Media Planning & Buying
Media planning and buying, without the channel bias.
Most media plans are written by firms that sell one channel. The recommendation is known before the research starts. We plan across everything and have no reason to prefer one line item over another.
Where this sits in the system
Media Planning & Buying
Media planning sits in the create job. It depends on two neighbors: capture, which is paid search and organic search, and measure, which proves the connection between them.
The specific failure: brand media bought without a capture layer produces demand a competitor converts. You pay to make someone curious, and the first search result they see belongs to somebody else.
The problem
Two things go wrong, and they are usually both true.
The plan is written by someone who sells the answer
Buying scale caps what is possible
What we do
What the work actually includes.
Planning
- • Channel-agnostic planning, starting from the business objective rather than a channel
- • Audience and media consumption research most firms our size cannot run in house
- • Category and competitive spend intelligence
- • Custom audience development from first-party and third-party data
- • Budget allocation across channels, and the case for each one
Buying and Activation
- • Connected TV and online video
- • Streaming audio and podcasts
- • Broadcast audio
- • Programmatic display
- • Digital out of home and location-based targeting
- • Access to premium inventory
- • Predictable pricing across video, CTV and streaming audio
Management
- • Cross-channel pacing and spend visibility in one view
- • Creative rotation and fatigue monitoring
- • Flight-level reallocation based on measured contribution
How we run it
Run
Weekly, not monthly.
Pacing, delivery and creative performance are reviewed weekly against the plan. Flight-level changes do not wait for a monthly meeting.
Automated monitoring flags pacing drift and creative decay across every channel at once, and a senior strategist decides what to do about it.
Measure
Upper-funnel media is measurable. It is just not measurable with a last click.
Three ways. Independent third-party studies establish brand lift, web lift, sales lift and store visits. Search and site behavior show the downstream effect: branded search volume, direct traffic and impression share in the weeks following a flight.
Platform delivery data confirms the media ran as planned, which is a hygiene check rather than a result.
Scale
What gets better in year two.
Rate improvements as volume grows. Audience cohorts that have been tested rather than assumed. Reallocation between channels based on measured contribution instead of channel loyalty.
A creative library with known fatigue curves, so replacement is scheduled rather than reactive.
How this works
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Readiness is engineered. So is the next stage of growth.
Public Safety & Industrial Equipment
Connected Capabilities
Paid Search
Demand you create has to be captured, or a competitor captures it.
Creative & Content
Upper-funnel media consumes creative faster than most companies can produce it.
Measurement & Attribution
None of this is defensible without independent measurement.
FAQ
Questions we get asked
How should a brand choose between connected TV, streaming audio, programmatic and paid social?
You do not choose between them in the abstract. The decision comes down to three things: where the audience actually spends attention, what your creative can carry, and what happens downstream when someone becomes curious. Connected TV shows a product but costs the most per person reached. Streaming audio buys frequency cheaply and cannot demonstrate anything visually. Paid social carries targeting and a click. Programmatic display is the cheapest way to stay present. A plan that starts from the objective ends up mixing them; a plan written by a channel seller does not.
How is upper-funnel advertising measured?
Three ways, none of them a last click. Independent third-party studies measure brand lift, web lift, sales lift and store visits against a control group. Search and site behavior show the downstream effect: branded search volume, direct traffic and impression share in the weeks following a flight. Platform delivery data confirms the media ran as planned, which is hygiene rather than a result. Some contribution cannot be isolated cleanly, and we say which parts those are rather than assigning them a number.
Can streaming audio affect branded search volume?
Yes, and it is one of the clearer connections to observe, because audio gives a listener no way to click. A person who hears the ad and wants to act has to search, so the response shows up in branded search volume and direct traffic instead of in the audio platform’s report. Reading it honestly requires a baseline before the flight and a geography that was not exposed to compare against. Without a holdout it is a correlation, and we will describe it as one.
What does channel-agnostic media planning mean in practice?
It means the plan can come back recommending less of something we sell. In practice: the brief starts with the business objective rather than a channel, allocation is argued line by line, and money moves between channels during a flight based on measured contribution rather than what was booked. The test is whether a firm ever recommends spending less in a channel it manages. If the answer is written before the research, the plan is a rate card.
Send us the current plan.
We will tell you what it is missing and what we would move first.