Advertising media strategy and planning: exploration of the strategy making approaches undertaken in the digital environment.

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to explore the practices being used to guide advertising media strategy and planning and identify if new approaches are emerging in the increasingly digitally orientated environment. Exploration of the literature identifies that the profession has changed significantly over the last three decades, with the role of media planners being elevated from that of an implementational scheduler to a more strategic role within the communication planning team. The literature also highlights a number of models designed to guide the media planning process. These indicate practitioners employ a classical deductive planning approach to evaluate, identify and propose the optimal media selection. Reflecting the newer strategic role, more recent frameworks identify a two-stage process where the development of a media strategy precedes implementation and optimisation, but this is still represented as a deductive process. Further exploration of the strategic management literature identifies how strategy making approaches in general have responded to the conditions of turbulence and uncertainty driven by the digital environment and indicated that this deductive approach might not be appropriate, leading to the hypothesis that the media strategy making approaches described through the literature do not reflect current practice. To explore this, primary research was undertaken, consisting of two concurrent studies.For study 1, fifteen in-depth interviews were conducted with senior UK media practitioners exploring current approaches to media strategy making. Study 2 complemented this with a content analysis of data collected from 93 practitioners to identify what information and data sources are used or required. The study identifies that the media strategy and planning approach has changed to become more emergent and iterative. This corroborates similar findings within strategic management literature. It also identifies that the role of media planners has been elevated further still, to be viewed as a business partner with the client. The culmination of this study results in the formation of a revised media planning process framework that makes the emergent and iterative approach more explicit, together with an accompanying ‘briefing checklist’ of the information that should be shared between clients and their agency strategists if the strategy and plan are to be effective.