Media Planning
More than just media
The focus of most media planning employees is to use analysis and creativity to develop effective campaigns and reach the target audience. However, as Australia’s largest independent media agency, we don’t focus solely on media outputs. Our organisation-wide philosophy is to understand our clients’ businesses, their business’ goals and the environment and market they operate in. We start by understanding as much as we can about the macro forces impacting their businesses and the wider business community, and focus on becoming almost an extension of our client’s businesses. We aim to go beyond simple delivery of reach and frequency and create detailed, measurable business, brand and product value. It is this holistic strategic thinking that we believe makes us stand out as a media agency, and unlocks the value our clients need.
Consumer insights are just as important as media insights, and with our industry knowledge, experience and relationships we understand the complex opportunities for brands sits in the job of bringing together media and technology. Our clients operate in a fast-paced and dynamic environment, and it is important as a leading media agency we take advantage of the market, consumer understanding and market intelligence we have available. Our process pushes a rigorous strategic process by combining the power of analytics and research tools and our unique holistic approach of collaboration and partnerships.
Understanding our clients, the consumer and the media
Our integrated media planning approach has several key stages, all focused on making our media agency part of our clients’ team. The first step is to uncover our clients’ key business and marketing objectives. This goes to the very core of who we are, and of how closely we focus on their goals. But it’s not just about identifying these objectives. We believe being a leading media agency means also reflecting on the objectives throughout the planning process and ensuring there is a firm, transparent measurement of success all the way through.
The next stage focuses on the consumer, who we believe is the most important part of any media agency planning campaign. We believe the more we can understand about the consumer the better we can reach them. We start by discovering consumers’ attitudes to the category and our clients’ brand, and profile them to cut through the clutter of the constantly changing lifestyle landscape. From there, it is about creating a map of the journey our consumer takes from awareness through to purchase. This allows us as a media agency to understand our clients’ consumers and develop insights into their relationship with the brand, the category and competitors’ and comparative brands. This strategic platform uses insights to inspire the media planning process, and all elements of a campaign must align to it.
The next step is to develop ideas, which is at the heart of any media agency, and at the heart of our integrated approach. We believe it is vital these ideas are generated together with our media partners, to bring them to life. Using both owned and earned assets at this point can help bolster above-the-line activity, but each media channel should work together for a succinct and seamless campaign. Negotiating with our media partners follows on from this, and is a key part of securing the most relevant and efficient campaigns. From a client’s point of view, we understand the importance of creating campaigns that are managed closely. It helps them remain agile and keeps the campaign focussed. We pride ourselves on our strong relationships with our media vendors as well as our clients. Our staff at all levels are involved with campaigns and bring all their experience, contacts and expertise to every deal. This is important as we want to continue to be a media agency that doesn’t deviate from providing tier-one services to its clients.
Next is performance and measurement. We work with a large range of performance-based partners to track media channels, measure them and analyse them against the planned deliverables. Our partners work across display, social, search and programmatic channels to ensure agility, flexibility and a focus on emerging trends. This allows us to keep our brands ahead of the market, which helps us stand out as a media agency. We also use leading software to enable full optimisation of our clients’ media budgets. This gives us the ability to measure direct response, conversions and return on investment on all advertisements.
An agile structure and measureable success
We are proud of our strategic approach and know its consistency and structure is one of its strengths. However, the way we do things and the way we structure our teams is always tailored to the needs of our clients. That agility allows us to work with the nature of the category, the frequency of planning cycles, the numbers of partners involved and even the decision-making hierarchy within our client’s business. This also allows us as a media agency to tailor a format that works for them, helps drive media conversations, encourages debate and creates an environment where media can influence business success on a national and local scale. This leads to an ability to go beyond delivery or reach and frequency and create measurable business brand and product value for our clients.
We believe our success as a media firm is down not to what we do, but the way we do it. We are all about respect; to our clients, staff, media channels and the broader community. Our openness and trustworthiness fosters both collaboration and innovation and pushes us to be addicted to our clients’ success.
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