As a population of over 60 million people or 23 million households, we work in 1.64 million businesses (that’s just VAT registered), live in 959 towns, drive over 26 million cars, spend £42 billion at restaurants in a year and send an average of 2 million text messages per hour.
There’s a lot of us, but thankfully (otherwise how boring would life be?) we are all a little different – we behave differently, like different things, have different interests. These differences mean we read 8,466 different magazines and watch 416 different TV stations. They influence where we go (passing around 800,000 different poster sites) and they effect who writes to us (we each receive around 370 different pieces of direct mail each year).
Understanding this information, interpreting it and then using it to work out the best and most effective method to communicate any product or service is media planning. Along with magazines, tv stations and poster sites, there are ‘media’ opportunities everywhere. On the side of lorries, the top of buildings, petrol pumps or beer mats. Buzzwords in the industry at the moment are branded content, James Bond driving the new Ford Mondeo, or social networking, Facebook and MySpace. The latter of these introduces the web, and you can imagine the opportunities and choice available there. Advertising, sponsorship, affiliation, links, buttons – there are a plethora of web advertising opportunities to think about.
Media planning is all about clearly identifying your target audience and understanding their behaviour. This understanding enables us to select the magazines they read, websites they visit and TV stations they watch. We then need to buy the media space and this is where the second media discipline comes in.
Media buying is the negotiation and management of the buying of media space. It’s when the theoretical planning is implemented. It’s about the final decisions (exactly what size space and position to take), it’s about negotiating a package, rates and discounts to suit your budget. Like anything, buying power is important, so it’s no surprise that the media industry is full of large multi-national businesses.
Media is a significant factor in the success of any campaign. It’s a great opportunity for creativity, so don’t just accept another half or full page in the same magazine – is there something just a little different you could do which is more likely to get the results you’re after?
James Woollam, Sales & Marketing Director, November 2007