Mele’s Musings

Rethinking Media Budgets

How would you estimate the amount of money you spend on food each month?  The simplest way to do it would be to collect all of your receipts from every place you spent money on food and add it up, right?  But what about those snacks and drinks from the vending machines?  And the various places that don’t give you receipts?  And the random trips here and there to the store where you pay cash or forget to right down the amount you spent?  The reality is that if you added up only the things that you have receipts for as a barometer of how much you are spending on food, you would probably miss a great deal.

It’s the same with media today.

Determining our investment in media used to be a pretty simple business.  Our own ledgers or aggregation tools collected information on media dollars spent in different vehicles and we could determine pretty accurately how much we were putting against TV, print, radio, outdoor, etc.  We could then compare those investments against sales and make some judgment about how effective media was.

Today, it’s not so simple.  While it is still relatively easy to gather good budget informatio on traditional and digital display media, getting accurate and aggregated information on all digital spending is tough.  Aggregation tools don’t handle search.  They can’t keep track of applications, sponsorships, or custom content.  And social or earned media is anybody’s guess.

The result is that accurately determining media investments in today’s digital media world, where ads are increasingly experiences rather than ad-like objects, is very difficult. 

For instance, if we judged the increasing importance of social media simple by the media dollars spent, we would get a very skewed view of its impact as this emarketer article points out.

The question used to be, “what happens if I move 30% of my media dollars to digital.”  But today, that kind of assessment is not as meaningful.  Building and maintaining a Twitter feed or Facebook page or community forum, while still considered media, don’t much of a media budget. 

Instead of thinking solely about media budgets or spends, we need to start thinking about media efforts or media energy.  Do we want a robust social program?  Then media spend is much less important than investing in the right resources around content and editorial.  Do we want to build applications and digital experiences?  Budget that would have gone to media needs to be reallocated to development.

Which is why digital can be a conundrum to some in media.  Without something to buy, media planners can become lost.  But in today’s digital world, media planning and strategy is not about what you can buy, or what rate you can negotiate something down to.  Instead, media planning and strategy is more about how you make the most effective use of your dollars – which often means not buying anything at all, or at least not anything that looks like ad space.

Today, we need to think about media budgets more fluidly and holistically.  What used to be considered the domain of PR or creative or technology now needs to be considered as part of media, or better yet, part of overall communications planning.  And we have to stop hanging on to antiquated notions of what media is or does. 

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