Promotion 435
media consumption habits. An essential second
step is to establish the media allocationwithin
the advertising appropriation, for it places a
limit on what is practically possible. The team
will next monitor competitors’ media usage, in
order to find unoccupied ground in the com-
munication landscape. For example, the agency
which launched the H ̈aagen-Dazs ice-cream
brand in Britain some 10 years ago deliberately
avoided the orthodox medium for the product,
television, and caught Unilever off guard with
a poster campaign that cost less than £500 000.
It was a manifestly successful strategy.
These preliminaries completed, media
planners can construct a broad-brush strategic
plan, by matching the objectives in the media
brief to the audience delivery capabilities and
message modulation propensities of the five so-
called ‘major media’ comprising the UK media
mix: press, television, radio, cinema and out-
door. This traditional, simplistic categorization
is rapidly becoming outmoded in the face of the
well-chronicled information explosion, but
remains the standard for the time being. The
confines of a single chapter do not permit a
review of their key characteristics, but thumb-
nail sketches can be found in an encyclopaedic
dictionary of marketing and advertising terms
(Baker, 1998), under the five relevant head-
words plus ‘major media’ and ‘media share’.
No single textbook can be recommended as
providing a more comprehensive review that is
reasonably up to date.
Once the strategic plan has been debated,
refined and agreed, the emphasis shifts to the
tactical level. Making choices among the media
optionswithin each class is in essence a matter
of evaluating them with respect to nine key
variables. Seven of these have already been
identified in Figure 17.3. In addition, media
planners need to take into account the creative
scopeoffered by an option under consideration:
will it place constraints on the execution of the
creative strategy being developed simultane-
ously? They will also be influenced by its user-
friendliness: the degree of effort required to book
and control a campaign. Media buying has
become generally easier during the past dec-
ade, but there can still be considerable variation
from one case to the next.
With the choices of media made, the
planners turn their attention to the building of
a media schedule capable of delivering the
message to the required audience in the right
way at the right times. Given that personal
viewing, listening and reading habits vary
considerably within any audience, frequency
and volume of exposure to any schedule can
never be uniform. Conceptually difficult dis-
cussions in academic and practitioner journals
testify to the fact that scheduling is an
extremely complex undertaking.
In practice, a first step towards selection
and scheduling decisions will be to feed per-
formance requirements into on-line media
selection programs or desktop software pack-
ages that all media planners now use as a
matter of course. Those cannot make decisions
by themselves, however, and this highly
numerate and technologically sophisticated
discipline still depends significantly on the
collective experience and wisdom of its
practitioners.
By such processes, the strategic plan is in
due course transformed into a costed operational
plan, which is in turn translated into a cam-
paign schedule by media buyers. These special-
ists have the disposition needed to haggle
successfully with the hard-nosed representa-
tives of the media sales houses and advertising
departments. Bargaining skills are especially
important in buying television advertising
time, which is effectively auctioned. The com-
plexities of media buying are well explained in
Chapter 8 of Brierley (1995). Because the cost of
a schedule reflects deals struck with suppliers,
it may vary significantly from the forecast in
the operational plan, which is consequently
reviewed and if necessary revised at intervals.
At the end of the campaign, the planning team
will assess the cost-effectiveness of their media
strategy, and retain the findings in mind as part
of the history influencing each future iteration
of the planning cycle.