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.
“How do you plan media, anyway?” I am often asked by passersby. Usually, I insist that the asker climb a mountain and sacrifice a goat before receiving the answer. But if you find this post, it’s free.
This is (not coincidentally) analogous to a lot of sweepstakes promotions I’ve been involved in, wherein you have the choice between jumping through hoops to enter the sweepstakes, or just entering it. Some people like to jump through hoops. Some people think that life is hard, so given two options, hard and easy, they choose hard most of the time. It just feels more…honest, I guess.
I am not one of those people, though.
Step One: Find out what the client wants.
You’d think they would just tell you, right? But that’s often not the case. A surprising amount of the time, the client (or an account manager) will come to you with a mandate like “Onceler Corp. wants a media plan for their ‘thneeds’ brand by Friday. It should include an email and, uh…animation.” It is then the media planner’s job to push back and ask (among other things): What does the client want?
Sure, they want a media plan, but why? Are they trying to get people to click on a banner and immediately order thneeds online (direct marketing), or are they trying to get across the idea that thneeds are things that everyone needs (branding)? Why have they decided to run ads at this particular time? Are they launching a new product? Doing damage control on one that exists? Making a show of force to counter a competitor’s advertising? Or did an executive at the client company just announce one day “We should really be doing more of that…what do they call it…online advertising” (this happens more than you think)?
Getting these questions answered is more important than anything else at this point. And this is crucial: It’s more important than delivering a media plan. Because if you give in and just make something up, then before you know it, you’re going to have to implement it and then defend the results. Fortunately for you, asserting that you need these questions answered before proceeding is usually an effective pushback. Either the client realizes they don’t know what they want, or the account manager realizes they don’t know what they client wants. In either case, they decide to mull it over (or you pro-actively help them figure it out, if you want to swim in those waters), and you live to plan another day.
Of course, the best way to avoid this problem is to make sure you’re involved in the account from the start, i.e. even before there is talk of planning media, so that you have all the relevant background information. I do not agree with Seth Godin’s implication that meetings are usually a waste of time. Sure, they often don’t accomplish what they set out to accomplish. But for the observer who is simply interested in soaking up the nature of the situation under discussion, filing it away for future reference, meetings (other people’s meetings, that is) can be a great resource.
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.
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.
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