The Roles in Brand Investment Decisions.

Do you have an idea turned into a Brand identity (name and logo)? Look no less than monetize it. Build initial service pipeline and customer base. Only once you have built basics, should you look for investing more on media platforms. Media investment without building basics has little meaning to the spends.

Tone of this article is set more for clients. They should grasp the underlying tone beautifully since they are the ones who’ll benefit the most while practicing it with relational dignity.

Brand Investment across ATL & BTL media platforms, like TV, Print, Radio, Digital, Outdoor Ambient, PR, is a high analysis, strategic job. Termed as “Media Planning”, often mentioned with “Media Buying”, it’s dominated by only handful professional agencies across the world. However, the real face of quality jobs lies somewhere else.

Real faces who possess the skills and ability to make practical decisions are the individuals who’ve grown over it and done it across years (irrespective of being independent or working under an agency). At the end of it, what matters is optimized decisions for most fruitful outcomes at the effective cost (not the lowest cost)! Professional agencies have limitations in bending themselves where it requires the most! They may have infrastructure (like data, software, and systems) but they may not be able to give “time to think creatively” to their manpower. It’s true in most cases.

The task of deciding how much to spend/invest on which media, and for how long, has technical grounds. The outcome, given the objectives, will result in a decision on “how much will be required to spend on which media”, “management fees”, and “likely consumer effects”. The document or an excel with numbers is called “Media Plan”.

Usually, there are 3 parties involved in the process.

First is “Client” or “Brand Manager” who has brand and certain budget with vague idea on how he’d like to spend it.

Second is “Agency” or “Media Manager” – go-between – who converts client brief into media brief and is responsible for final planning / buying delivery

Third is “Broadcaster / Publisher” whose given time in given geographies with relevant consumer reach is required for plan to be implementable

The process of best planning starts with client’s absolute clarity on two points.

• Brand budget & its upward flexibility (to be aligned in initial chats itself minding pros & cons). It will set the tradeoff between cost efficiency & consumer effectiveness
• Readiness to spend for at least 1-2 years with clear objectives for sustainable gains (“This plus that along with the other one too” are three different objectives and not one! It doesn’t work under limitations of media effectiveness)

*Note: In our careers, we have seen many brand managers with absolute clarity and many others having confused state of non-clarity. As long as client-agency interface (irrespective of which type of manager is at helm) has process/scope of dialogue and respect for each party, we have seen clients benefiting in overall output (good processes help remove people’s interpersonal biases). It’s always advisable to remain open and give hands of freedom to your manager/agency to bring about most creative outcomes. It always rewards in long run. Try it!

So, what goes in making a Media Plan?

Data gets fed in. For India, there are about 400+ active and considerable TV channels, about 1000+ publications in print, 200+ city wise Radio stations to choose from, thousands of options in ambient media, digital platforms, and many other channels to choose from. Most of it has numbers on consumer reach in some form or other. To aide it, there are audience measurement softwares like TAM, BARC, IRS, TGI etc.

A media manager feeds all the data into process. Churns audience affinity of every media vehicle. Maps it with prevailing rates of buying a unit space on each media vehicle and arrives at volume cost. With many permutations combinations of consumer reach vs cost efficiency, a media manager suggests an optimum plan! That’s the document of spends required to be made to reach certain % of viewers/audience. On top of it, planning (through the planner’s subjective learnings over years) also necessitates a lot of pivotal considerations to achieve depth of plan impact. This last step is most crucial often ignored the most!

Remember! While all these take place, managers often realize the need to sync plans with ad creatives & messages. However, the functions are so separate now that it’s impossible for the manager to align it (due to separate organizational setups in professional agencies). Hence, ad copy or brand message is mostly crafted independent of media plans (unless clients have addressed it smartly in their functions internally). Small brands don’t get much into scientific systems of media planning and large brands do face challenges of departmentalization / organizational layers.

That’s why it’s wise to build a quality interface (client-agency) that involves least number of people / departments with highest opportunity of ongoing dialogues & creativity.

Media plans can do wonders in that case!

For our support in media investment decisions, do write to us at chief@myclevelexecutive.com