TV Media Planning
How we media plan a TV advertising campaign
Media Planning for TV Advertising
The UK TV advertising market place is worth over £1.5 billion a year. There are over 200 channels and thousands of programmes to buy. Media planners help brands find the right audience to maximise your advertising.
The opportunity to scale your product or brand through buying TV advertising campaigns is great as TV is the largest scale deliverer of advertising in the UK. Planning TV advertising campaigns requires specialist knowledge and can appear complicated, however we make sure our clients understand all the working parts. We create plans with the greatest chance of success against agreed KPIs with a mind to scale.
At a glance
- Research is at the heart of creating a TV advertising media plan: we need to understand your target audience, what other media they consume, what your competitors are doing, etc
- Advertisers need to be clear on their campaign objectives
- We turn the research into a media plan, matching your target audience with audience profiles of all the TV channels
- A plan is created, showing the channels, audience size, time of day and provisional pricing
Getting started with a TV advertising media plan
To plan a TV media campaign, we take the time to get to know your business and its objectives. We research the whole sector you work within and how your competitors are working. We have monitoring systems to look at the whole market. We use all the data you can supply us with alongside the market data and your core objectives to create a strategy for the TV media plan.
We put research at the heart of their planning, in order to understand your business and your consumers. They will look into:
- What are the KPI’s for the campaign that you need to achieve?
- Who is your target consumer?
- What media do they consume?
- When is the best time to deliver advertising messages to them?
- What makes them purchase?
- What do your competitors do?
Once we understand the sector, your strategy and business goals, we focus on creating a TV media plan. A key part of the TV plan will involve targeting the audience you want to talk to. When considering which audience to target, we need to know which audience profile(s) are most likely to respond to your advertising message. Audiences could be broad (for example, young v old), or quite narrow (for example, women aged 18 to 25). Think about who is most likely to respond and least likely to respond to your message. TV delivers mass market audiences but you can skew this towards the audience profile most likely to buy. The more data you have the better as we love translating data into target audiences.
Turning the research into a TV media plan
Once we agree on the target market, we create a TV advertising plan. We have tools that analyse all the TV viewing and can rank all the stations ability to deliver the audience you require. There are over 200 channels all with different audiences. We have no set deals with specific channels so we can select TV channels to buy based on the correct target audience and the audience size of the channel. From an advertiser’s point of view, it does not matter how many channels there are, as long as you know that people are watching the adverts and we can analyse audience volumes and profiles to provide expert analysis to plan for growth to when, where and how they view.
There are over 100 TV audiences (defined by industry body BARB) we can use to plan the correct channels. Here is a few that we can use to plan the best TV campaign with the correct TV audience.
By way of example, the following chart from Thinkbox shows some audience profile data for the top 20 UK TV channels:
What does a TV advertising media plan look like?
A TV media plan shows how the TV campaign will be delivered. It will look a little like this:
The plan contains the following:
- The station – is the TV Station, if the station has a +1 time shift channel this will be included in the this
- Period – the actual dates of the campaign campaigns can be as short as a day or to cover a whole month
- Days of the Week – this shows which days of the week the campaign will be delivered over. TV is flexible so you do not have to advertise 7 days a week but can focus on the days that are most effective against kpi’s
- Daypart – This shows the times of the day that the advertising will go out between. You can buy different periods of the day to suit
Once the market has been researched, the media planner will then determine how best to allocate your budget to maximise return on investment to achieve the KPI’s and include a strategy to build from the initial campaign.
Once you have approved the plan, we then need to buy the campaign from the stations. To find out how we buy television advertising, turn to our Media Buying page.
Matching the message to the media
It’s also important that your TV ad has been considered with the same target audience in mind. Our team can assess the suitability of your current TV ad, or work with you to create a new TV ad or ad strategy. The message and objective of the TV ad creative should be strongly aligned with the media plan so that message and media can work together to optimise results.
