5. Where should the ads appear? In which markets and regions?
6. How much money should be spent in each medium?
When all questions have been asked and decision made, the recommendations and rationales are organized into a written document called a media plan. The plan, when approved by the advertiser, becomes the blueprint for the selection and use of media. Once the advertiser has approved the plan, it also serves as a guide for actually purchasing the media.
It would be a mistake, however, to think of media planning as nothing more than finding answers to a list of questions about media. Such a view is too narrow to provide the necessary perspective. Rather, it is better to assume that each question represent certain kinds of problems that need to be solved. Some problems are relatively simple, such as, "On which day of the week should television commercials be shown?" Other problems are much more difficult, such as, "In which media will ads more effect the prospect's buying behavior to result in sales?"
Media planning should be thought of as a process or a series of decisions that provides the best possible answers to a set of problems. A planner might find that a solution to a given problem does not guarantee it will work when other factors are considered. Finding the best solutions to a set of problems represents the main task of planners, and this is what makes media planning so intellectually challenging.
Changing Face of Media Planning
Some marketers believe the traditional media forms, such as television, newspapers, magazines, and radio, are less effective in producing sales now than in the past, because markets are changing and media must reach the product's best prospects much more selectively. Traditional media are challenging because they are mass media in an era where culture is changing--the masses are breaking up into a smaller segments. Therefore, advertisers must define markets much more precisely than they were defined in the past.
During the introduction of a new product, it is sometime easy to see that mass advertising is the way to communicate with large or small markets, as consumers flock to buy new brands that they first encountered through advertising. But today's consumers want more information about both new and established products that can be communicated with the traditional media. Because consumers expects to get this information from the Internet, marketing plans must consider how to use this new medium to build on the awareness created with mass advertising.
Traditionally, media planning has asked questions revolving around how media can reach the right persons. The "right" persons came from broadly aggregated data, such as "women aged 18-49," or "men aged 25-54." But these broad demographic characterizations obscure an almost unlimited array of life-styles, interest, and even media habits that are relevant to marketers if they want to deliver advertising to their best prospects. Today's media planning requires planner to identify smaller groups of product users and the media that best reach them. Furthermore, a society changes, media will have to be able to alert marketers that a target group's size and composition might have changed, so marketers can reach these smaller groups with little waste.
Technology has made it economical to deliver program content that appeals to smaller and smaller groups of people. Audience fragmentation has become the dominant characteristic of media, especially television, in the early years of the '21st' century. Today the average home can receive 75 television channels, up from 41 channels in 1995. Cable television programs, delivered either by wire or by satellite, can now be seen in 82 percent of 'U.S.' households with TVs. This proliferation of viewing chooses has significantly eroded the audience of the traditional broadcast networks, but total hours of viewing have remained essentially constant.
The result is a splintering of the audience among channels whose content may or may not be relevant to advertiser. For example, marketers of vacation destinations will certainly advertise on the Travel Channel, but the majority of their customers never watch it. The planner's challenge is to deliver the advertising to these potential customers in other, less obvious and less targeted, but much more popular venues.
