What is media planning? Today seems like as good of a day as any to open up a discussion about media planning for online advertising campaigns. Have you ever found yourself traveling in a new city, right after it has gotten dark, without a map, no money, hungry, thirsty, and no place to sleep for the night? Well, if you have had such an experience, it’s not very fun, and you probably developed a pretty skewed view of the city and your related experiences. This is because you visited the city without a proper plan and limited information and as a result you most likely had a stressful and negative experience. You could have been visiting a great city, full of wonderful potential, but without properly planning ahead of time you had a very difficult time experiencing the full potential of your environment.
This is similar to trying to write a digital media plan and execute a digital media buy without an accurate customer profile or useful customer data. You shouldn’t expect to be able to guess and estimate your way through this process and have a successful digital media buy as a result. Yes, you might be lucky a couple times, but in the long run your client will become dissatisfied and your competition will sway your client in their direction.