Holistic Planning Elements

Our holistic planning process reviews several key elements, including:

• The specific marketplace dynamics that affect our client’s business.
• Competitive pressures, including comparative spending levels and media channel selection.
• Identifying, ranking and selecting markets based on geographic pockets of opportunity.
• The strategies available for targeting our prospects across media channels.
• The opportunity for brand integrations with media partners.
• Our target audience’s receptivity for specific media channels, as well as how those channels influence their purchase decisions or brand engagement.
• Buying strategies based on specific business objectives.
• Calculating the additive value of each additional media channel.

Turning Consumer Insights to Media Strategy

Consumer analytics and syndicated research provide the insights, but it takes talented people to put it all together. Our people are cross-trained across all media channels and assisted by specialists who provide a greater understanding of the marketplace opportunities and historical performance in specific channels and touchpoints.

Channel Expertise

As a brand-focused, consumer-centric, data-driven agency, we regularly use every form of media you see here. And chances are, next month our list will be even longer as we continually evaluate and adopt new media strategies to keep our clients one step ahead of their competitors.

• Digital Video
• Multichannel Networks
• Branded Content
• Cinema Advertising
• Newspaper
• Magazine
• Display
• Search
• Mobile

• Digital Apps
• Social Media
• Gaming
• Direct Mail
• OOH
• FSI
• Television
• Terrestrial Radio
• Satellite Radio
• Internet Radio
• Streaming Audio

Targeting Capabilites

Given the incredible growth in big data overlays and programmatic digital buying, media targeting strategies have exploded over the last 5 years—particularly in digital and mobile media where it seems like media vendors are creating new media targeting capabilities on a weekly basis.

Our planners and buyers are constantly researching, testing and evaluating new targeting strategies to meet our clients’ media performance objectives. We often incorporate multiple targeting strategies in our campaign testing recommendations to determine the best approach for each brand.

By analyzing a client’s best customers through our Connected Analytics Platform, we uncover demographic attributes, purchasing behaviors, attitudes, opinions and beliefs that can be used to build a unique set of targeting strategies for every brand.

In digital media, our buyers use a combination of offline data and online data to target media based on a variety of factors, including traditional digital strategies like clickstream and contextual data, as well as targetable attributes from offline data, including demographics, psychographics, brand preferences and historical purchase behavior. And it’s all accessed through traditional and advanced programmatic digital buying capabilities.

Channel Receptivity & Influence

When building a holistic media plan, it is also essential to evaluate channel receptivity and influence. Using planning tools from Nielsen and Simmons, we evaluate our target audience’s receptivity to advertising messages in different media channels, as well as how a particular channel influences our target’s purchase behavior. Our goal is to find high-reach channels with high receptivity and influence.

Intelligent Buying

For direct response buying, our Connected Analytics Platform provides the intelligence needed to identify and select lower-cost, look-a-like networks and programming that deliver similar audience composition to the top-rated networks at a fraction of their cost. This ensures that customer acquisition objectives are achieved before investing in more expensive, broader reach networks. Our test-learn-and-optimize approach allows us to quickly identify which media properties deserve increased outlay for optimal return on investment.

Negotiating Better Rates

Our buyers are skilled at negotiating general market, direct response, programmatic and performance based media, which gives them a unique perspective of the media marketplace and the ability to negotiate optimal rates for our clients. It also lets us design hybrid buying strategies. How? We deliver targeted awareness-building impressions through fixed buys in key dayparts and programming with broad daypart rotations purchased at direct response rates to achieve efficient frequency.

As a smaller agency, we also have one of the most effective tools in rate negotiations: walkability. Since we’re not obligated to purchase media on behalf of several large clients like our bigger agency rivals, we can obtain bids from multiple media providers. When rates don’t meet our estimated performance benchmarks, we’re free to walk away and choose a different provider.

A Truly Integrated Media Investment Approach

Through our holistic planning approach, media investments flow freely from under-performing to better performing channels without hesitation. That’s because all planning team members are better informed and don’t base their decisions solely on their specific area of expertise.