Media Planning Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It
Media planning and strategy is the process of deciding where, when, and how to allocate advertising spend to reach the right audiences and drive measurable business outcomes. Done well, it connects brand ambition to channel reality, balancing reach, frequency, cost, and timing against what a business actually needs to achieve. Done poorly, it becomes a budget-allocation exercise dressed up as strategy.
Most media plans I’ve seen over the years suffer from the same structural flaw: they start with the channels rather than the customer, and they optimise for the metrics that are easiest to report rather than the outcomes that actually matter. That’s a planning problem, not a media problem.
Key Takeaways
- Media planning that starts with channels rather than audience behaviour is budget allocation, not strategy.
- Over-indexing on lower-funnel performance channels captures existing demand but rarely creates new demand, which is where growth actually comes from.
- Reach and frequency are not vanity metrics. Without sufficient reach into new audiences, even a technically perfect media mix will plateau.
- The best media plans are built around a clear theory of how the customer moves from unaware to purchase, not around platform rate cards.
- Media measurement gives you a perspective on reality, not reality itself. Honest approximation beats false precision every time.
In This Article
- Why Most Media Plans Start in the Wrong Place
- What a Media Strategy Actually Needs to Answer
- Reach vs. Efficiency: The Trade-Off Most Planners Get Wrong
- How Channel Selection Should Actually Work
- The Frequency Problem Nobody Talks About Enough
- Media Planning Across Different Business Stages
- Measurement: What You Can Know and What You Can’t
- What Good Media Planning Looks Like in Practice
Why Most Media Plans Start in the Wrong Place
Earlier in my career, I made the same mistake that most performance-focused marketers make. I over-indexed on lower-funnel channels because the attribution looked clean and the numbers were easy to defend in a boardroom. Search was capturing intent. Retargeting was closing browsers who’d already shown interest. The cost-per-acquisition figures looked strong.
The problem, which took me longer than I’d like to admit to fully internalise, is that a lot of what performance channels get credited for was going to happen anyway. The person who typed your brand name into Google was probably going to buy. You didn’t create that intent, you just collected it. It’s the retail equivalent of standing at the till and claiming credit for every sale. The real work, building awareness and preference in someone who wasn’t already thinking about you, happens much earlier in the funnel, and it rarely shows up cleanly in a last-click report.
Think about how a clothes shop works. Someone who tries something on is already far more likely to buy than someone browsing the rails. The media equivalent of getting someone into the fitting room is the awareness and consideration work that most performance-heavy media plans systematically underfund. You can’t optimise your way to growth if you’ve never reached the audience that would drive it.
This is one of the most persistent structural problems in modern media planning, and it’s been well-documented by researchers who study marketing effectiveness over time. Forrester’s intelligent growth model makes a similar point: sustainable growth requires building new demand, not just harvesting what already exists.
What a Media Strategy Actually Needs to Answer
A media strategy is not a channel list. It’s a set of decisions, each grounded in a specific rationale, that together describe how a brand will reach the right people, with the right message, at the right moment, within a defined budget. Before any channel gets selected, a media strategy needs to answer four questions clearly.
Who are we trying to reach, and where do they spend their attention? Not demographic proxies, but actual people with actual behaviours. The answer to this question should come from audience research, not from what the platforms tell you their inventory can target. Platform targeting options are built around what data they have, not around what your customer actually looks like.
What do we need those people to think, feel, or do differently? This is the communications task, and it’s distinct from the business objective. The business objective might be to grow revenue by 15%. The communications task might be to shift consideration among a specific segment who currently buy from a competitor. Those are different problems and they require different media approaches.
What’s the theory of how media investment translates to business outcome? This is where most plans are weakest. There should be a logical chain from impression to behaviour to revenue, even if it’s imperfect. If you can’t articulate that chain, you’re not planning, you’re just spending.
How will we know if it’s working, and what will we do if it isn’t? Measurement frameworks need to be designed before the campaign runs, not retrofitted afterwards. And they need to account for what you genuinely can’t measure, not just what shows up in the dashboard.
If you’re thinking about how media planning fits into broader commercial growth, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the wider strategic context, including how media investment connects to market positioning, audience prioritisation, and revenue planning.
Reach vs. Efficiency: The Trade-Off Most Planners Get Wrong
There’s a persistent tension in media planning between reach and efficiency. Performance teams tend to optimise hard for efficiency, which means concentrating spend on audiences most likely to convert. Brand teams tend to push for reach, which means accepting higher costs per conversion in exchange for broader exposure. Both instincts are partially right and partially dangerous.
Efficiency without reach creates a shrinking pool. You get better and better at converting a smaller and smaller audience. Your cost-per-acquisition looks great right up until the moment your business stops growing, because you’ve exhausted the demand you were capturing and never built any new demand to replace it.
Reach without efficiency burns budget on audiences who will never buy, for reasons that have nothing to do with your media plan. Not every impression is equal, and treating reach as an end in itself produces the kind of vanity metrics that give brand marketing a bad name in finance meetings.
The answer is sequenced investment: use upper-funnel channels to build genuine reach into audiences who represent future demand, and use lower-funnel channels to efficiently convert the demand that upper-funnel activity creates. The ratio between those two investments should be driven by where the brand sits in its growth cycle, not by which channels are easiest to measure.
When I was growing the agency at iProspect, we went through a period where the business had strong performance numbers but was starting to plateau. The accounts that broke through that plateau were almost always the ones where we convinced clients to invest more in reach, even when the short-term attribution looked weaker. The accounts that stayed flat were the ones where we couldn’t shift the conversation away from cost-per-click.
How Channel Selection Should Actually Work
Channel selection is where media planning gets tactical, and it’s where a lot of plans go wrong by treating channels as fixed rather than as tools with specific jobs. Every channel has strengths and weaknesses, and the job of a media planner is to match those characteristics to the communications task, not to default to whatever the agency has the best trading relationships with.
Paid search is excellent at capturing existing intent. If someone is actively looking for what you sell, search puts you in front of them at the moment of decision. It is poor at creating intent. You cannot search-optimise your way into someone’s consideration set if they’ve never heard of you.
Display and programmatic are efficient at scale and useful for retargeting, but they operate in an environment of declining attention. Banner blindness is real. If your creative isn’t strong enough to cut through, programmatic reach is largely wasted reach.
Video, whether broadcast, connected TV, or online, remains the most powerful format for building emotional connection and shifting brand perception at scale. It’s expensive relative to cost-per-click, which is why it gets cut when budgets tighten, which is usually exactly the wrong decision.
Social media channels are increasingly pay-to-play environments. Organic reach on most major platforms has declined significantly over the past decade. The value of social as a media channel depends heavily on creative quality, audience targeting precision, and whether the platform’s algorithm serves your objectives or its own. Creator-led content is increasingly how brands cut through in social environments, and Later’s research on creator-led go-to-market campaigns shows how brands are adapting their media approach to work with that reality rather than against it.
Audio, out-of-home, and print each have specific roles that digital channels don’t replicate well. Audio is intimate and habit-forming. Out-of-home builds local presence and mental availability. Print still carries credibility signals in certain categories. The question is never “should we use this channel” but “does this channel do a job that serves our strategy at a cost that makes sense.”
The Frequency Problem Nobody Talks About Enough
Reach gets discussed. Budget gets discussed. Channel mix gets discussed at length. Frequency is the variable that most media plans treat as an afterthought, and it’s often where campaigns fail silently.
Too little frequency and your message doesn’t register. People need to encounter a brand or message multiple times before it becomes meaningful. One impression rarely changes anything. The threshold varies by category, by creative quality, and by how established the brand already is in the consumer’s mind, but the principle holds: under-frequency is waste just as much as over-frequency is.
Too much frequency and you tip from persuasion into irritation. Programmatic campaigns with uncapped frequency can serve the same person the same ad dozens of times in a week. That’s not marketing, that’s harassment, and it actively damages brand perception. I’ve sat in client reviews where retargeting campaigns were running at 30-plus impressions per user per week and everyone was celebrating the low cost-per-click. The question nobody was asking was what that frequency was doing to the brand.
Effective frequency planning requires setting caps, monitoring actual delivery against those caps, and adjusting in-flight when the data suggests you’re either under-delivering or over-saturating. Most platforms will happily let you over-serve if you don’t actively manage it, because more impressions means more revenue for them.
Media Planning Across Different Business Stages
A media strategy for a market-entry brand looks nothing like a media strategy for a category leader defending share. The objectives are different, the audience challenges are different, and the channel mix should reflect that.
For brands entering new markets or categories, the primary challenge is awareness. You are unknown. The communications task is to become known to the right people, and that requires reach-heavy investment in channels that can build mental availability quickly. BCG’s analysis of go-to-market strategy in financial services highlights how brands entering established categories need to invest disproportionately in awareness before performance channels can work effectively. The same principle applies across sectors.
For growth-stage brands, the challenge shifts to consideration and preference. You have some awareness, but you’re not yet the default choice. Media strategy here needs to build the case for why you’re different or better, which requires more content-rich formats and more touchpoints across the consideration experience.
For established brands, the challenge is often defending mental availability while finding new audiences to replace natural attrition. The temptation at this stage is to cut brand investment and rely on performance efficiency, which works until it doesn’t, and by the time you notice the problem, you’ve usually been under-investing in brand for long enough that recovery takes years rather than months.
Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market feels harder than it used to touches on this dynamic from a sales and pipeline perspective, and the underlying tension is the same: short-term efficiency optimisation compounds into long-term growth problems when it crowds out the investment that builds future demand.
Measurement: What You Can Know and What You Can’t
Media measurement is the area where I’ve seen the most organisational self-deception. The tools are better than they’ve ever been, attribution modelling is more sophisticated, and the data volumes are enormous. None of that changes the fundamental truth that media measurement gives you a perspective on reality, not reality itself.
Last-click attribution systematically undervalues upper-funnel activity. Multi-touch attribution models distribute credit according to assumptions built into the model, not according to what actually caused the purchase. View-through attribution in display and video is almost entirely fiction, because seeing an ad and being influenced by an ad are not the same thing.
I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and one of the most consistent patterns in the entries that didn’t make the cut was over-reliance on platform-reported metrics. Entries would cite impressive click-through rates and conversion volumes without any evidence that the underlying business had moved. The metrics looked like success. The business outcomes were either flat or unattributable to the campaign.
The most honest approach to media measurement combines platform data with business data, uses incremental testing where possible, and acknowledges openly what can’t be measured rather than pretending the dashboard captures everything. Marketing doesn’t need perfect measurement. It needs honest approximation, and the willingness to make decisions under genuine uncertainty rather than false precision.
Vidyard’s Future Revenue Report makes an interesting point about untapped pipeline potential for go-to-market teams, and part of that untapped potential comes precisely from the measurement gaps that cause teams to underinvest in channels they can’t directly attribute.
What Good Media Planning Looks Like in Practice
Good media planning is less glamorous than the industry makes it look. It involves a lot of unglamorous work: audience analysis, competitive media audits, channel-by-channel cost modelling, scenario planning, and the uncomfortable conversations about what you can realistically achieve with the budget available.
Early in my time at Cybercom, I found myself running a creative brainstorm for Guinness when the founder had to step out for a client meeting. He handed me the whiteboard pen on the way out the door. The internal reaction, which I kept entirely to myself, was something close to panic. But the experience taught me something useful: good strategic thinking under pressure requires having a clear framework before you walk into the room. If you know what the brand needs to achieve, who it needs to reach, and what the communications task is, the channel decisions follow more naturally than you’d expect.
The same principle applies to media planning. The plan is only as good as the strategic clarity that precedes it. If the brief is vague, the plan will be vague. If the objectives are unclear, the channel selection will be arbitrary. If the measurement framework is an afterthought, the results will be uninterpretable.
The practical markers of a good media plan are: it starts from a clear audience definition, it has a coherent theory of change, it balances reach and efficiency in proportion to the growth objective, it sets frequency parameters rather than leaving them to platform defaults, it has a measurement framework designed before the campaign launches, and it has a clear decision rule for what happens when the data suggests it isn’t working.
For a broader view of how media planning connects to market strategy, commercial positioning, and demand creation, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub brings together the strategic context that media decisions need to sit within. Channel tactics without strategic grounding are just spending.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
