THE ADNEWS NGEN BLOG: Something's missing from 'Media Planning 101'

30 March 2012

I had two semesters of uni to go when I came home one day and decided that I wanted to be a media planner. Up until that point I can’t quite remember what I wanted to be, maybe a fireman or an astronaut, but I do know that as soon as I was interested in advertising, media was the one discipline that stood out to me.

So, I emailed all of the agencies that I’d heard of and was lucky enough to score a gig with Mediacom.

I’m sure my case wasn’t completely isolated but in the short time that I’ve been in the industry I’ve noticed that this isn’t usually what happens. We’ve all got our own stories about how we ended up in our jobs and the common theme across almost everyone I’ve spoken to is that they’ve fallen into them while looking for something else. I was at an industry workshop recently where the speaker asked the room if any of us had planned on a career in media, in a room full of media reps and junior executives but not a single person put their hand up.

Some people obviously do leave uni wanting to work in media, but grads just don’t seem to be lining up at the door like they are at creative agencies. I can definitely see why; advertising students spend three years drinking beer and drawing pictures all day, you can’t blame them for wanting to do it for a living. It’s just a shame that to these guys, media seems like a job that’s all about spread sheets and calculators. It’s not the grads’ fault, from my experience of advertising degrees they tend to focus on the boring bits of media and skip over the reasons we love it. People often talk about the perks we get, which are great, but there’s a lot more to our jobs than the concert tickets and corporate boxes.

Our job is about solving problems with both creativity and logic. We take pages of data and use it to tell stories. Sure, we crunch numbers and balance spreadsheets but at the same time we work our ideas into every media plan. Calculating TARPs and CPMs are integral parts of our job but at the end of the day we’re here to take ads from being something that people encounter to something that they experience and consume. I’d like to see this side of the profession better covered in ‘Media Planning 101,’ the side that’s all about embracing the weird and wondrous; and using real world strategies to solve our clients’ communications problems. If we do that, I think we’ll see less people simply falling into media jobs and more people going out looking for them.

David Bielenberg
Assistant, Implementation Planning & Investment
MediaCom

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