Media Planning and Programmatic Advertising Essentials

Posted on Apr 2, 2025 in Business Management and Marketing

Media Planning Process

A. Briefing and Objectives

The goal is to identify growth drivers, with the objectives and KPIs as the results of this stage.

Three elements of the Business Analysis to achieve the goals:

  • Client Briefing Analysis
  • Analysis of Past Experiences
  • Business Analysis – SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)

It is important for the advertiser to define SMART objectives. You have to take into account the communication objectives that are:

  • Knowledge (visibility)
  • Attitude (engagement triggers)
  • Behavior (growth drivers)

B. Analysis Phase

The principal goal is to define the opportunities for a company. Our objective is to deep dive into three segments: Consumer, Brand, and Category.

  • Category: Aims to anticipate changes in the market and to understand the competition set by assessing: competitive trends, competitive reviews, and drivers of growth.
  • Consumer analysis: Understand our target audience and touchpoints analysis.
  • Brand analysis: Identify key distinctive assets and the key metric that summarizes the brand proposal to customers.

C. Strategy

The goal is to define who and what the brand should focus on to overcome its core challenge and achieve the objectives set up in the briefing. It is important to have a connection strategy that emerges from the recommendation strategy.

D. Activation

The goal is the media plan activation, accomplishing everything previously discussed.

E. Measurement

Measurement is critical because we can see what is working and what is not. Therefore, we can modify the media plan as it goes, improving the response we get and therefore improving our Return on Investment. This is especially true with media that provides immediate feedback, like digital.

Programmatic Advertising

Definition: The buying and selling of online ad inventory through automated methods rather than human actions. This includes but is not limited to Real-Time Bidding (RTB).

Three Key Benefits:

  1. Reach: Access publishers beyond the tech walled gardens.
  2. Relevancy: Microtargeting.
  3. Control: Lots of data.

Advertising is served by an Ad Server.

Cookies and Pixels enable programmatic advertising.

  • Cookies: Small piece of data sent from a web server and stored in a web browser.
  • Pixels: Piece of code integrated into an email or website to track user activity.

Exploring the Programmatic Ecosystem

Buy Side

Advertisers want to buy online inventory, either directly or through the agency’s trading desks.

Demand Side Platforms (DSP): Software that enables ad buyers to bid and buy ads for all kinds of online media: display, video, connected TV, native, audio.

  • This is real time.
  • Wide range of publishers.

Data Management Platform (DMP): Technology that collects, organizes, and activates all kinds of data (1st party, 2nd party, 3rd party) audience data. The backbone of programmatic.

Seller Side

Audience (targeted group of users) and publishers (sellers of ad inventory).

Supply Side Platforms (SSP): Software used by publishers to sell.

  • Maximize prices and increase fill rate.
  • SSP is to help monetize inventory.