Data-Driven Media Planning

Determining how, when, and where a target audience should receive an advertising message requires navigating an increasingly complex buyer’s journey. But as the media consumers engage with becomes more diverse, so do the data sources that media planners can draw from to conduct audience analysis. Data-driven media planning connects the right message with the right audience at the right time, resulting in more-effective marketing campaigns and higher rates of return on ad spend. Let’s look at how data can inform media planning to deliver better results.

Media Planning vs. Media Buying 

Media planning and media buying are two related but distinct activities. Media plans serve as a roadmap to help brands meet their advertising goals and include details such as campaign objectives, goals, target audience(s), audience analysis, types of media and media channels, and anticipated timeline. Media planners select and source the inventory they believe is best suited to meet the objectives of a marketing campaign. Media buying describes the actual purchasing of advertising opportunities identified in the media plan. Media buyers negotiate pricing with publishers, ensure that ad spend remains in budget, and explore opportunities with both traditional and emerging media. 

Media Planning Challenges Solved by Data

Today’s media landscape is vibrant, diverse, and evolving quickly. Traditional media is going strong in many ways but has ceded ground to digital offerings. This transition is a boon to advertisers thanks to the wealth of data generated by these platforms—as users engage with streaming content, social media, online ads, and websites, they leave behind a trail of actionable data. Here are four ways media planners can leverage this data to increase the value and effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

Effectively target consumers

Tailoring ads to specific consumers maximizes opportunities for engagement by connecting the right consumers with the right advertisement, on the right channel, at the right time. Microsegmentation, in particular, requires advanced data-driven techniques.

Select the right advertising channels

Successfully navigating the glut of channel choices requires a 360-degree view of a campaign’s target audience. Knowing where consumers choose to spend their time and their money is important, but with consumer time being fragmented across different channels and devices, more intel is needed. Advanced, data-driven approaches provide valuable insights into a consumer’s personality, sentiment, and other factors influencing their behavior. 

Create cross-platform advertising campaigns 

Conducting a customer 360 enables advertisers to understand the buyer’s journey, including the blend of traditional and digital media that customers engage with on the path to purchase. Analyzing customer data helps media planners select the right mix of traditional and digital advertisers to optimize marketing touchpoints. 

Measure campaign success/ROI

All media plans require optimization to ensure that the advertiser’s end goals are being met. Measurement and optimization helps media planners accurately measure consumer engagement across multiple channels, making it easier to see which ones are converting at or above expected rates and which are failing to generate the anticipated results. By aggregating consumer engagement and conversion metrics from multiple platforms, marketers can make better decisions about how best to reallocate marketing budgets to optimize spend. 

How Data Clean Rooms Support Media Planning

Data clean rooms are secure environments that allow multiple companies, or divisions of a single company, to bring data together for joint analysis under defined guidelines and restrictions. Here’s how data clean rooms are being used by media planners today:

Resolve consumer privacy concerns

In light of growing consumer privacy concerns and the impending demise of cookies, data clean rooms have emerged as the preferred solution for protecting personal identifiable information (PII) and complying with privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Data clean rooms control what data comes in, how the data in the clean room can be joined to other data in the clean room, what types of analytics each party can perform on the data, and what data, if any, can leave. Any PII data loaded into the clean room is secured and encrypted. The data owner has full control over the clean room, while approved partners can get a feed with anonymized data. 

Securely collaborate with industry partners, customers, and technology providers

Data clean rooms provide a secure space for brands, advertisers, and other data providers to collaborate on their data in a tightly controlled environment. Media planners and campaign managers use data clean rooms to run advanced data analytics reporting on combined data sets to gain new insights on consumer behavior, segmentation, and more.

Join in-house data with third-party data providers

Data clean rooms join anonymized marketing and advertising data from multiple providers together for attribution. They also allow marketers to create custom audiences that can be used to improve the accuracy of their targeting on digital advertising platforms such as social media sites or content streaming services. 

Snowflake for Data-Driven Media Planning

The Snowflake Media Data Cloud powers data-driven media planning and provides an excellent solution for securely and privately sharing data. With Snowflake, media planners can conduct pre-campaign analytics more efficiently, allowing for a deeper understanding of their target audiences. Snowflake’s technology enables permissioned data sharing and collaboration across an entire ecosystem of partners, customers, and technology providers for person-level marketing without revealing PII or compromising privacy. 

And with Snowflake, you can securely access and join third-party data to your existing data sets for audience enrichment, improved targeting, and robust post-campaign analytics. With live, ready-to-query data sets, Snowflake Marketplace provides media planners with actionable insights on their target audiences.

See Snowflake’s capabilities for yourself and give it a test drive by signing up for a free trial.