Is media-neutral strategic planning really the Holy Grail?

Kate Waters, Senior Planner, Partners BDDH

What do we mean by media-neutral strategic planning?

In the absence of any formal definition, perhaps the best way to understand what we mean by media-neutral planning is to look at what has typically happened in the past. The aim is usually to create an integrated campaign (either across different advertising media, or encompassing below the line media too) which reflects a common strategy, creative idea and ideally execution. Planning's role is typically to write a campaign brief that is integrated. In my experience the most common way of achieving this is to fill in the 'media' box on the brief a variant of 'neutral', 'anything and everything', or 'a big idea'. The aim - which is a good one - is to ensure that the creative team are not shackled by the constraints of say a 30' TV script or a bound-in insert but instead generate an idea that is big enough to transcend media and flexible enough to be executed in a myriad of different forms.

Such approaches succeed in so far as they produce campaigns which look and feel as if they are based on the same idea. Two of the strongest recent examples are ITV Digital's 'Monkey' and French Connection's FCUK. Both can and do exist across many channels - TV, merchandise, direct mail, and so on - and the consumer is left in no doubt that they are on the receiving end of a single-minded idea with many expressions.

Superficial integration

All too often, however, the resulting campaign is based on fairly flimsy executional niceties which results in a fairly superficial form of integration. Pick a high street bank at random and the chances are you can think of a campaign which is 'integrated' in so far as you see the same image or hear the same piece of music on an ad, the website, etc. One can build a strong rationale for such an approach based on the assumption that media like TV are used to establish the campaign idea and other supporting media - say posters or direct mail are used to remind people of it, thereby increasing the salience and memo ability of the campaign. In other words, the consumer sees a poster of some familiar characters a thinks, 'Ahh! I recognise him/her from the TV where they were telling me something interesting about brand x".

Now this is fine as far as it goes, but it is my belief that our almost obsessive search for a campaign that looks and feels the same is frequently a mistaken one. At worst what we achieve is a bit like taking apples and oranges and painting them both green: superficially they look similar because they're the same colour, but delve a bit deeper and they have very different qualities. All too often we force each medium or channel into a creative straightjacket that doesn't quite fit rather than exploiting and using each medium to its full advantage. In doing so, I believe that we may be sacrificing a harder working campaign.

A vision for integrated communications

Let me start with what is completely obvious, nevertheless useful, observation. The communications industry is made up of many smaller specialist disciplines - media planning, new media planning, direct marketing, sales promotion, web/new media, etc, etc. There is a good reason for this: all the different media and communications channels work in a different way. Each influences the consumer's relationship with a brand in a unique way and has its own distinct strengths and weaknesses which practitioners carefully exploit to achieve the most powerful creative impact. As a result, each warrants a specialist approach and we can safely assume that it is an approach that pays back - else clients wouldn't continue to pay a large number of specialist agencies.

Surely the opportunity for integrated communications is to celebrate these differences and specialisms. The best integrated solutions are not those that adopt a blanket approach to all media with one uniformly expressed creative idea but those where the media or communications channels each play a different role or work together in subtly different ways to achieve the campaign's objectives. And, if necessary, the creative product reflects this. The end result is a campaign where the whole is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts because each part complements each other and all are mutually supportive. Each medium is allowed to function to best effect because it uses the creative execution that most powerfully harnesses its strengths. The whole campaign functions a bit like an ecosystem - a complex system where each element (medium or channel) is dependent on many others and the removal of one or more elements significantly weakens the whole.

Media sensitive planning

So how do we achieve this vision for integrated communications? Do we have to change the way we currently work? What role should planning play? Arguably if we look at some of the best integrated campaigns - like FCUK or monster.co.uk - we could argue that such campaigns were created within the existing processes and frameworks and consequently they should be no barrier to creating more campaigns like this in the future.

However, I suspect that such campaigns were created by accident rather than design and I suspect that one of the reasons that we do not create more of them is because we settle for writing 'neutral' in the media box on the top of creative briefs. In other words, I think media-neutral planning can make us, as planners, lazy. Creating truly integrated campaigns is difficult and by settling for 'no opinion' neutrality we task creatives with the incredibly difficult job of not only coming up with the big idea but also figuring out how it needs to work in each medium in order to maximise the strengths of every element of the communications mix.

Consequently, I do not believe that such media-neutral planning actively fosters true integration in the sense which I have described. The very term 'media-neutral' implies that the message or idea that we communicate is independent of the channel we use to communicate it. And if we accept that to be true, I do not believe we will ever consistently unlock the potential of integrated campaigns. Rather, I think planning needs to do almost the opposite - explicitly take account of which media will be used to deliver a message and more importantly work closely with the relevant specialist to carefully define what role each channel should play in the campaign and how they can work together to achieve the campaign's objectives.

In other words, what I believe we should aim for is media sensitive planning - that is where research, insights, briefs and the other bread and butter of a planners' toolkit reflect and are tailored for the communications channels that will be used for a campaign. For each key element of the campaign we need to create a model for how we expect that medium to influence our audience, define clearly what we expect that part of the campaign to achieve and tailor the message and execution as appropriate.

This certainly implies a change in the way we work - at the very least, planners need to get smarter about other communications disciplines and be comfortable working closely with a broader brand team - not just within their own agency but across all the communications agencies retained by their clients. But I wonder if the paradigm shift towards truly integrated communication could be the first nail in the coffin of the traditional agency planner? In the future I suspect planners will need to 'float' between specialist agencies - become 'communications' planners, skilled in all communications disciplines and able to cast an objective eye over the media landscape in order to decide which disciplines and which media are best able to meet the communications challenge.

The Holy Grail, then, is not media-neutral planning but media sensitive planning coupled with a creative idea that is on the one had big enough to provide cohesion between the communications channels and on the other, flexible enough to be executed in such as way that it truly does justice to every channel of the campaign.

(c) Account Planning Group 1995-2002