Media Planning and Buying

Definition one: the process of deciding how to most effectively get your marketing communications
seen by your target audience.
Definition Two:
A process for determining the most cost-effective mix of media for achieving a set of media objectives.
Goal: maximize impact while minimizing cost
Media is often the largest MC budget item
Definition: Three: The design of a strategy that shows how investments in advertising time and space
will contribute to achievement of marketing objectives.
Definition four:
Media planning is about determining the best Media Mix (i.e., the best combination of one-way and
two-way media) to reach a particular target for a particular brand situation.

Media Objective

There are broadly five elements in media objective

statements:

1. Target Audience

2. Reach

3. Frequency

4. Message Weight

5. Message Distribution

Message Weight
The sum of the reach number of specific media vehicles in a given
media plan gives the message weight. Here while summing the reach,
duplication or overlapping is ignored. Message weight is expressed in
terms of gross impressions or gross rating points (GRP).

The total size of the audience for a set of ads or an entire campaign.
Message weight can be expressed as:
a.

Opportunity to see: The possible exposure of the advertising message

to one audience member is called an opportunity to see (OTS).

b.

Gross Impressions: It is the total number of potential exposures

(audience size by the number of times the ad message is used during a
period). Gross impressions are a summation of exposures of the target
audience to media vehicles in a media plan.
Each exposure is counted as one impression. Suppose an advertiser
puts advertisements on a programme of a TV channel viewed five times
by 6000 people in the target audience and seven times by 6000 people
in a four week period.