10 things to remember when reviewing a media strategy from your agency

Okay, so you’ve prepared and shared your amazing, inspiring brief.  Some time has passed for your media agency to work at it and they are ready to revert to you.  This is the easy part, right?  Wrong.  There is much you, as the marketer, can still contribute to the process.

1. Don’t use a sample of one

Given a target market, the agency will objectively look at various forms of research to understand that particular group’s media habits.  They will look at what they do, where they go, what information the consumers do or don’t consume, and how they feel about it (amongst other things).  As marketers, we are almost always guilty of viewing groups of people from our own perspective.  There is nothing more constricting to the process than when a client decrees, during the media revert, “well, my wife watches…” or “I never look at a billboard when I drive,” or my absolute favourite, “nobody I know clicks on online ads.”  Even if you are part of the demographic, even if Brian from Accounts is exactly the target market, or even if you are married to someone who is part of the target market, it is dangerous to base an entire media investment on insights gained from that one person.

2. Work with useful and specific target markets

Assuming that your target market isn’t too broad, the aim of the media research is to find commonalities amongst the market which you can translate into actionable media strategies.  For this, we need to look at a wider group of people other than those we already know and to whom we have already spoken.  Most media surveys have upwards of 15,000 respondents meaning that, in a specific segment, we can be looking at the media habits of a large group of people.  There is a good case for having a healthy debate about the research upfront and agreeing on a trusted source (or sources) but if the research produces results which are different to what you imagined, the appropriate response might be to ask for a deeper look rather than a complete rejection because it doesn’t fit your preconceptions.

3. Follow a logical process – strategy, to planning, to ideas

You have a really fantastic media idea.  It’s never been done before and the media owner who proposed it will do it for a small price given that it will generate great publicity for them.  But why are you doing it?  Is there a real consumer issue it is aiming to solve or will it at least deliver a real business benefit that you have set out to achieve?

There are a multitude of ideas out there and it’s dangerous to execute a plan without a strategy.  Whether or not you or your agency follow a process, there are usually three key stages to the media strategy – the strategy of which channels to use and how to use them, the planning of which platforms, stations, and publications to use, and then ideas themselves.

4. Understand which communication channels are being proposed

The first is where one defines which communication channels are right for the target market and how you need to address each channel.  Is the route-to-work (including media such as drive-time radio, street-side billboards, social media and traffic light promotions) the right channel for you?  How do consumers feel about receiving communication in this channel?  Is there a particular way you should engage with this channel based on consumer research (for example, do they prefer radio competitions with DJ involvement or do they prefer plain generic advertising, are they offended by traffic-light promotions, or do they look out for out-of-the-ordinary road-side outdoor)?  It’s important to understand which channels your agency is proposing and how they suggest you use them.  And it’s important to agree to include or exclude any of these key channels before proceeding – not only because it makes logical sense but also because time spent by creative agencies and media agencies pursuing a channel you don’t agree with (and will never approve) will eventually cost you in recouped time from agencies that burnt hours and hours pursuing ideas you were never going to approve and ungenerous discounts from media owners who presented a multitude of proposals you were never going to go with.

5. Make sure your target market is right when choosing platforms

The second is where one decides the media platforms – which stations, which publications, and which sites are being proposed.  Here it is key to remember the first point in this article, in that it’s dangerous to pick media channels based on your own favourite or what you perceive of the market – research is key here.  If you find that your agency is reverting with magazine titles, TV channels, or shopping centers that just “don’t feel right”, it’s usually because you’re working with a target market which is too broad.

Take, for example, a media target market of LSM 6-10.  The top magazines (depending on how your agency looks at it) might produce YOU, Huisgenoot and DRUM as the biggest magazines in that market, however you had, in your mind, Men’s Health, Glamour and GQ.  Had your agency, or you, added a filter of “upmarket, urban, LSM 10, fashion-conscious buyers of skin care products” you might have ended up with the magazines in mind.  The real benefit, however, is that using the right target market would return not only the magazines you had in mind, but also other magazines which fit the right target market but which you hadn’t thought of yet.  This applies to all media and platforms.

The third, and often most exciting step, is where your media agency works with media owners to come up with ideas to be activated.  Whether it’s lighting up Table Mountain the brand’s blue colour, getting your sponsored celebrity to be pictured ‘paparazzi’ style wearing your brand and seeded to paid-for website content, or an exciting 3D augmented reality fold-out showing your latest car range in a fashion magazine, there are a few things to consider:

6. Let consumer insights guide the ideas

Don’t get swept away.  We’ve all done this.  Something is so amazingly cool and it’s never been done before and you can’t wait to tell your loved-one about it. One must stop to ask if it’s something these particular consumers would like, would respond to, and that would lead to business results.  If it doesn’t answer all that, then maybe it’s better for another brand targeting another consumer.

7. Make sure the ideas are actionable

But is there a snowball’s chance in hell of it ever happening the way it’s proposed?  20% of strategy executed 100% is much better than 100% of the strategy executed at 20%.  Part of your media (or advertising) agency’s commitment to you is to have gauged whether an opportunity can actually be executed before presenting it (or at least to alert you that it’s still unknown) so that you can make an educated decision.

8. Beware of the amazing idea that nobody is destined to see

In the theatre, there is a principle that if the audience outnumbers the performers, the show is cancelled.  So many ‘innovative campaigns’ which employ genuinely brilliant ideas are seen by fewer consumers than the people it took to execute the idea.  We’ve all seen the ‘award winning’ campaigns: the hugely entertaining flash mob activated in a quiet shopping area without the correct seeding to social media, the clever billboard constructed entirely of your product but which is in on a road few people pass, or the stunt on TV that only a smattering of your target market get to see.  It’s not enough to just hope that it will ‘go viral.’  Push your agency to ensure that the idea is either immediately exposed at a reasonable scale or that there are the right mechanics in place to drive it’s spread through other means.

9. Measure the RIGHT things

One of the wonderful things that online media planning has brought to marketing is the ability to measure activity in ways that offline media has never been able to.  Add to this a multitude of consumer surveys and your own research, one can often get drowned in available measurements.  It’s really interesting that your website average time spent is 4m23s, your average frequency on radio was 3.5 and your number of social media likes increased by 12% but did you want to know that and do these metrics actually tell you anything about what you wanted to achieve?

During the media revert, make sure your media agency is proposing (and you agree with) a set of measurements based on the objectives you have set.   The actual metrics will vary vastly between different target markets and different campaigns but the point is – decide what you want to achieve, how you want to measure it, and what, in the measurement outcome, you would determine  success or failure.

10. Be nice. Actually, don’t just be nice, be inspiring.

It is likely that quite a few people from the agency and many more from the media owner side have spend many days and hours (and late night hours too) preparing the research, strategy, planning and ideas for presentation to you.  You probably need them to do more work with you in the future so how you receive the revert can determine the quality of work you receive in the future.

Be in the meeting, don’t be somewhere else.  Put your phone away.  Get out your note pad or your tablet and take notes.

Don’t set out to shoot down the agency.  Use your people skills to ask encouraging questions that help build your campaign rather than jarring points-of-difference that merely put the presenter off his or her game.

If you have the authority to say no, but don’t have the authority to say yes, resist the temptation to use your ‘veto’ authority too much.  A campaign whittled down several times before it gets to the final decision-maker is invariably going to be as dull as ditchwater.

And, finally… always keep this question in mind: which consumer issue is this specific activity going to solve?  If the media agency is proposing that you do ten different things, take each item and ask them specifically which consumer each is for and which consumer issue is it going to solve (which hasn’t already been solved by another item)?  I have sat in agency presentations when the agency has responded “TV is to add reach” or “cinema is to elevate the brand”.  That is no reason to commit funds.  Imagine you are stopped by your financial director in the lift asking you why he has been asked to sign off a cinema PO for a sizable sum.  Push your agency for a defined strategy so that you can answer, confidently, “it is to increase visits to our stores by 15% by convincing younger tech enthusiast age 20-35 that our stores have a wider range of tech products than any other store.”