Leave the Silo on the Farm: The Necessity of Integrated Media Planning in the Digital Age
Stan Federman
By Stan Federman, Chairman & CEO, Telmar
A new breed of media planners has emerged recently. This planner loves digital only, either because she was raised in all digital media world, for whatever reason, doesn’t believe that traditional media have a place in today’s media planning.
The planners often produce suboptimal plans and deny the power of non-selected media types because they refuse to examine the whole landscape of media alternatives simultaneously in relation to their brand’s marketing requirements. This whole phenomenon is just another variation of the old Silo-Mix Planning (SMP) vs. Integrated Media Planning (IMP) debate.
Web Media, Social Media, Eyes-on Out-of-Home media, Mobile Media and other new media developments have proved the traditional media Silo approach myopic, but the total abandonment of traditional media from the planning process is equally unwise. For many years and still in many parts of the world, agencies and advertisers plan their media campaigns separately, in silos. A silo is a storage unit used in agriculture to hold grain—one for corn, wheat, soybeans, etc. In media planning, this translates to one bucket for radio, TV, outdoor, etc.—and then bringing them together for a final mix.
The downside for advertisers? Agencies creating plans without treating media neutrally, at least initially, deny each media the opportunity to demonstrate its contribution to a brand’s marketing goal. As a result, some agencies first allocate budget or GRPs to each media “silo.”
Why do we recommend that you leave the Silos at the farm and lean toward “Integrated Media Planning”? All media, including Social Media, the Web, Digital Outdoor and traditional media are considered equally at the onset.
In Silo/Mix Planning (SMP), the planner:
1. Uses a segmentation system to determine the best target(s) for the brand.
2. Runs a crosstab to analyze all the individual media separately (using the best currency and alternative data available).
3. Then, using the above results combined with judgment and experience, selects the individual media types thought best for the brand, a budget, or how much media weight or R&F to allocate to each media type.
4. Using a Silo planning system of choice, creates the best plan for each media type selected for the resources allocated in 3 above.
5. Mixes the plans selected to create an overall report on expected performance on the whole multi media plan.
Under Integrated Media Planning (IMP), the planner:
1. Uses a segmentation system to determine the best target(s) for the brand (same as above).
2. Then allows all media to be considered neutrally and generates a plan. They do this using an integrated, all-media, single-source Fused or MultiBased study. They evaluate the study in a media planning software system that considers all the media available in the studies simultaneously, produces a recommended budget allocation, and generates a media plan. The plan runs across all the media types the system selects and produces all the individual and total plan media performance metrics.
3. Produces alternative plans on a “What if” basis to compare qualitative variables not able to be considered in the Benchmark plan.
4. Selects the best combination of Benchmark and “What if” plans to produce the final plan for the client.
5. Mixes the plans selected to create an overall report on expected performance on the whole multimedia plan.
In the hands of the professionally trained and experienced media planner, both approaches can produce superior plans. Choosing the IMP approach, however, will guarantee that ALL the old and new media available in today’s new digital media environment are at least considered.
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