Media Planning
In marketing, the pre-work couldn't be more critical to a potential campaign. Variable Media provides in-depth strategic planning which includes an objective reasoning for every placement, platform, and creative selected.
Before the development of each plan, we provide market and competitive research about the advertiser. Next, we develop a media calendar that can and should align with social amplification, or key product/service offers to increase brand synergy. After, we provide the full plan to our client partners to ensure confidence and possibly any iteration revisions necessary.
Media planning has been based for far too long on how consumers’ lives used to be. The way we all consume media has changed enormously, yet our media planning notions and measurement have changed little.– Mike Bloxham, Ball State University (view source article)
Strategic Direction
Ad Platforms: Good platform strategy is the antidote to competition. Variable Media currently buys media across most platforms; however, the goal is to remain agnostic in discovering the best few that we can begin to scale and then move into a performance vs. test budget strategy.
Variable Analysis: Campaign variables provide the insight necessary to make crucial decisions to improve performance. Provided below are multiple case studies showcasing the importance of analyzing various variables (audience, creative, device, location, demo, etc.).
- Variable Analysis Case Studies
Audience Targeting / Creative Testing - We develop key audience and creative strategy through an in-depth review of the advertiser brand, competition, current assets, future opportunities, and where we see the best performance via platform/placement. Sometimes where we start is not where we end; one crucial case study that shows this is the information you can garner from the placement and combination report within Google Ads. While we might make our bets, once we begin advertising, we will have a clear understanding of the audience and creative.
- Variable Analysis Case Studies
- Ad Platofrm UI/UX Limitations (Google Ads - Combo / Placement Reports)
Optimization Path - A variety of factors can affect an optimization cadence, but most impacted by creative asset collection and ad spend but could be limited by geo-location or audience, so "it depends." The one constant strategy we always implore is analyzing prior, during, and post-campaign data to help confirm or shift our hypothesis for success.