Media planning. What’s our take on that, you ask? Well, like everything else on the Internet, we think it could be a lot better. It’s all kind of weird, still in this talking head phase from broadcast, where everything is thought of in discrete units that are interchangeable. On broadcast you have, what? 60s, 30s, 15s and, maybe, if things are crazy, a 3 or 6. But you make each one, and then you run them in a bunch of places. With interactive media planning, it’s like we have 90s, 80s, 60s, 50s, 40s, 30s, 20s, 11s, 9s and 14s, and each one has to be a different frame rate, and a different color, and a different interlace speed. It’s ridiculous how much money is wasted making mechanical iterations for online media buys done in a vacuum separate from the creative. Or when you do a banner campaign around a square piece of creative and the media buy comes back with a million skyscraper banners. Then the client ends up spending $180,000 to do the mechanical banners for a $300,000 media buy. These numbers are not made up. We’ve seen it happen. More than once.

It gets worse. How do you place a Subservient Chicken? How do you “buy media” for a viral campaign? And you know what else sucks? When you’ve just come up with the greatest idea ever for a campaign – a brilliant campaign that will tell the world about your awesome project without placing a single banner ad, and all you need is $100,000, which is awesome, because the client said they have $500,000 for the internet, except oh look there’s an email in your inbox saying that… oh, it’s the media plan. They just spent $450,000 on media. We have $50k now. Man, they didn’t even need that media. This happens all the time. All the time. It’s so bad.

Media planning needs to be holistic. It needs to be coordinated. It needs to be planned with all the information at hand, including the best ideas that are on the table so far. At some point, somewhere, someone makes a decision on how to break down how money is spent on Internet marketing. Sometimes a client will just say to us “we have X dollars, how should we spend it?” This is awesome. Sometimes, before a lick of creative is made – before a single good idea has been generated – the breakdown of how the Internet marketing money is going to be spent has already been determined. So here’s our bit of advice: whoever it is that is deciding where each dollar goes in their Internet marketing, please, for the love of god, decide after the ideas have come. Don’t plan your interactive spending before you know the best approach for the job at hand.

And, finally, the most important thing we can tell you about media: Please, please, please don’t do a gigantic expensive media buy (print, TV, etc.) before you know how long the interactive will take to build. It’s common sense, we realize, but we think, owing to interactive’s historic place as the poor relations of advertising, it’s still all too often an afterthought. People come to us all of the time saying “the broadcast runs in six weeks. We need such-and-such for the Internet.” We will do everything we possibly can to make sure this happens, but all too often, it’s not possible for us, or it could be better given more time. Nine times out of ten, someone will be able to do it for you, but ten times out of ten it won’t be half as good as it could have been.