The new planning paradigm: How media is diversifying and integrating at the same time

Take TV: hundreds of ‘traditional’ channels, plus video on demand in all its forms – subscription video on demand (SVOD) like Netflix, broadcaster video on demand (BVOD) like the BBC iPlayer, and advertising-based (AVOD) suppliers like YouTube- to browse.

The data shows that, for media owners, this ecosystem can be very complementary; 72% of BVOD viewing is in conjunction with linear.

Of course, TV isn’t isolated from the rest of the media ecosystem. Commuting time is taken up by scrolling social media platforms that vie for attention, and which contain links to news brands that each demand logins or build paywalls to monetize their content. Audio content is available through online radio stations, subscription streaming apps, catch-up services, or podcasts. Ofcom’s 2023 Media Nations report shows that short-form video (like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts) has become a major new diversion for the British public: more than a third of adults now report watching it on a daily basis, across multiple platforms.

To some degree, media planners feel this fragmentation too. Understanding how audiences watch video on TikTok versus YouTube versus Netflix (and what that actually means for brands) is difficult. But what these experiences have in common is that they are all digital. So while the job of the planner is now difficult, it is also converging around a common point of focus: digital media, which now makes up 77% of UK advertising spend.

Is it finally digital-led media planning’s time in the sun?

So we have two seemingly contradictory trends – of diversification and convergence. On the one hand, people are spending their media hours in a greater diversity of places. But those media hours are converging in digital, meaning that brands and media planners are seeing a consolidation in how they access consumers.

For too long, brands and consumers have tolerated a lack of connectedness in advertising, with different teams planning media channels in silos. Now, with more and more media (TV, out-of-home, audio) within reach of a digital planner, we’re seeing more consistency in creative and channel activation – particularly when it comes to multi-platform video.

This shift also means a breakdown in some of the old-fashioned binaries applied to media planning: brand and performance, online and offline, ad-free and ad-supported. Where does Uber advertising sit in your media plan? How about host-read podcast ads? A lot of young people first encounter brands through digital, most likely social, with around 40% of daily video viewing by 4-15-year-olds via video-sharing platforms. This type of content engagement – and the advertising built on it – will be how we create a model for the media planning of the future. Here are the three principles on which that model will be built.

1. Redefining impact

It’s no longer enough to plan based on expected long-term impact alone. Difficult economic conditions and the end of the era of ‘free’ money mean that brands are rightly asking difficult questions about the impact their media is having right now.

Digital planners, many of whom came of age in performance channels, will understand this intuitively, and will combine the real-time data from digital buying and the latest statistical modeling techniques to open up hypotheses about new channels and formats: what impact does digital out-of-home have on store footfall? Can we attribute website sales to investment in video?

2. Obsessing over quality

Helping brands to navigate this fragmentation means helping them to think beyond delivery and understand quality. The best planners will do this by asking three questions.

First, they’ll ask ‘is the placement right for your audience?’ With a proliferation of digital platforms, audience planning now means a return to thinking critically about where your customer can be reached. It’s a skill we lost when Meta ruled and audience planning meant choosing interest categories for targeting.

The second question: ‘is the context right for your message?’ Does the environment you’ve chosen amplify your message, or take away from it? Is your creative designed for the context in which you’re showing it? Limitations in audience-based targeting from growing privacy regulation make this the right time to reconsider how we apply contextual cues in our planning.

And finally: ‘is your measure of success right for your objective?’ The video view metric is meaningless, but it is meaningless in different ways in different places. More and more Meta video inventory is mid-roll, which forces completion. With 40%+ of YouTube impressions now being served on connected TVs, the nature of engagement is changing, with more ads being ignored or playing in the background.

Think about viewability, attention, and how engagement relates to the message you’re delivering. Create a proxy (like attentive seconds) and apply it across the board.

3. Preparing to re-plan

Digital planning and buying is flexible, and that flexibility allows for more experimentation. This requires a ‘challenge culture’. More than ever agencies should be pushing their clients to begin diversifying their media spend and potentially moving away from environments that no longer deliver impact and quality.

Two things can be true at the same time: media fragmentation and convergence are happening alongside each other. The opportunity for planners who can see the changes is huge.