Why & Why Now? Reasons You Need Guideline Planning

As consumers of media, everyone gets their information and ideas from different sources, networks, and channels. With the variety of mediums and avenues available to access this information, a diversified advertising and media portfolio is becoming more and more necessary to reach a brand’s audience.

Media planning consists of identifying the ideal channels to reach a brand’s target audience to maximize ROI. Although it has been performed for decades, effective media planning has become increasingly important for advertisers to meaningfully deliver their message in today’s diverse media environment.

Vast channel segmentation fractures audience attention and siloes data sources, resulting in decentralized, disorganized data pools. It’s up to media planners to give this data meaning through vigorous collection, organization, analysis, and integration practices. This typically requires them to laboriously switch between various spreadsheets and sources, creating obvious inefficiencies when monitoring ongoing media trends.

Media consumption rates surged in 2022, with the average global consumer spending nearly eight hours per day with some form of media. To make a sufficient impact, advertisers and agencies must be clear about which channels to invest in to optimize their ad spend. They can find that competitive clarity with Guideline Planning.

Media plan management is a crucial process for enterprise teams to analyze and understand. As we know, media trends move quickly—although for many years, these trends remained unchanged because traditional media channels were limited. The rapid rise of global media access quickly diversified these channels, leaving today’s media owners unsure of which ones remain relevant to their audience. Access to the right data and timely trend analyses with Guideline’s media planning tool makes the answers to these questions much clearer.

Benefits of Informed Media Planning

A strong media plan takes into account numerous factors and data points. With the ability to visualize the tremendous fragmentation of where customers are spending their time, an all-inclusive media planning tool allows agencies and advertisers to clearly understand these key insights and develop their plans.

Other benefits of access to more informed media planning data include:

• Easily track and manage advertising budgets while accurately estimating ROI.
• Segment audiences by gaining a better understanding of what resonates with them.
• Create and maintain superior visibility in your market with ample time to respond.
• Reinvest resources saved by simplifying and standardizing the media buying processes.

No existing tool can eliminate unpredictability in media consumption trends, but with the right resources and timely, accurate ad spend data, advertisers can significantly improve buying, selling, and trading strategies with Guideline.

Unleash the full potential of your media planning. Learn more about Guideline’s planning solutions. →

Guideline Planning is Media Planning Evolved

Guideline Planning empowers brands and agencies to make smarter, faster advertising decisions by:

• Adding visibility
• Prioritizing speed
• Boosting clarity
• Unifying systems

This one-of-a-kind tool addresses some of the field’s longest-standing pain points. Guideline’s technology supports a shared desire to:

Say goodbye to spreadsheets

Most media planners collect their ad spend data by cross-referencing a vast collection of data sheets, each with its own standards for gathering, recording, and comparing various metrics. As a result, these planners often spend a significant amount of time shifting between spreadsheets, identifying key trends, making their comparisons and analyses, and then recording relevant findings in their own separate internal documents.

This familiar process is a considerable detriment to productivity, considering very little—if any—of this crucial data is centralized or standardized for large-scale use. Manual workflows that rely on copying and pasting across systems result in slow reactions to changes that are needed in your plans.

Media planning with Guideline’s tool offers access to a comprehensive and unified database that eliminates the need to switch constantly from spreadsheet to spreadsheet in search of advertising answers. This media planning tool has effectively created a currency on which to base media buying, selling, and trading decisions, saving valuable time by standardizing data sets and streamlining trend analysis for media planners.

Acquire clean data straight from the source.

Moreover, many advertisers and agencies don’t lack access to data. In fact, practically anyone with internet access can find data regarding ad spend and media consumption rather easily with a quick Google search. (A query for “ad spend and media consumption trends” returns more than 7 billion search results.) Many of us have been sold the promise of data as the cure to all our problems, but troves of meaningless data aren’t the answer. Essentially, media planners don’t need more data; they need better data providers that offer relevant, clean data they can actually use to optimize individual media plans.

For advertisers and agencies to ensure the reliability of the insights data providers offer, this ad spend intelligence must be acquired straight from the billing source as soon as it’s available. Guideline is currently the only specialized data provider that offers this level of continuity, timeliness, and credibility.

Select the right media channels.

A proper media plan addresses this overarching question: How can we best reach our audience? Effective digital planning is only the beginning. Online media (digital publications, pay-per-click, social media, programmatic advertising) only covers a fraction of the landscape. Advertisers must also consider the influence of offline media, such as magazines, newspapers, radio, TV and cable, and out-of-home advertising.

Since the amount and variety of media distribution channels have expanded so quickly in recent years, developing strong media plans relies heavily on knowing which of these avenues an audience is frequenting. This will take into account numerous measurable factors, including publishing times, marketing budget, and message frequency. Your ability to effectively measure and analyze these factors will determine which channels you present your message on. Since these investment choices dictate your overall reach, choosing the proper channels will ultimately make or break your campaigns.

Guideline provides unmatched transparency into these rapid but meaningful shifts, allowing agencies to clearly visualize channel distribution in near real time. Not only does this give advertisers added confidence in their media spend with the ability to anticipate where spend trends are going, but it also gives them more opportunity to act when course correction is necessary.

Guideline Planning: Why Now?

As markets continue to rapidly expand in different directions every day, we can assume that shifts in media consumption trends aren’t slowing down any time soon. To keep up with these shifts and anticipate future trends, advertisers and agencies need access to premium data that ensures maximum transparency. And they trust Guideline Planning to deliver that intelligence.

Start with Smarter Media Planning

These actionable insights are no longer just nice to have or simply a bonus to existing data access. Media owners, buyers, and sellers need this crucial information and prediction authority to make the best investment and advertising decisions for their brand and successfully reach their audience as media trends deviate.

Guideline offers more visibility, speed, clarity, and integration potential than any other data provider, allowing for faster, more informed advertising spend decisions. This complete and unified solution allows agencies and advertisers to plan, allocate, visualize, and analyze media plans in a collaborative environment that delivers unprecedented insight.

Schedule a meeting to learn more and discuss additional benefits of media planning with help from Guideline tools.

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