ FM radio stations all across the country. All of these could be considered for advertising to a Nepalese audience besides ever-growing penetration of the internet, social media, and mobile users, which is opening up a completely new avenue of the digital world. As the range of media options have expanded in recent years, the media planning has become not only more important but also more challenging.

Media Planning Challenge beyond Fragmentation

The common syndrome with most clients in Nepal is that they tend to dismiss the media habits of their target audiences and try and impose their own or their family member’s generalized media consumption patterns while planning media for their campaigns. They fail to remember that media planning is not done for them to see the ads. And many at times they find it even difficult to admit that the target audiences we want to reach for the campaigns are from diverse segments with different lifestyles approaches and motivations in their life that their media consumption patterns are not similar to theirs.

Modern Media Planning in Practice

The job of media planning involves determining the best combination of media to achieve marketing objectives. It is a combination of research, broad experience, and analytical skills, to determine the best possible media vehicles to reach out to the intended target audiences in the most cost-effective manner. Key media agencies have a proper mechanism to access many sources of information; be it media consumption data, program ratings, information on target consumer groups, and understanding of how consumers have previously responded to similar messages from their portfolio of clients.

The modern media planning has 3 broad parameters:

1. Setting media objectives

2. Deciding media strategies

3. Choosing the media mix

Identifying Core Audiences

Understanding the target audiences is the most important step in devising a media plan. It is important to analyze your media targets in terms of their demography, social-economic set-up, and more importantly in their lifestyle approach. There are considerations of demographics (age, sex, location, education. income, etc), psychographics (beliefs, practices, emotions, etc). and ethnography (cultural, religious, racial, and community roots).

For example, in a very simple way, the target audience for Axe deodorant can be defined as “contemporary cool young men between 18 to 24 years looking for an edge in the dating game”.

Besides defining the target audiences accurately, you have to also evaluate your product availability or distribution verses media coverage for the media options we are considering because media wastage is also becoming another big challenge in the current market.

Media Strategies

Similarly, media strategies are devised in terms of offensive or defensive approach. Same as in football, defensive games are played to protect your current business while the offensive move is taken to cash in on the opportunities.

Your media planner is a football coach who will design scheduling tactics depending upon the seasonality of the business and media budget allocated by the clients. General practices in scheduling tactics are Continuous, Flighting and Pulsing.

In continuous media patterns, a timing pattern is used whereby the advertising messages are scheduled continuously throughout the time period covered by the media plan.

Flighting media is advertising continuity or timing pattern in which advertising messages are scheduled to run during intervals of time that are separated by periods in which no advertising messages appear for the advertised item. Any period of time during which the messages appear is called a flight.

Pulsing is an advertising timing or continuity pattern in which there is a noted variation of media spending in the media schedule. There is some spending during all periods of the schedule, but there are periods in which the spending is notably heavier than others. This approach stands in contrast to a continuous media pattern in which equal amounts of spending are allocated to all time periods of the schedule.

Media Mix

With in-depth understanding of the brand, media agencies decide the media mix to best achieve the given media objectives. Media mix is the combination of media to be used in an advertising campaign. In the past, television channels and publications have always dominated the media mixes of most advertising campaigns because these media reached the broad segments of the market. But in recent times, there is increasing popularity of social media platforms or consumer engagement models, besides traditional mainline media which are still part of a large national campaign. The appropriate media vehicles to choose from or particular TV channels or publications and specific TV programs will all depend upon the media objective of the client. Media agencies generally choose media vehicles that most efficiently and effectively connect with the target audiences. In today’s complex media environment, it is important to consider options such as sponsorship, innovative brand properties or even encouraging brands to create their own contents.