The media planning glossary.
72 terms working planners actually use - defined directly, explained in practice, and linked to the guides that go deeper. No filler, no folklore.
Planning fundamentals
Campaign objective
A campaign objective is the commercial outcome a campaign exists to produce, written in plain language and then translated into measurable media KPIs.
Channel planning
Channel planning is the selection of specific media channels and platforms for a campaign, based on the role each plays in the customer journey, the audience's reachability there, the creative formats available and historic performance, rather than habit or platform enthusiasm.
Flighting
Flighting is the pattern of when a campaign's budget is spent across its dates: flat, front-loaded, pulsed around key moments or built toward a peak.
KPI (key performance indicator)
A KPI is the measurable outcome used to judge whether a campaign or channel line is succeeding, such as reach, CPA, ROAS or lead volume.
Media brief
A media brief is the client document that defines what a campaign must achieve: the commercial objective, audience, markets, budget, timing, constraints and success measures.
Media mix
The media mix is the combination of channels a plan uses and the share of budget each receives.
Media plan
A media plan is the document or system that records a campaign's allocation decisions: audiences, channels, platforms, tactics, budgets, flighting, KPIs and rationale.
Media planning
Media planning is the process of deciding where, when and how much to spend on advertising to reach a defined audience and achieve a commercial objective.
Media strategy
Media strategy is the layer above planning: it defines the role advertising plays in the commercial objective, which audiences matter, how the brand will compete for attention and what the budget must achieve.
Pulsing
Pulsing is a flighting pattern that maintains a continuous low level of activity with periodic bursts of heavier spend around demand peaks, promotions or cultural moments.
Seasonality
Seasonality is the predictable variation in demand, media costs and competitive pressure across the calendar: retail peaks, travel booking windows, B2B budget cycles, Ramadan, summer troughs.
Budgeting & pacing
Budget allocation
Budget allocation is the division of a campaign budget across channels, platforms, tactics, audiences and time periods.
Budget pacing
Budget pacing is the discipline of comparing actual campaign spend and delivery against the plan throughout the flight, so overspend and underspend are caught while there is still time to act.
Diminishing returns
Diminishing returns describes the point at which additional spend on a channel, audience or tactic produces progressively less outcome per pound, as the most responsive people are already reached and auctions push into more expensive inventory.
Marginal efficiency
Marginal efficiency is the return produced by the next unit of budget on a line, as opposed to the average return of everything spent so far.
Net vs gross media cost
Gross media cost includes agency commission and fees; net media cost is what the platform or publisher actually receives.
Overspend
Overspend is spend running ahead of the approved plan.
Pacing variance
Pacing variance is the gap between actual spend and planned spend to date, expressed in currency and as a percentage of planned-to-date.
Planned spend to date
Planned spend to date is the amount a campaign should have spent by a given day according to the approved plan.
Required daily spend
Required daily spend is the remaining budget divided by the remaining campaign days: the average rate needed to finish on budget.
Underspend
Underspend is spend running behind the approved plan, caused by narrow audiences, low bids, restrictive cost targets, disapproved creative, tracking or billing issues, low demand or budgets spread too thinly to exit learning.
Metrics
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of clicks or sessions that complete the desired action.
CPA (cost per acquisition)
CPA is the average media cost of one desired outcome - a purchase, lead or sign-up - calculated as spend divided by conversions.
CPC (cost per click)
CPC is the average cost paid for each click, the dominant pricing model in search and common across social.
CPM (cost per mille)
CPM is the cost per thousand impressions, the standard pricing unit for display, video and social inventory.
CPV (cost per view)
CPV is the cost paid per counted video view.
CTR (click-through rate)
CTR is clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage.
Effective frequency
Effective frequency is the number of exposures a person needs before an ad achieves its communication goal - awareness, recall or action.
Frequency
Frequency is the average number of times each reached person was exposed to a campaign, calculated as impressions divided by reach.
Frequency capping
Frequency capping limits how many times one person can be served a campaign's ads within a period.
Impressions
An impression is one delivery of an ad to a screen, counted whether or not anyone noticed it.
Reach
Reach is the number or percentage of distinct people exposed to a campaign at least once during a period.
ROAS (return on ad spend)
ROAS is revenue attributed to advertising divided by the cost of that advertising, usually expressed as a ratio or multiple.
Viewability
Viewability measures whether an ad had the opportunity to be seen, commonly using the MRC standard of at least 50% of pixels in view for one second (display) or two seconds (video).
Audiences & targeting
Addressable audience
An addressable audience is a group that can actually be targeted through available platform signals - demographics, interests, behaviours, intent, customer lists or lookalikes - as opposed to a strategic audience described in research terms that no platform can select.
Audience persona
An audience persona is a structured description of a priority audience: who they are, what motivates them, how they behave in media and, critically, the targetable platform proxies that reach them.
First-party data
First-party data is information a business collects directly from its own customers and audiences: purchases, sign-ups, site behaviour, CRM records.
Funnel (upper, mid, lower)
The funnel is the shorthand model for stages of readiness: upper funnel builds awareness among people not yet in-market, mid funnel builds consideration, lower funnel converts active demand.
Lookalike audience
A lookalike audience is a platform-built audience of people who resemble a seed list - customers, converters or high-value users - based on the platform's behavioural signals.
Prospecting
Prospecting is media activity aimed at people who have not yet interacted with the brand - new potential customers rather than existing ones or recent visitors.
Retargeting
Retargeting (or remarketing) serves ads to people who have already interacted with the brand: site visitors, video viewers, cart abandoners, CRM contacts.
Third-party data
Third-party data is audience information collected by an entity with no direct relationship to the person, packaged into segments and sold for targeting.
Channels & programmatic
Ad exchange
An ad exchange is the marketplace where programmatic auctions happen: DSPs bid on behalf of buyers, SSPs offer inventory on behalf of publishers, and the exchange resolves the auction in real time, typically in under a hundred milliseconds before the page finishes loading.
Brand safety
Brand safety is the practice of preventing ads from appearing alongside content that damages the brand - through blocklists, allowlists, category exclusions and verification technology.
CTV (connected TV)
CTV is television content streamed through internet-connected devices - smart TVs, sticks, consoles - bought digitally, often programmatically.
DOOH (digital out-of-home)
DOOH is digital out-of-home advertising: screens in public places - roadside, transit, malls, venues - increasingly bought programmatically with scheduling, location and audience-movement data.
DSP (demand-side platform)
A DSP is the platform advertisers and agencies use to buy programmatic inventory: it holds the campaigns, audiences, budgets, bids and creative, and bids into auctions across many exchanges and publishers on the buyer's behalf.
Open exchange (RTB)
The open exchange is the open programmatic marketplace where any buyer can bid on any available impression in real time.
Paid, owned and earned media
The paid-owned-earned model classifies media by control and cost: paid is bought exposure (advertising), owned is channels the brand controls (site, CRM, social profiles), earned is exposure others generate (coverage, shares, reviews).
PMP (private marketplace)
A PMP is an invitation-only programmatic auction where selected buyers bid on a publisher's inventory under a deal ID.
Programmatic advertising
Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of ad inventory through technology platforms, most visibly real-time auctions that decide which ad serves in the milliseconds a page or stream loads.
Programmatic guaranteed
Programmatic guaranteed is a direct deal - fixed price, reserved inventory, agreed volume - executed through programmatic pipes rather than manual insertion orders.
SSP (supply-side platform)
An SSP is the publisher-side counterpart to a DSP: the technology publishers use to make their ad inventory available to programmatic buyers, manage floor prices and connect to exchanges.
Activation & operations
Conversion tracking
Conversion tracking is the technical setup - pixels, server-side events, imported conversions - that records when the desired outcome happens and feeds it back to platforms and analytics.
In-flight optimisation
In-flight optimisation is the ongoing adjustment of live campaigns - budgets, bids, audiences, creative, placements - based on delivery and outcome data during the flight.
Insertion order (IO)
An insertion order is the contractual document confirming a media buy directly with a publisher or vendor: placements, dates, volumes, rates and terms.
Learning phase
The learning phase is the period after launch or significant edits when a platform's delivery algorithms are still calibrating who to serve and at what cost.
Media activation
Media activation is the translation of an approved plan into live campaigns: building the structures in each platform, applying budgets, audiences, bids, schedules and tracking exactly as planned.
Media buying
Media buying is the execution and commercial management of the plan: negotiating, purchasing and stewarding the inventory the plan calls for, whether through platform auctions, programmatic deals or direct publisher agreements.
Naming taxonomy
A naming taxonomy is the agreed convention for naming campaigns, ad sets and ads so that every live object identifies its client, market, objective, audience and tactic consistently.
Reconciliation
Reconciliation is the end-of-period process of confirming what was actually delivered and billed against what was planned and ordered, resolving discrepancies, credits and adjustments.
RFP (request for proposal)
In media, an RFP is the structured request an agency sends to publishers or vendors asking them to propose inventory, ideas and rates against a brief.
UTM parameters
UTM parameters are tags appended to landing-page URLs - source, medium, campaign, content, term - that tell analytics tools where a session came from.
Measurement & attribution
Attribution
Attribution is the set of rules deciding which media touchpoints receive credit for a conversion.
Brand lift
Brand lift measures a campaign's effect on brand metrics - awareness, recall, consideration, intent - usually via surveys comparing exposed and control groups.
Incrementality
Incrementality measures how many outcomes happened because of the media that would not have happened without it, typically via holdout or geo experiments.
Last-click attribution
Last-click attribution gives 100% of conversion credit to the final touchpoint before the action.
Marketing mix modelling (MMM)
MMM is a statistical approach that estimates each channel's contribution to outcomes using aggregated historical data - spend, sales, seasonality, pricing, external factors - without tracking individuals.
Share of search
Share of search is a brand's proportion of category search volume - searches for your brand divided by searches for all brands in the set.
Share of voice
Share of voice is a brand's proportion of category advertising presence - spend, impressions or visibility - relative to competitors.
AI & software
AI media planning
AI media planning uses machine intelligence to accelerate the mechanical parts of planning - extracting briefs into structured inputs, drafting personas, proposing channel allocations and flighting - while the planner reviews, corrects and owns every strategic decision.
Media planning software
Media planning software is a purpose-built system for creating, managing and controlling media plans: structured plan creation, audience work, allocation, flighting, and the connection of the approved plan to live delivery data for pacing.
Your next media plan starts in five minutes.
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TikTok202,500 people
Meta294,000 people
LinkedIn6,000 people if the move is approved
YouTube236,800 people
DV360333,000 people
Google133,700 people
Brief, Personas, Allocation, Flighting, Pacing, Approval