How to Develop an Effective Media Plan

8/1/2006

You will learn the importance of

• Being clear about your advertising goals
• Evaluating media options and proposals
• Selecting media that matches your goals
• Finding the experience you need to make media decisions.

Here are steps to developing a hot media plan:

1. Remember why you are advertising
In an earlier Big Idea, we highlighted why firms advertise. Some reasons worth remembering are:

• Competition. You’re not alone. There are other firms that are very good at what you do—and they’re advertising. According to Greenfield/Belser surveys of large firms in the late ’90s, 85% included advertising in their marketing plans versus 30% in 1991. Today? It’s probably 90% or more.
• Awareness and perception. Control your destiny. Unless you manage the market’s perception, the market’s perception will manage you—and not do justice to who you are and what you can accomplish for clients.
• Confirmation. It makes existing clients feel good, reminding them that they have made the right choice.
• Internal unity. Advertising can unite your professionals and staff. As a firm merges and grows, the sense of a shared culture and mission can get lost. Advertising will remind everyone of the firm’s values and its mission.
• Talent. By building name awareness, advertising can help you attract the best and the brightest, both students and accomplished professionals.

Ads can do all those things. But no single publication can achieve all those things at once or equally well. Choices must be made. That’s your media plan.

2. Define your goals
Is your top goal:

• Increasing your firm’s name awareness among buyers of services of all types in FORTUNE 500 companies?
• Selling a specific service in one geographical region or industry?
• Attracting law students to on-campus interviews?
• Building attendance for a seminar?

A clear understanding of your goals should guide the development of the creative work, of course. But your goals should also guide your selection of media. Smart advertisers begin the creative process with the potential media in mind. For example, a small budget and highly targeted media led us to create a card to be inserted in the publication rather than simply print on the regular pages of the publication. It stood out like a sore thumb, getting lots of attention!

3. Define your buyers
If your goal is to increase name awareness, for example, you’ll want to reach a variety of buyers and influencers. They could be:

• C-Suite executives—CEOs and CFOs who confirm or ultimately control the hiring of outside firms
• Entrepreneurs and small business owners
• Government officials, who are frequent referral sources
• Other professionals—even competitors.

The more closely you define your targets, the more effective you’ll be in managing your media dollars.

4. Follow your buyers
You know who they are. But where do they go for their news about the industry or services like yours? Why not ask them? Ask which newspapers and magazines they read and where they spend time on the Web. Be prepared for some surprises. New media sources appear every year. Clients will often be reading the hot new industry newsletters, magazines or blogs before you’ve even heard of them.

What you learn by talking with a few clients won’t be statistically valid, but it will be useful when analyzing publication pitches, agency recommendations and your own hunches.

5. Start with your competition
“You’re kidding right?”

You may not realize how much your competition can help you. For example, in a beauty contest, if buyers have never heard of you, smart competitors will tell them, “Never heard of ‘em!” shaking the buyer’s confidence in their short list. So advertise in your own trade press. Don’t dismiss the tactic as out of hand. If you do a good job in differentiating your firm, you’ll find that same “competition” to be a source of referrals. Be known as an industry leader inside the industry.

6. Reach for the sky
National business newspapers and magazines build brand awareness and name recognition over a wide spectrum of readers—from FORTUNE 500 executives to Wall Street leaders to venture capitalists. Their wide distribution, though less-highly targeted than industry pubs, delivers greater prestige. Reach is an important aspect of your media plan. The goal is to maximize reach and repetition, but even the most lavish media plan must make choices between the two. Therein lies the art of the media planner.

7. Look under your feet
Local publications are the ticket if you define targets geographically. If your town is fortunate enough to have a business journal (eponymously, the Business Journals or Crain’s), you’ll find their cost lower than the general newspaper and usually a better value to boot. City magazines are expensive but the perfect choice for some services, particularly when they employ sales-boosting editorial gimmicks like “The Top Professionals Under 40.” Don’t disdain religious, arts and civic organization publications if they fit into your plan. In fact, consider everything. Media planning usually suffers from too little creativity, not too much.

8. Put your ear to the ground
That’s not a stampede you’re hearing but commuters on their way in and out of town. Womble Carlyle has turned its iconic bulldog Winston into a spokesdog on commercial radio, to the delight of drive-time listeners in several major markets.

9. Fly through the air
Broadcast can be your strongest tool in building an image or changing the image of your firm—think Archer Daniels on PBS. But broadcast is not for everyone. Don’t limit your thinking to PBS. Head for the narrowly-focused cable channels and the powerhouse CNN. If CNN is targeting your market for ad sales, you’ll find them a willing partner in working with you to develop creative packages that include more than just broadcast, including participation in important seminars.

10. Go online
Five years ago, in these pages, you would have read discouraging advice about online advertising. No longer. As the audience has grown and become more familiar working with the Web, advertisers are flocking to the Web and, if not abandoning then balancing their investment in broadcast and print for a healthy stake in online advertising. Be smart about the promised demographic, the reputation and image of sites you select and the terms you accept.

11. Put your heads together
We believe that conferences should be part of your media plan. If you’re going to spend the time and money to show up, then make a showing as well. Because many firms put these dollars in a separate budget, they seldom show up as part of a comprehensive media plan, but they should.

12. Take flight
Ads don’t move along in lockstep like soldiers. Smart plans move more like infantry—run across the field for three weeks, then dig in for a month, run, dig in. In advertising, this kind of schedule is called “flighting.” Create a splash, for example, around the kickoff of the school year, go steady through November, then go dark in December with a big push at the beginning of the new year. In other words, the monotone march of advertising placements is neither useful nor natural.

13. Advance patiently, then hit the long bomb and spike the ball
Even the NFL complains that sports metaphors are tired and overused. Whatever. We’re trying to drive the message home. A spike is a period of time where your ads are big and seen by your tightly focused target everywhere. A spike could be scheduled around four major seminars, for instance. IBM uses this steady-as-she-goes approach with its weeklong schedule on CNN and other news shows, followed by a blockbuster buy on Sunday football broadcasts. That’s a spike!

14. Hit ’em where they ain’t
If types of media or specific outlets are chock full of competitors, try a different medium, especially a novel one. First movers typically gain press attention from thinking differently than the pack. Bottom line, think as creatively about the media as the message.

15. Brace yourself
As you narrow your options, you’ll be listening to pitches, scrutinizing costs and weighing the claims of media possibilities. The proposals all sound good. Every publication can cook up glowing demographics and amazingly low cost-per-impression numbers. But ask:

How many copies of each issue do they actually print? How are they distributed? Are they actually read? What’s the evidence that they are passed along? By the way, have you wondered why magazines have mostly disappeared from the shuttle flights? It’s because publications were using this distribution channel to inflate their circulation numbers (and thus their advertising rates) until some smart lawyer brought the hammer down.

Circulation reports in the media kit are just a starting point. You’ll need independent information to evaluate a medium. If you have time to do some analysis, here are tools that can help:

• BPA Worldwide audits the circulation of business-to-business publications, as well as general-interest business periodicals. BPA also provides trend reports and analysis.
• Audit Bureau of Circulations supplies audits of print (newspapers and consumer magazines) circulation and readership, and Web site activity. ABC maintains a database of circulation and readership information.
• SRDS offers a database of media rates and contact data on more than 100,000 U.S. and international media properties.
• Market research companies provide advertising, circulation and editorial studies to advertising agencies, corporations and consultants. Erdos & Morgan, for example, performs custom studies such as brand equity research and subscriber surveys.

16. Balance reach and repetition
Balancing a media budget involves some tough decisions. In the end, you’re always left with questions like these:

• Is a quarter-page in a regional edition of The Wall Street Journal a better value than half-pages in three Crain’s regional papers?
• If you’re an oil company and 500 of your target buyers read Petroleum News, does that make it a better vehicle for your message than Forbes, which is read by thousands of non-buyers?
• Is the wrapper for the convention issue of an industry pub more effective than a steady stream of full-page ads in industry newsletters?

Science will only take you so far. Balancing a media plan is an art. You must know when cutting repetition cuts into bone and makes the entire plan a waste of money.

17. The inevitable but highly rational pitch for outsourcing the media buy
Negotiation skills
You may love to negotiate. You may not. Negotiating with the media presents an interesting set of challenges. First of all, there’s no such thing as a “standard” deal with any media. The rate card says one thing. But placement (e.g., in the first half of the magazine) can be negotiated. And good customers often receive bonus ads that others never hear of (We’ve gotten over $500,000 of free placements for our clients).

Long-term relationships
The long-term relationships of an experienced media agency or buyer can be critical in striking the best deal. Agencies and media buyers purchase a lot more ad pages than a single buyer. In some cases they can negotiate lower rates that will allow you to stretch your media budget. Since most agencies and media-buying firms are paid a commission from the publications where they purchase advertising, there is generally no cost to you. So it’s a no-brainer, right?

Hassle-free
Aren’t you just thrilled to get a call from a media representative pushing their product? No? Fielding phone calls and emails from ad reps can take hours out of your or your assistant’s week. And it’s not much fun, because you have to say “no” many more times than “yes.”

Well, we don’t mind. In fact, we gladly meet with reps to create and sustain relationships, learn about new developments and swap stories. That works to your benefit when we’re ahead of what the general public knows. When you outsource media buying you can refer all those calls to the agency. This can save precious hours and allow you to focus on overall strategy.

Make-goods
Ever had your ad printed off-register? Not only is the impression ruined in the paper, you’re fielding calls from disgruntled professionals within the organization. Why not pass it on? “I’ve already called the agency” is all you need to say. We handle the media and the remedy. Not only that, we’re looking to ensure that problems don’t arise. For example, The Wall Street Journal will generally give us press proofs of our ads to confirm that the beautiful color image translates effectively into black and white. See, all the little things you didn’t know!

Bennies
Bennies? We mean extra benefits, such as the opportunity to sponsor a power breakfast launched by the publication and known only to insiders. Or the opportunity to meet with the Asian editor of a powerful business publication to learn more about your market. Relationships count for a lot. Our clients benefit.

18. Pass-along readership
Pass this Big Idea along to your bosses so they will know how complex media buying really is. Gain their respect for educating them, and chop out the hard sell at the end if you think it’s out of line. Till next month.