Media ShopTalk:   w/c 3 May 2010

This week our in house Media Guru, Moti Grauman, shares his learnings on Digital Media Planning.

Digital Media Planning

What is expected of a good Digital Media Plan, and more importantly, what should clients expect from a good digital planner? That question has kept me up many a night and the answer is unexpected. Almost 11 years ago, I began my career in digital marketing and I have never looked back. But up until recently my focus was purely on new media. I hadn’t been exposed to the traditional advertising world or how methodical it has become. The last year has taught me more about digital marketing than the previous 10 years, and the unfortunate thing is that the major lessons come not from the new, exciting and dynamically innovative digital world, but from the established techniques that have been used by marketers around the world for decades. That’s a significant point, and it’s a point that too many of us “digital gurus” fail to take seriously.

We all too often try to re-invent the wheel because we consider ourselves experts. We don’t stop to consider what lessons have been already been learnt by the masters of marketing, individuals who explored consumer behaviour and have been influencing it long before the internet existed. The situation is understandable. Digital planners know what to expect from a campaign upfront. If they buy a million impressions then that’s exactly what will get delivered. Traditional planners need to anticipate audience. Digital reporting can measure clicks and post impression activity so a focus on strategic planning is not nearly as necessary as it is for a TV, Radio or Outdoor. Well, that’s been the basic assumption for too long, and it’s fundamentally flawed. Not only do online and mobile plans require that upfront strategy, digital marketers should be paying even closer attention to the metrics than anyone else. Consider Frequency: The digital answer to that has always been frequency capping. As long as I have been in the business that answer has sufficed. But frequency capping ensures that no one sees the banner too many times.

We have no idea if users see our ads enough. Ad noting scores are simply not a digital idea. Even if we were able to control frequency properly, do we know what the ideal is? The standard in South Africa is 4 or 5, but some studies recommend 8 as an optimal model. The assumption that everyone online is LSM7+ is also no longer true, and yet we continue to regard it as if it were carved in stone. What about gender, age, location, time and behaviour? Everyone knows that digitally these options are available, but I challenge anyone to show me an effective application of these targets in the South African digital environment. This is Marketing 101 in the traditional space. To emphasise the point, digital campaigns are judged on performance in a way that traditional campaigns can’t be. So again, why is grassroots strategy not a factor in digital? I believe, that the problem is not that digital marketers don’t want to write “A Grade” strategy, it’s that they don’t know how. It’s never been important. There are two distinct camps in the marketing world: Traditional and Digital. Digital has always had a much larger degree of  measurability, limiting the need for upfront strategy, so digital planners were never exposed to the tools or the years and years of solid, tested and invaluable insight that has made traditional marketing the science that it is today. This distinction is hurting our industry and its hurting clients.

The uptake of digital channels in SA is slow because its not understood. There’s essentially a language barrier that needs to be crossed. So often we are required to sell a digital strategy with digital jargon to a client who doesn’t know how to evaluate it. The most forward thinking of clients allocate some time and budget to digital but they do it as a “by the way”.... They don’t want to hear because they are afraid they won’t understand. And here’s the crux: Digital planning is obsolete! The focus needs to be on the strategy, not the medium. A good plan doesn’t always involve TV, but when it does there isn’t a special strategy written for the TV element. The requirement comes to light because of the strategy. Its intuitive. There is no reason that digital media is not regarded the same way. Good strategy needs to include digital, but only as part of an overall collaborative plan. Now if I can just ignore the sound of Digital Planners all over South Africa screaming in protest, I should be able to sleep like a baby.

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