Media Planning Basics 2: What Has Come Before

Once you know what your client wants, you need to find out what they’ve done before.

Don’t work in a vacuum. It’s surprising how often clients don’t offer this information up front. More often, they’ll come to you and effectively say “Another agency ran some media plans for us that didn’t do very well. We fired them. Maybe you’ll do better.” In fact, sometimes the client may be so eager to leave behind their last partner that they don’t want to talk about who they were or what they did. But you’ve got to get that information. If you can, get hold of the actual media plans and the actual reporting and analysis that the last agency gave to the client.

If the last media planner made obvious mistakes, then you might see your whole media strategy opening up for you right there. Maybe they chose the right sites, but spread the impressions out too thin, or put them in the wrong positions. I had a client who showed me their previous planner’s report, indicating zero clicks and zero conversions over the entire campaign…in other words, they hadn’t been tracking it properly.

Structure sets you free. It’s such a satisfying feeling to be able to go back to the client and say with confidence: “Okay, we know what the other planners did wrong, and that’s where we want to start. Here’s where they screwed up, and here’s what we’re going to change, and here are the results you’re going to see.”

Clients can wrap their heads around that. It’s a lot more appealing than hearing “We ran some reports in MRI, and we cross-referenced the sites that index highest for your target demographic with the sites that offer the lowest CPMs, and we’ve determined that all your customers are waiting for you at Flickr!” Because if that’s all you have, then those customers had better be there, or you’ve just killed your credibility (and that of your tools) in the client’s eyes.

Not that you can’t come up with something beyond what MRI tells you without referring to an old plan…you can, and should…eventually. But old, failed plans are what you’re being compared to anyway, so you might as well seize the opportunity. Heroes are defined by the villains they defeat.