Media planning is more of creating value, provoking sales for clients

Media planning which invo l ve s identifying media channels by media agencies for promotion of clients products is now more of creating value and provoking sales for the clients’ brands than the usual concentration on seeking discounts.

The CEO of PHd, a media company of the Omnicom Group, one of the largest marketing communication groups in the world, Bayo Adisa, in a chat with BusinessDay supported this view when he said effective media planning must deliver the required audience and generate call
to action for the clients’ benefits.

This has become fundamental as more clients, especially marketing managers are becoming discerning in the face of pressure to generate sales, deliver return on investments and grow the business.

Describing budget efficiency as the ability to stretch the budget and get concessions that will enable the client’s budget deliver more in value, Adisa said “it is not just enough that the client has put, for instance N5m down and you are able to deliver N6m what of media.

It is much more of how this amount has impacted on the business itself. If I sell products, what chunk in my sales figure can I readily record on account of my advertising?”

According to him, media agency must deeply understand audience profiling – the ability to define audience psychographics and demographics – and know at every point in time where to engage the consumer.” All these are very important and the understanding of all these will determine the effectiveness of media planning.

When you have effective planning and you are able to match it with budget efficiency, then you are a star to your client” Adisa enthused.
In his view on the notion that there are much media buying agencies servicing a few Ad spenders, Adisa who left MediaCom as director of business development to head PHd, founded four years described some agencies as circumstantial agencies.

“They are agencies that were brought to live on account of some Media planning is more of creating value, provoking sales for clients compelling situation and circumstances. When you see a media practitioner who is a friend to someone highly placed in a company,
the next thing is to form an agency and some of them sit only on that account”, he said.

Assessing the outgoing year and his projections for 2015 in the face of vagaries in the system, Adisa described 2014 as a basket of the good and the bad.

“What has dominated our environment in the closing year is that a good number of clients are slashing their budgets. But the good news is that as all these are happening, we have new entrants, new businesses coming in.

There are new people that are settling down in our environment and want to do things that will bring them to limelight to the discerning
consumer”

Projecting in to the future, he said the thinking was that from the last quarter of 2014, there will a lot of noise from political activity, but he regretted that the Ads are not coming as expected.

“The elections are coming up in a few weeks but the ads are not there. The political campaigns are not really materializing, so we have to look inwards”, he advised his colleagues in the industry. 2015 will not be as juicy as we expected but discerning media agencies and marketing communication practitioners need to think inwards.

 “Any client you want to service you should bring value to the table for him”.

On whether online as advertisement platform is over-rated, Adisa who believes that the traditional media would continue to be strong said there should be continuous need for creativity in content to generate call to action so that the client will get necessary ROI.
“I do not think that Online has not been creatively put together. What I think is lacking is that, as in every new concept, it will take time to materialize. In fact we should be talking about mobile advertising. If you look at it we are essentially a youth population. The youth are the consumers of the online content. The target market of advertising brand has to be well defined. Where do you find your core target group. If you want to sell a car and you are advertising online, how many youth population will buy the new cars. What we should be talking about is the effectiveness of the deployment of the online advertisement and this rests with media planners.

We have to be able to advise our clients on the media channels that will deliver the audience to you”.