Media planning and strategy

What a media plan should do.

A media plan decides how a budget gets used to reach a goal. It sets out who to reach, on which channels, when, how much to spend and what the money should produce.

A useful plan also explains its reasoning. Your team should be able to see why each channel is there, what it's expected to do and what would make you change it. That makes the plan much easier to approve, defend and adjust.

Media planning vs. media buying.

Media planning decides where the budget should go and why. Media buying carries out that plan by setting up, purchasing and optimizing the campaigns.

Some teams want both from one partner, so what gets planned is what gets run. Others have their own buyers and just need a senior plan. We do either, including work behind another agency's brand.

How we build the channel mix.

We start with the goal and the audience, then give each channel a clear job. Search can capture people who are already looking. Social and video can reach people who aren't looking yet. Some channels help you reach an audience that platform rules or budget make hard to reach anywhere else.

Platform rules can shape the mix as much as the audience does. For CAMPIA, a 412-bed student residence in Montréal, Meta's Housing category removed age, gender and postal code targeting. We reached parents and students through different platforms instead.

We also look at what the budget can really support. A small budget split across too many channels and audiences rarely gets enough weight anywhere. We'd rather recommend fewer channels and explain what we left out.

Budgets, phases and flighting.

A plan needs to say when the money gets spent as well as where. Many campaigns work better in phases, with early budget building awareness and later budget going toward people closer to acting.

The calendar matters too. For Dans la rue, we planned around a Quebec general election, La Nuit des sans-abri, Mardi je donne and the Guignolée des médias, because each one changes what a cause campaign should do. Your business will have its own moments like these.

Campaign architecture.

Architecture is how a campaign gets divided up inside the platforms, and it decides what you can control and what you can read afterward. We work out how many campaigns are needed and what separates one from another, whether that's audience, phase, language or objective.

Every split has a price. Each new campaign divides the budget and the conversion data, and a platform's automated bidding needs enough conversions to work with. We separate two things when they need different budgets, messages or reporting, and we keep them together when they don't.

Platform rules shape the architecture too. Housing, employment and financial products fall under special ad categories on Meta, which limit the targeting available. We plan around those limits from the beginning, because finding them during setup can undo the whole structure.

The launch calendar.

A calendar should include more than your own dates. We look at what else is happening in your market during the campaign, including holidays, industry events, competing news and anything that could change how your message reads on a given day.

We then work backward from the launch. Creative production, translation, legal review, tracking checks and platform ad review all take time, and some depend on others. The calendar shows those dependencies and who owns each one, so your team can see early when a late approval would affect the launch.

From the plan to production.

A plan fails quickly if the creative team has to guess. We write a production brief that lists every campaign with its format, size, duration, copy and language. This shows the real number of assets a plan requires, which can be much larger than people expect.

Checking the math.

Media plans often break down in the details. A CPM changes and the impressions row doesn't follow. A percentage split in one slide doesn't match the table it came from. Results get forecast from conversion rates the campaign could never reach.

We rebuild the numbers from their inputs before a plan goes out. For the Journées de la persévérance scolaire, that audit found a retargeting line overstating delivery by 400,000 impressions. For Dans la rue, it found four independent defects in a results model claiming 170% to 219% of the campaign goal.

Plans with several funders or stakeholders.

Some plans have to satisfy more than one party. For AQPER, a reconciled $52,250 plan covered seven funders, with a province-wide film building an audience that five local promoters then retargeted in their own municipalities. Each funder needed to see its own line, and the budget had to reconcile from slide to slide.

How we measure a media plan.

We compare delivery and results against the plan itself. That means looking at spend, reach, frequency and the agreed outcome by channel and phase.

When something moves away from the plan, we look for the reason before changing the budget. Sometimes the plan was wrong, and sometimes the campaign needs more time or the tracking needs fixing.