Planning fundamentals
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. It sits between strategy and buying: strategy decides what the campaign must achieve, planning decides how the budget gets there.
In practice
A media plan answers five questions: who are we reaching, on which channels, with what budget, over what period, and how will we know it worked. The output is an allocation that can be activated, measured and defended to whoever signs the invoice.
Planning does not end at approval. The approved plan should become the baseline against which live delivery is paced, otherwise it is a forecast rather than a plan.