How to Get the Best From Your Media Planner

Whether you’re the client or the agency account person, your media planner is one of your most important team members. The success of a campaign is often linked to choosing the right placement at the right time. Proper media placements are what ultimately touches our audiences, builds awareness and provides a jumping off point for integration of other campaign elements.

Your rapport, relationship and process with the media planner are as important as inspiring the best creative from your creative team. Here are 3 essential tips to help you build your relationship and get better results:

1. Brief properly – Set up your media planner for success by doing a proper briefing, with all the parameters around the media plan (objectives, timing, budget, expectations), the creative brief, and hopefully a compelling creative concept that is the backbone of the work.

2. Insist on insight and empathy – With good data in hand about geo/demographic stats and media habits, now it’s time to really get inside the skin of the target audience. Work with your media planner to truly empathize with your audience, how they live, how they work and play, their moods and mindsets at various times and why. This will ensure more effective media plans.

3. Involve them in the creative process – Rather than showing them finished creative and telling them to develop a media plan on that basis, find ways to involve media planners in the very ideation process itself, even at concept stage. Given their vast experience with different media and the creative that has been put through them, media planners can sometimes be surprisingly creative themselves.
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