MPG Training

Module 1 - Comms planning fundamentals​

​Tutor: Paul Gayfer

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The Fundamentals: We'll begin our day by examining what remains important and effective in an industry evolving at a pace that we've never experienced before. How the foundations of our thinking always lead back to people, with a fresh look at the established laws of marketing and behavioural theory and how they should be interpreted and applied in a modern media environment.

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Module 2 - Identifying sources of growth 

​Tutor: Greg Newman​​

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This session is all about setting direction. We'll look at a number of different ways to define the problem you want to solve and the shape of the solution. We'll work through ways to explore audiences, competitor analysis and cultural exploration in search of interesting, distinctive, directional approaches to your comms plan and delegates will leave with clarity on how to think beyond tools and marketing theory to define comms approaches which will outperform industry benchmarks continually.

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Module 3 - Focusing on the task

​Tutor: Joe Wood 

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This session is primarily about budget setting. It might not be the sexiest topic, but hopefully by the end you’ll appreciate its importance in a new light.

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Why? Money talks. In our particular case putting the right money in the right places signals our priorities, determines how close we get to achieving our clients’ goals and shapes the conversations we have about the role(s) of – behaviours for – media.

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In this session we’ll get into how to think about setting budgets – considering alignment with business goals, balancing across different jobs for comms, distribution of resources across markets and portfolio planning.

This isn’t just about how to carve up cash, but also about how the exercise itself can inform the conversations we have with clients and the direction we take in media behaviour.

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Module 4 - Engineering the plan 

​Tutors: Jack Winter, Ben Cunningham and Pam Odumusi

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In this module, Engineering the Plan, we will share practical methods and techniques to help media planners translate marketing strategy into a concrete media and communications plan, focusing specifically on the intersection of Comms Planning and Media Planning. We explore how truly great planners engineer a plan using a system of interlinked Paid, Owned, and Earned channels to achieve objectives beyond simply maximizing reach. A key focus is organizing your thinking using a comms architecture and understanding your audience's mindset and media habits, which is crucial for a plan's success. We will run through core planning principles to help create the conditions for an effective media plan where we discuss reach & frequency. attention, recency and relevance. Finally, we examine how to phase and flight a campaign to maximize exposure, impact and engagement at the key audience moments.

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Module 5 - Media creativity

​Tutors: Paul Gayfer, James Shoreland and Emily Fairhead-Keen

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​This session empowers you to take that creative 'pike' and bludgeon it through the treacle, to get to work which moves people, businesses, and the world. We've arguably never had a greater challenge - or more opportunity to find the best holes for the creative message, but also to elevate the media and actually start with the media as the creative itself. You'll explore some of the best ways to tell the creative story in channel, as well as some nickable principles to explore around the media as creative.

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Module 6 - Measuring for success

​Tutors: Lucy Verby, Ben Cunningham and Jas Mahil

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​In this module we provide a foundational introduction to measurement and effectiveness to provide media planners with the tools to set themselves and their clients for success. The course content is structured around practical principles, such as how to start with clear goals, ensuring our media plans work towards commercial outcomes like revenue and lifetime value, and define the distinct roles of metrics for optimisation, buying, and reporting. Core topics include articulating the drivers of growth, an explanation of the wide range of measurement techniques available, understanding the impact of creative quality and context as effectiveness multipliers, and making post-campaign analysis (PCAs) meaningful by linking them to business success criteria established during the planning stages.