How does it feel?

It’s January and in adland that means one thing. Predictions. For the last few weeks trade press has been awash with the prognostications of the great and the good of the industry.

Overwhelmingly and perhaps unsurprisingly, most of these articles focus on the new. We ask ourselves, what will change in the year ahead? And what impact will that change have on the jobs we all do?

The details might be different, but many of the changes being discussed ladder upward toward the overarching themes that have governed discourse in marketing and communications for years now. Namely, growing complexity and increasing fragmentation in the commercial and media landscape, the need for new skills and capability within agencies to drive excellence in execution, digital and data are transforming everything. The fact that this transformation is happening quicker and more violently….

It would be fool hardy and frankly incorrect of me, to try and argue that these forces are not central to media and communications planning in 2022. However, in focussing relentlessly on the new, are we at risk of forgetting some fundamental principles?

Media agency staff have, on occasion, had a reputation for being ‘gorillas with calculators’, so much so that both my current and former employer were established as a reaction to this reputation. Investment levels, GRPs, coverage and frequency, medium, light and heavy weights… the language and vocabulary of media planning is often economic, rather than emotive.

This is compounded when you start to think about the new focal points of media discourse – data management platforms, 1st and 3rd party data, demand and supply side platforms, click through rates, conversion rate optimisation, cookies, clean rooms…

At times it can feel like the discipline of media planning is becoming less about communication and more about plumbing. A discipline focussed on the creation and management of systems and networks responsible for moving information from one point to another.

The target audience, the people and lives we are notionally trying to connect with and influence, risk becoming abstract and obfuscated from the process. Rendered less as living things and more as a series of signals, ones and zeros, something no doubt exacerbated by the disconnection caused by COVID restrictions and working from home.

I have seen whole presentations on ad-tech which entirely ignore the way that advertising delivered by the technology in question manifests itself in the real world. In an industry increasingly driven by technology, perhaps one of the most important question we can ask ourselves in the year ahead is not ‘what is going to change?’ but instead, ‘how does it feel?’

How will our communications feel to the consumer when they come into contact with our ideas?

….Will our messaging seamlessly sit alongside the activities the audience are performing in a complimentary way or will it jar? …Does that disconnect provide us with the opportunity to realise more or less attention? …..When the audience encounter our advertising, will they see it every 100 yards on the highstreet or only once per shopping trip? …..Will it be in every advert break they happen to see or just in the programmes they really love? ….Will they grow to resent the sofa they didn’t end up buying as it follows them around the internet?

And so on.  

Media planning must embrace new technological opportunities for all of the things it can help us to do. But we must not forget that these tools are only a means to an end, not the end itself. Getting the messages from A to B is half of the job. What happens when they get to their destination is the other half. The founding principle of planning as a discipline in communications agencies was to ensure that the consumer, the audience, were adequately represented within the process. As media continues to become a technology based discipline we must remember to allow room for the audience in our language. Yes technology is important, but so too is creativity and ingenuity - something which can often be wrung out of our thinking when we’re overly reliant on specific tools and techniques.

Consumers don’t get exposed to tech-stacks anymore than they get exposed to the (sometimes) beautiful powerpoint I create to build my arguments for my colleagues and clients.

If we lose sight of the interaction between consumer and content, we might as well just pack up and go home.

Asking this question is not some hippy dippy attempt to ‘get in touch’ with our selves, but instead about finding ways to remind ourselves of the qualitative, and not just the quantitative, side of media planning. A vital attempt to stay connected to the execution in the real world and what it will look like in real terms, not just technical, abstract terms.

So next time you’re building a plan or a response to brief, make sure you ask yourself ‘how will this feel’ to the consumer and see how that can guide the decisions you make. The execution of our thinking in the real world is, as always, everything - no matter how much change we see in the technological landscape, reminding ourselves of this is crucial.