What is a Media Planner?
The Ones Who Deliver Messages
Even after earning a degree in media science.
Even after spending 6 months after college job hunting.
It took me a while to discover the role of a media planner.
But, when I finally did,
I found it fascinating.
Here’s why.
What is a media planner?
A media planner is, quite simply, someone who helps deliver a message through media.
Advertising, at its simplest form, is about communicating a message.
That process can be broken down into two parts:
- Creating the message.
- Making sure the message reaches the right audience.
At an ad agency, the creative team focuses on the first part. Media planners focus on the latter.
If creatives decide what and how to say, media planners decide when and where to say it.
Since even the most beautifully-crafted, award-winning ad is useless if no one ever sees it, deciding which channels to deliver the message is crucial.
Media planners, therefore, decide which media channels to utilize, where the message should appear, and when people are most likely to encounter it. By employing a mix of media like TV, Magazines, Billboards, Social Media, and various displays, media planners quite simply “plan the media”.
However, delivering a message in front of the right audience is becoming more arduous. Behind every campaign are countless hours of research, budgeting, data analysis, strategy, and — perhaps most importantly — Excel spreadsheets.
Why Is Delivering a Message So Difficult?
The reason is simple. We live in an increasingly noisy world.
The past belonged to the age of mass media.
Get Hongchan Lee’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
People intook information from just a handful of TV channels, newspapers, and radio stations.
If you wanted to advertise, your job was relatively straightforward: choose a few major media outlets, buy the space, and your message would naturally reach a large audience.
Of course, buying mass media ad slots was expensive, and figuring out the financing part was probably its own complication. Nonetheless, estimating where tens of thousands of people’s attention was concentrated wasn’t particularly difficult.
Today, we live in the era of media fragmentation.
Instead of gathering in one place, people are scattered across platforms, each shaped by their own interests and habits. The days when an entire family sat together at 9 p.m. to watch the evening news are long gone.
Now, Dad is glued to Fox News or MSNBC. Mom spends hours watching house tour vlogs or sourdough baking tutorials on YouTube. And the kids are bouncing between Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, and whatever platform drops next month.
And it’s not just that there are more platforms. Each platform has become an ecosystem of its own, with countless advertising formats, targeting options, and campaign objectives.
Google alone offers 10 advertising products, ranging from Search and YouTube ads to Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. Similarly, Meta gives advertisers ad products which each offer dozens of creative formats.
So deciding when and where to advertise has become an increasingly complex task. It’s no longer about simply buying media. It’s more about deciding which combination of possible decisions deserves your budget.
Before a Message Can Be Delivered
But at some point during work, I have to dive deeper. Beneath the piles of ROAS, CTRs, sessions, and conversions.
Beneath the question of,
“Where should we advertise?”
lies a fundamental question,
“Why do we behave the way we do?”
Before we can use media effectively, we first have to understand us.
Where do we spend their time?
What captures our attention?
What influences our decisions?
When are we most likely to take action?
Perhaps that’s what fascinated me most.
Learning to understand who we are.
