Planners today are expected to balance audience behaviour, campaign objectives, budget realities, and cross-channel performance, while ensuring every euro invested is working as hard as possible. Today, media planning is less about gut instinct and more about unbiased, data-driven decision-making.
So, what does today’s media planning really look like in practice?
1. Starting with the audience, not the channel
One of the biggest shifts in media planning is moving away from channel-first thinking.
Instead of asking “Should this be TV, radio, or digital?”, modern planners start with a more fundamental question:
Where does this audience actually consume media today?
Audience consumption data plays a central role in shaping plans. It allows planners to understand:
Which channels their target audience engages with
How that behaviour differs by age, location, lifestyle, or intent
How consumption splits across traditional and digital media
This removes personal bias and internal assumptions from the process. The plan isn’t built around the planner’s preferences - it’s built around real audience behaviour.
2. Aligning the plan to the purpose of the campaign
A strong media plan doesn’t exist in isolation. It is always shaped by what the campaign is trying to achieve.
Modern planning explicitly factors in the primary objective, whether that is:
Brand building
Driving conversions or sales
Promoting an event or short-term activation
Or a combination of multiple goals
Each objective changes how channels are weighted, how success is measured, and how budgets are allocated. A brand awareness campaign prioritises reach and coverage, while a performance-led campaign focuses more heavily on efficiency and intent.
Without clearly anchoring the plan to its purpose, budgets risk being spread too thin - or invested in channels that don’t support the outcome.
3. Understanding minimum effective spend
One of the most overlooked aspects of media planning is effectiveness thresholds.
Every channel has a minimum level of spend required to deliver impact:
A minimum number of TVRs to drive recall on TV
A minimum volume of impressions to build frequency on social media
A minimum number of spots for an ad to register effectively on the radio
Below these thresholds, budgets aren’t just small - they’re often wasted.
Modern planners factor in this expertise early. They understand that it’s better to:
Invest properly in fewer channels
Than to appear “everywhere” without achieving meaningful exposure anywhere
This approach protects budgets and ensures media spend works as hard as possible.
4. Designing a cross-channel mix that works together
Audiences today are inundated with media across multiple touchpoints. As a result, effective plans rarely rely on a single channel.
Modern media planning considers the combined effect of channels, not just their individual performance. A well-designed mix:
Reinforces messaging across platforms
Increases the likelihood of recall
Improves efficiency through repeated exposure in different contexts
This often means blending digital and traditional channels in a way that reflects how people actually move through media during their day - not how channels are traditionally sold.
The goal isn’t to maximise channels. It’s to maximise impact through interaction.
5. Balancing reach and frequency and avoiding waste
Reach and frequency remain fundamental pillars of media planning, but today’s planners apply them with greater precision.
The objective is to:
Reach enough of the target audience
Expose them often enough to be effective
Without crossing the point of diminishing returns
Too little frequency means the message doesn’t land. Too much means money is being spent without additional impact.
Modern planning uses benchmarks and best-practice guidelines per channel to strike this balance - ensuring exposure is sufficient, efficient, and intentional.
6. From insight to proposal: where Smart Planner fits in
All of these factors - audience behaviour, campaign objectives, minimum spend thresholds, cross-channel mix, reach and frequency are too complex to balance manually and can take weeks of manual work.
That’s where Buymedia’s Smart Planner comes in.
The Smart Planner is designed to take these modern planning principles and apply them consistently to produce a high-level media proposal in minutes. It uses:
Audience consumption data to guide channel selection
Campaign objectives to shape budget weighting
Built-in knowledge around minimum effective spend
Cross-channel logic to create balanced, realistic plans
The output isn’t a final, locked-in plan - and it’s not meant to be.
Instead, the Smart Planner provides a credible starting point that planners can:
Compare against alternative iterations
Refine based on specific inventory and availability
Adjust using their own expertise, local knowledge, and learnings from previous campaign performance
From there, planners move into the detailed work - analysing titles, confirming dates, validating inventory, and finalising a plan that’s ready to go live.
Planning has changed - tools should too
Modern media planning is no longer about repeating old patterns or relying on assumptions. It’s about combining data, expertise, and experience to make smarter, more defensible decisions.
The Buymedia Smart Planner exists to support that shift - helping planners move faster, reduce bias, and focus their time on what matters most: making the right decisions for each campaign, reducing wasted spend and improving the efficiency and impact of their media investment.
