Media-neutral planning - what is it?

Richard Butterworth, Joint Head of Planning, BMP DDB

Forget for a moment the jargon which surrounds these sorts of discussions: all we're trying to do is find a way of delivering the right message or experience to the right people in the most effective way; a way that adds the most value to our clients' businesses.

Achieving this aim obviously starts with those clients themselves. Do they want or need to engage with consumers in such a manner? Have they set up their internal structures and processes to do so? Are they paying their agency partners on a basis that will stop them scrabbling around for a greater slice of the communications budget? And so on.

I'm sure these matters are covered in more depth by other contributors. The only suggestion I'd like to make is that if you can't answer 'yes' to these sorts of questions right from the start, then you're probably heading for some headaches.

But let's assume the client foundations are in place and concentrate on the skills needed to deliver the right messages to the right people most effectively. More practically, let's think about the personnel we might try and recruit if we were setting up a media-neutral agency from scratch.

You need personnel who know an awful lot about consumers.

Finding the right message or experience depends on having a good idea how people relate to the category the client operates in, the product the client offers, the client's brand, how that brand manifests itself - and most of the above concerning the client's main competitors. Basically, account planner expertise, but let's call it consumer planning. Account planners tend to choose big paint brushes and set up broad brush strokes for large audiences: consumer planners need to be comfortable with everything from miniatures to installations.

Working out how best to deliver that right message - let's call it channel planning - is dependent on a having a good idea how much different communications channels are consumed by, and can an exert an influence on, people.

No single job discipline involves all the skills needed to do this channel planning job. Media planners at media agencies can do something similar within the context of one or two channels, typically advertising and sponsorship. Channel-specific specialists can do it in the context of their particular disciplines. And all of them armed with sufficient data, a calculator, and the back of an envelope can crudely calculate relative audience sizes and costs-per-thousand.

But no one (yet) has the expertise to advise clients about what proportion of their communications budget they should invest behind one, some, or all the many channels available to them. 'Proportion' is an important word because it presupposes a quantified basis for decision making rather than, merely, a common sense feel that channels A, B, and C are right for the job - though it may often be the case that a common sense feel will get you to the right decision.

Offering this advice ought to be easy: all you need to do is work out the relative ability of the channels in question to influence the consumer behaviour which a client is trying to shape. The behaviour could be a sale, an enquiry, a store visit: whatever's most pertinent to the category, brand, and task in question. And the relative influence of the channels could be teased out by weight tests, multiple experimental-versus-control scenarios, exposure tests, and so on - the usual techniques in the evaluation armoury, applied to the nth degree depending on the number of channels involved.

In practice, though, this is very hard: everyone needs to agree on the behaviour they want to influence, there has to be freedom to experiment with different elements of the channel mix, and the effect of channel-choice somehow needs to be disentangled from that of the content and style of what those channels are carrying. Also, you end up with stacks of data, data that calls for the disentangling skills of the an econometrician.

So where does that leave us as we hunt for people to work at our new media-neutral agency? We need some consumer planners. Easy. And we need a hybrid media-strategist-data-planner-econometrician. Not easy, Dr. Frankenstein, but by no means impossible.

The search shouldn't end there. In combination, these two sets of people might give you a fine plan. But joined up thinking is a waste of time without joined up doing: a plan which stacks up on a spreadsheet doesn't matter much if it can't be implemented. So you need a consummate 'doer', some sort of integrated Account Director who can project manage fine plans into something more tangible. If you're lucky this role might be performed by a client representative. Indeed, that's the ideal, but rare are the clients who have the time available to do this. Hence the need for someone else to be the proxy conductor, guiding the unruly channel specialists into some sort of harmony.

Someone else is missing too, someone who is often passed over when matters like these are debated. That's the person with the creative imagination, the person who can turn a dry multi-channel message-delivering automaton into something much more powerful. This might involve generating a look, a personality, or a conceptual idea which lends coherence to the entire campaign. More fundamentally, it might involve dreaming up an event or PR idea which inspires the activity in all the other channels which surround it. Whichever, the creative member of the team shouldn't be drafted in at the last minute when the ink has dried on the plans: he or she should be a full participant in shaping them.

Taking these four disciplines together, this may sound unerringly similar to the structure of the 'traditional' full service advertising agency. And it is. But there's one massive difference: this agency would be producing media-neutral plans, turbo charging them with media-neutral creativity, and making them happen with media-neutral project management skills.

Well, it's interesting to speculate?

(c) Account Planning Group 1995-2002