Barb Briefing

Barb Briefing: Emma Moorhead

17 June 2021

DATA TO OPTIMISE PLANNING

For the past 60 years, media planners have got lucky. We’ve had one major broadcast channel, capable of reaching multiple audiences, all at the same time. TV gave us a rock-solid foundation on which to construct a plan, especially in building brands in the priming stage. A single channel built emotion, created engagement and delivered visual impact, all in a neat 30” spot package.

Lots has of course changed but for me the real story is the drifting apart of audiences.

Audience fragmentation is making our jobs increasingly complicated. The inherent contradiction of 21st century complexity is that the more opportunities open up for us the more paralysed we can become. More opportunities offer more data for decisioning and yet this also requires more time to mine these data and line up the indicators for growth. Getting more data is rarely the problem, although the real meaning and consistency of such data is often debatable. We are not always gifted with a gold standard such as Barb. Lining up the indicators so they are harmonised to be comparable and then distilled down so that decisioning is fluent and without loss of context takes time.

Nowhere is this more true than in the massively expanded world of television. Addressability requires a redefinition of the purpose of reach, and the availability of AV content to ever-larger domestic TVs and a multiplicity of smaller hand-held devices creates a massively uneven playing field.

Wavemaker has created Maximize to respond to the challenges of today’s media landscape fragmentation. It is a cloud-based and opensource platform that codifies the channel planning process enabling planners to get to the optimum budget split, flighting and phasing fast. Maximize is a single integrated tool stack that generates data-fuelled media and communications plans. This is the first global tool in our industry that optimises growth against multiple audience segments moving from traditional segment level planning to agent-based modelling.

This means rather than planning one audience at a time we can plan multiple audiences simultaneously for the priming and active stages of the purchase journey, across all online and offline touchpoints. There are three core modules which allow you to create and explore growth audiences, create brand-specific touchpoint lists, and build campaigns that will optimise the delivery of priming and active communication to your most valuable audiences.

  1. We begin by creating and exploring growth audiences No two people have the same media behaviours. Maximize allows us to move beyond the traditional socio demo language of audiences by defining our own audiences using locally-available panel data (hello Barb). We can then explore audiences to identify salient traits compared to others, or compared to the total population. Excitingly the plans we produce can be optimised towards more than one audience segment.
  2. We then add granularity and detail to touchpoints. Every advertiser uses media differently so we make the system bespoke for every one of our clients by creating brand, advertiser or market specific touchpoint lists. At the Touchpoints stage we establish the parameters for campaign success accounting for nuances of brand and category, while balancing priming and active stage tasks. We then define the comms task and the channels which will most effectively deliver it across paid, owned and earned touchpoints. We also balance channel effectiveness with pricing efficiency. Each touchpoint is modified to adjust to our individual client strategy.
  3. We then define and optimize our campaign plan Our AI planning engine models thousands of scenarios optimised for influence across multiple audiences. Sophisticated plans, focused on growth are built in minutes which optimise budget allocation across touchpoints and audiences and which are flighted to deliver campaign objectives. It doesn’t produce the final plan, but it gets us 60% of the way there. From here our plans are fine-tuned to add real life elements and experience and create the perfect plan.

Why is this amazing?
Let’s bring this to life with a real example.

Back in July 2020, Nationwide challenged us with a simple but powerful provocation: are we truly speaking to all of UK society, nationwide”? As a brand whose proposition is to help build society it is essential they actively include diverse audiences.

We used Barb data to compare delivery of past campaigns and analyse the unique reach of channels to specific diverse audiences. We built in-depth audience segment analysis through a diversity lens and began reporting reach and frequency vs diverse audiences as well as actively diversifying our media plans. This enabled us to understand how we should adapt our channel selection to increase our delivery amongst diverse audiences and guarantee delivery at least in line with our trading audience.

We have been able to understand how diverse and inclusive our planning truly was. Making those changes for a campaign at the start of the year meant we could audit our delivery and report back on the changes we’d made to bring delivery in line – for example we increased 1+ by 8% for Pakistani audiences and 9% for Indian audiences.

Is this the future of planning?
What Maximize feeds on is great data – having Barb data integrated makes it even more powerful.

Our planners use human insight, ingenuity and creativity to create the very best plan, identify the very best partners and apply their media planning craft skills and tactics to give our clients the edge. Maximize is an example of using machines to do what machines do best, freeing up our planners to do the things that humans do best.

Emma Moorhead, General Manager, Media, Wavemaker