Media planning and buying agencies play a crucial role in helping businesses effectively allocate their advertising budgets, choose the right media channels, and execute successful advertising campaigns. EDS, as a media planning and buying agency in Dubai, UAE, offers comprehensive services to assist businesses in achieving their marketing goals. Here’s why partnering with EDS can be beneficial:
- Market Expertise: EDS has in-depth knowledge of the Dubai and UAE markets. They understand the local consumer behavior, media landscape, and cultural nuances, allowing them to create tailored strategies for clients.
- Budget Optimization: Media planning and buying agencies like EDS can help you optimize your advertising budget by selecting the most cost-effective media channels that reach your target audience efficiently.
- Media Channel Selection: EDS can recommend the most suitable media channels for your campaign, whether it’s digital advertising, outdoor advertising, TV, radio, print, or a combination of these. Their expertise ensures that you choose the right mix for your goals.
- Audience Targeting: EDS can help you define and refine your target audience, ensuring that your ads are seen by the right people who are more likely to convert into customers.
- Negotiating Power: Media buying agencies have the negotiating power to secure favorable rates and placements with media outlets, maximizing the value of your advertising budget.
- Campaign Execution: EDS can handle the execution of your advertising campaigns, from designing creative assets to managing placements and monitoring performance.
- Performance Measurement: They provide measurement and reporting services to track the performance of your campaigns, offering insights for optimization and future planning.
- Innovation: EDS can recommend innovative advertising strategies and emerging platforms to keep your campaigns fresh and competitive.
- Strategic Partnerships: They often have strategic partnerships and relationships with media outlets, providing access to exclusive opportunities and placements.
- Savings: By outsourcing media planning and buying to experts like EDS, you can save time and resources, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business.
Working with a media planning and buying agency like EDS can streamline your advertising efforts, increase the effectiveness of your campaigns, and ultimately help you achieve your marketing objectives. Their expertise in Dubai and UAE markets positions them to deliver targeted, efficient, and results-driven advertising solutions. Whether you’re a local business or an international brand, EDS can help you navigate the dynamic media landscape in the region.
SEAMLESS MARKETING
Our Omni-Channel
For omnichannel marketing to be effective, it must be seamless. Consumers expect messages and experiences that engage them in their daily routines, regardless of the device they are on, the store where they are shopping, or the media they are consuming.
A significant change in the media landscape has led to a need for diverse media plans, as the behaviors of different demographics and age groups continue to evolve.
The reach and time spent on two media channels, Commercial TV and Out-of-Home, are higher for adults than other media channels; this is because one-to-one media channels of functional internet and social media follow closely behind. This illustrates the clear benefit of utilising a variety of media platforms to optimise campaign delivery.
TELEVISION | OUT OF HOME | RADIO | PRINT | CINEMA | ONLINE | SOCIAL & DIGITAL | MOBILE & APPS
TELEVISION
Television advertising, the leading advertising format, is used to convey a paid message on television which typically promotes a product, brand or service. Our media planners have an innate understanding of audiences and their daily media habits, including their preferred device—whether it be on a TV set or a Mobile phone. We use a combination of Direct response TV, which remains one of the most commonly used strategies for businesses and brands globally; Broadcaster Video On Demand (BVOD), which can be used to reach specific audiences; TV Sponsorship, where brands are featured within programming in exchange for payment; and Product Placement , where products are embedded within content.
Utilising various audience research data pre-campaign, we can identify who and where our target audiences are. We can then strategically plan how we are going to reach them, track and optimise TV campaigns in order to find out exactly what is working and what’s not by using a response-driven attribution tracking system that gives us insight into performance of TV campaigns. This insight can identify trends, opportunities and underperformance, allowing us to take steps to increase efficiency.
OUT OF HOME
Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is an extremely effective way to reach consumers when they are in transit, waiting, or otherwise away from their homes. Billboard advertising remains the most popular OOH format, but digital options are becoming more and more common as they are much less costly than traditional billboard options.
Many DOOH solutions are already being used in previously traditional spaces, for example with Street OOH, which is mainly seen in urban centers, from bus shelters to newsstands. Transit advertising also offers a combination of static and digital sites at airports, buses, subway advertising, truck-side, food trucks and taxis.
Location-based advertising combines mobile advertising with location-aware services to deliver targeted advertisements to consumers’ mobile devices. It can be used effectively in conjunction with out-of-home advertising, especially digital out-of-home (DOOH) displays. Unlike traditional media, LBA can provide research that can be used to tailor future offers.
RADIO
The radio landscape has been transformed over the last decade, with the rise of digital technology, which has enabled advertisers to target more specific audiences. The digitisation of broadcasting has also led to greater diversification within the industry, enabling the creation of more niche stations. Today, there are countless stations offering advertisers a variety of demographics and segments—online radio, podcasts, smart speakers, app-based radio and broadcast, as well as AM/FM and satellite.
Radio will continue to modernize in a way that helps brands reach new audiences, reinforcing its position as an effective advertising medium. Whether it’s a traditional radio spot, sponsorship, live reads, competitions, outside broadcast and social partnership opportunities like Influencers representing your brand, we know this medium inside out and how best to make it work for you.
Radio still reaches many people, doing better than press. It is an easy way to get messages out instantly, making it a useful medium for call to action and event announcements. Radio works well when targeting specific audiences, such as niche groups or a particular audience at an event, whether that be a sale, music concert or brand activation. If you would like to know about the benefits of using radio for your next campaign, talk to us about the best omni-channel strategy for your brand.
Print and press publishing still has its own unique audiences, and is often more appropriate than other mediums when it comes to reaching specific target markets, products or services. While print media is no longer necessarily the first option for many businesses, it does play a critical role for specific verticals and/or marketing categories.
Communication to the readers, followers and fans of print and online publications should be tailored around them. Advertising through using a combination of online and traditional print, radio, and television media can be very effective if you use a combination of brand advertising, advertorials (a type of paid endorsement), product placement, inserts (magazine pages inserted by manufacturers into another publication), bagging (the inclusion of complimentary samples with a purchase), and sampling (giving away free samples to potential customers) can help your brand reach the right audience with the right message.
CINEMA
Although cinema viewership and attendance has slightly decreased over the last five years, it is enjoying a resurgence, and cinemas continue to deliver your message to a captive audience that is qualified and quantified. Cinema-goers agree that it is all about the entertainment, and there are many factors that make a night out at the movies ideal for families or friends. The peak day for visiting the cinema is still Saturday, so it’s an opportunity for brands to engage audiences when they’re happy, relaxed and feeling positive.
The big screen can engage the audience with full sight, sound and motion to increase ad recall. Unlike radio and print, cinema is not reliant on great frequency to have effect. Once with a good commercial, the audience will be engaged. Then consider additional opportunities: the online audience, social followers and fans, augmented reality or theatre displays; advertising on screens in foyer areas; activations; and even advertising on popcorn boxes—all of which add up to provide cinema-goers a fully immersive experience. This combination of marketing approaches is especially effective when used in combination and/or in conjunction with a focused OOH campaign that is catchment area focused.
ONLINE
As the demand for marketing and advertising strategies increases, so too does the need for companies to find more cost-effective solutions. We offer highly targeted campaigns with a measurable ROI.
Our search specialists drive qualified traffic to websites that convert into sales, leads and/or downloads. We use the most up-to-date ways of increasing effectiveness, localisation and relevance, blending innovation and strategic insight with data expertise to ensure paid search activity always delivers results.
For more information on our digital marketing services, contact us today.
SOCIAL & DIGITAL
Social Communities are becoming one of the biggest growth opportunities in marketing. Our Social team pairs creative and messaging with media to complement one another, working in parallel to engage your desired audience. Different audience segments behave differently when it comes to their social media usage, from Snapchat to WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the list goes on, depending on which country they’re in—whether they are Gen Z, Gen Y or even Silver Surfers.
Paid social media campaigns are a cost-effective way to promote your business, whether you’re launching a product, promoting an event or increasing brand awareness. Adding Influencer strategies, a few key bloggers and vloggers and a combination of paid, earned and owned media will help you get maximum exposure for your inbound marketing campaign. And if you add social shopping to your ecommerce site, it’s job done.
MOBILE AND APPS
Smartphones have revolutionized media consumption, changing simple text and picture messages into engaging multimedia experiences. Mobile location-based advertising is a strategic, cost-effective option that allows advertisers to target consumers based on their proximity to a specific location. The ads are delivered directly to consumers’ mobile phones through existing media channels such as TV, radio, print, and OOH advertising.
Additionally, the app market’s rapid evolution is creating new complexities but also opportunities for advertisers who have the right tools, strategy, and team in place to dominate their vertical and be well positioned for viral growth on the app store.
There are multiple ways to engage with audiences through their devices and behaviors, including augmented reality, virtual reality, and gaming. The opportunities to do so with new technologies being developed every day will continue to improve the quality of engagement with quantified audiences that provide measurability.
Media Planning: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
In today’s marketing environment, marketers often have a variety of different media platforms and assets to work with. This can make it challenging to effectively track each tactic’s success and overall impact on the business’s bottom line. With a thorough media planning strategy in place, teams can more accurately and holistically monitor campaign success, making it easier to optimize performance in the future.
Here are some considerations to keep in mind when building a media plan:
What is Media Planning?
Media planning is the process of determining how, when, and where an audience will be reached with a selected advertising message. Media planners analyze their target audiences, marketing channels and media vehicles to determine the most efficient way to communicate a message to the intended audience.
In the fast-paced world of marketing, it’s important to plan how you will reach your audience. To do so, marketers must determine the “right” place and time to deliver the right message to consumers. Media planning is the process of making these decisions.
Media planning is often the responsibility of media planners at advertising agencies. Media planners must work with media buyers and the client organization to develop a strategy to maximize return on investment on media spend. Media planners are expected to have a firm understanding of the organization’s brand and target audience, various platforms and trends in media technology.
Media planning is a strategy of formulating and evaluating the effectiveness of advertising campaigns while buying refers to the actual implementation of this plan.
The media planner will identify the most effective combination of messaging and media mix to reach consumers in a positive, impactful way.
What is a Media Plan?
A media plan is a detailed document that outlines which audience will be targeted, across which channels, at what time, and with which message.
An effective media plan helps an organization identify, create and purchase advertising opportunities that target a specific audience and fit within its marketing budget. To create effective media plans, consider these factors:
Who does the ad need to reach?
What is the marketing budget?
What are the conversion goals?
How frequency should the message be shown?
What is the reach (how many people will see it)?
How do we define success?
Types of Media Planning
When creating a media strategy for your brand, you must decide what types of media will be cost-effective and generate sales.
Media planners generally consider three main types of media when creating a media plan:
Paid Media
Paid media refers to any form of advertising that brands pay for, including pay-per-click advertising, display ads, and branded content. This is one of the most common ways for brands to get exposure and boost sales.
Owned Media
Owned media is content that a brand owns and controls, such as blog posts and social media accounts. Increasing the use of owned media can allow your brand to reach more potential customers and increase brand awareness
Earned Media
Earned media refers to the publicity a brand generates from outside sources rather than its own company. For example, customer reviews, word-of-mouth, and media coverage are all forms of earned media. This type of publicity is valuable because it often comes directly from consumers. This feedback can also help improve the quality of the product or service being offered.
By weighing the pros and cons of each platform, your company can determine which forms of media will work best within its media plan.
What are the Benefits of Media Planning?
A data-driven media plan helps companies to streamline the campaign review process by providing them with centralized information across multiple forms of media. This enables the company to optimize its campaigns and messaging while leveraging multiple platforms.
Key benefits of media planning include:
Establish Processes
Media buying can be a complicated and time-consuming process. With proper planning, you can save resources and increase efficiency by getting your plans and processes in place.
Budget Tracking
Marketers must work within their budgets and come up with a media plan that accounts for all costs and estimated return on investment.
Audience Segmentation & Analysis
Media planning is an important part of any marketing strategy, requiring a thorough understanding of target audiences and the most effective messages to reach them.
Optimization & Testing
Good media plans use existing data to determine what has worked, what isn’t working, and what might work in the future.
Improved ROI
Media planning is an essential part of a successful campaign, allowing you to create an optimized campaign that delivers ROI.
What are the Objectives of Media Planning?
Media planners must identify the best combination of advertising elements to achieve a particular goal. Objectives should generally align with business goals, such as long-term growth and improving return on investment.
Marketing plans rely on a variety of tactics to help their organizations increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive conversions.
Media Planning vs. Media Buying
Many people confuse media planning and media buying but they are not the same. Media planning is the process of creating a plan for how you will use your budget to reach your target audience across various channels and platforms, while media buying is the process of purchasing ad space across those channels and platforms in coordination with the agreed-upon media plans.
To maximize the success of a campaign, you need to evaluate platform formats and rates to ensure they coincide with your plan, negotiate costs, keep abreast of media trends, and build relationships with counterparts at various channels and platforms.
Media buying often leverages one of the following popular strategies:
Manual bidding
Direct buys
Programmatic buys
Real-time bidding
Challenges of Media Planning
Media planning is challenging because it requires balancing many different factors, and because some marketers believe that media planning strategies have not kept pace with changes in marketing.
Challenges include but are not limited to:
Consumer-Level Targeting
To create a successful media plan, marketers must understand consumers at a granular level in order to determine what types of messages resonate with them and create plans accordingly. To accomplish this, they need to rely on marketing analytics and an omnichannel measurement solution.
Platform Preference
Brands must also know the various channels and platforms that their target audience members engage with, as well as when these individuals use those media. This will allow them to choose the most effective platforms for campaigns. It is important for brands to keep their budgets and media spend in mind when planning their marketing strategies.
Heavy Budget Focus
In media planning, marketers continue to focus on budget rather than customer engagement. However, there is no flexibility in a budget, preventing marketers from adjusting their campaign tactics based on what is working and what isn’t. Modern media planning requires the flexibility to allocate budget to different channels if they prove to be more successful.
Integrating Measurements
Online and offline marketing channels are so numerous that it is difficult for marketers to measure the success of various campaigns and determine which are most effective.
As media planning becomes more dynamic and focused on delivering optimal consumer experiences, agencies must adopt flexible budgeting and real-time, unified measurement capabilities that allow them to optimize their campaigns as they run.
How to Write a Media Plan (4 Steps to Follow)
A media plan comprises a detailed process that helps marketers understand the needs of target consumers and the goals of their business.
Here are the essential steps and considerations marketers must make when creating a media plan.
Step 1. Determine Media Goals and Objectives
It may be tempting to think that the goal of a campaign is simply to drive conversions or engagement—but this would oversimplify things. Each department has its own goals, which might in turn have multiple objectives. The sales team might be targeting increased revenue, while the marketing department seeks to increase brand awareness. Knowing the main goal of the campaign will determine how it runs, as well as messaging.
Media planners should conduct research into market trends and the competitive landscape. This research will offer visibility into where similar brands have achieved success in the past, informing planning decisions. For example, if a brand has long relied on email campaigns but research reveals that competitors have had greater success with native ads, it may be time to shift the plan.
When developing a media plan, consider your budgets. Do not assign strict dollar amounts to specific advertising channels. A flexible approach to your marketing budget will allow for optimizations to be made as campaigns run.
Step 2. Determine Target Audience
Today, marketing is driven by the creation of positive customer experiences. Marketers need to focus on the audience’s needs when developing messaging and selecting where to display their messages across the media mix.
• First, examine which segment of the overall audience you are trying to engage.
• Look at attribution measurements and engagement analytics to understand the types of ads users engage with, which creative is most effective, and importantly, which channels these consumers use.
• While marketers often utilize demographic information such as age, location, general interests, etc., be sure to incorporate person-level data gathered through a unified measurement approach to get the most tailored results.
Step 3. Consider Frequency & Reach
A media plan should include not only a strategy for targeting the right audience, but also a plan for reaching that audience frequently enough to make an impact.
• Reach refers to how many people the campaign will be in front of over a specific amount of time.
• Frequency refers to how many times the consumer will be exposed to the ad over the course of the campaign.
There are a few popular approaches that marketers take when selecting frequency.
The continuity strategy involves running ads on a regular basis over the course of a campaign. This approach is often used for goods that are not seasonal and require repeated reinforcement to stay top of mind.
Flighting is a form of television advertising in which a series of ads are aired on a specific program, followed by a break in ad content. Flighting works well for seasonal products or for those with less ad budget. For example, when there is a pause in a flighted television campaign, marketers may choose to run print ads instead.
Pulsing is a combination of flighting and continuity. Pulsed campaigns consist of low-intensity, consistent advertising that is augmented by higher-intensity flights of advertising during times when additional messaging has a high impact.
Step 4: Analyze and Optimize Campaign Performance
A crucial part of building a media planning strategy is to continuously monitor, track, and analyze performance. Marketing campaigns won’t succeed if they aren’t managed; that means looking at what works—and what doesn’t—on an ongoing basis so you can make changes as needed.
Selecting the Right Media Channels
Marketers have many choices of channels to use in their marketing campaigns. They should choose the ones that will reach their target audiences most effectively by using information gathered during the research and goal-setting stages.
The following are some of the most popular forms of media used for marketing, along with their strengths and weaknesses.
Offline Media
Magazines
Magazines have the longest shelf life of all print media and usually remain in a consumer’s possession for two to four weeks after being read. Research has shown that people retain more information from printed text than from other forms of media (60 percent of readers trust magazine ads).
Advertisements that tie in with consumers’ interests are more effective because consumers are less resistant to these types of ads. Magazines, for example, are highly targeted (e.g., running cooking magazines). They reach secondary audiences in addition to their primary audiences because they are passed along to family and friends.
Newspapers
Placing ads in local newspapers can help to ensure a brand’s message stays local. Marketers can choose to place ads in sections of the newspaper that are relevant to their target audience. For example, if you want to target consumers interested in fashion, you might select space in the Style section of the newspaper. Additionally, readers of local newspapers tend to have higher education and household incomes than the general population, so this could be important when selecting ad space based on demographics.
Radio
Radio ads are an effective way to target local areas or regions of the country. Radio ads can be used to build frequency with your target audience, and they are considered a lower-cost medium. Research shows that exposure to a radio ad and time to purchase is the shortest of any medium. When paired with other forms of media, overall campaigns can be more effective.
TV & Cable
TV and cable are highly visual media that frequently show commercials demonstrating products in everyday life. A commercial for a cleaning product, for example, can show the product at work while highlighting its benefits and features. People watch an average of five hours of television a day; commercials are an important way to reach them.
Out of Home
Billboards are large and can be seen from a distance. In a busy area, a billboard could reach 10,000 people in a month. Outdoor advertising is not limited by the size of the billboard, only by your creativity. Outdoor advertising is also an extremely mobile option; for example, you could use displays at an airport to advertise luggage.
Online Media
Digital Publications
Digital publications often allow you to include an email newsletter or a one-to-one personalized email in their publication. They can track the open rate and understand the conversion rate of visitors to your site or asset. These tools are great for lead generation campaigns.
PPC
Advertisers can capitalize on people’s search intent by advertising their products when consumers are looking for them online. Advertisers can retarget people who visit their sites with ads for those products and services. Search engine marketing, or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, is extremely cost-effective because advertisers only pay when people click on their ads.
Social Media
Social media marketing is an extremely cost-effective way to target consumers. It allows marketers to target their audience by interests and demographics, giving them the chance to create more personal relationships with customers. Many successful brands have built communities around their products through social platforms, allowing them to connect with consumers in a more meaningful way. This can result in more brand advocacy, which is a surefire way for your content to go viral on social media.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising uses an algorithm to find and target specific audiences across digital platforms. There are two methods to consider when looking into this method of advertising:
Programmatic Bidding – uses demand side platforms to buy ads on the digital market based on target audience.
Real-Time Bidding – allows advertisers to bid on impressions to their target audience. If their bid wins, the ad is displayed right away.
Tips for Building a Media Planning Strategy
As marketers begin to strategize new media plans, keep these ideas in mind:
Reach
When buying ad space, it is important to consider when and where the advertisements will be viewed by your target audience. For example, purchasing ad time during a live televised event (such as a sports game) ensures that viewers will be watching live and not fast forwarding through commercials.
Establish Clear Goals
What are your goals for this campaign? How many people are you looking to reach, and what are your expectations regarding sales?
Engagement
How you approach your advertising directly relates to how much people will talk about your brand. Making sure that your ad has a clear direction and plan of action, as well as how you plan to test the effectiveness of your ad.
Attribution Models
When planning marketing campaigns, it is important to use a marketing attribution model that can track offline and online media. This will ensure that your team is using the right criteria when choosing between different types of media.
Media Planning and Marketing
Since the start of the pandemic, more customers have begun shopping online. 77 percent of window shoppers make impulse purchases. This number is expected to rise as more and more people become comfortable with purchasing goods over the internet. It is important to have an effective media strategy that separates your budget between print, digital, video, and broadcast ads.
To ensure that your brand is getting the most bang for its buck and delivering content to the right audience, you should know the costs and effectiveness of using each form of advertising. From there, your company can allocate the appropriate amount of resources to each campaign to increase website traffic and brand awareness.
Getting Started with Media Planning
A comprehensive media planning strategy allows organizations to make more data-driven decisions about how to improve marketing ROI and drive conversions. Many teams leverage tools that allow them to be smarter, faster, and more accurate in their media planning choices.
Marketing Evolution’s Scenario Planner allows organizations to build an annual media plan that includes multiple “what if” scenarios, which allows them to modify key campaign factors without impacting active initiatives. This enables teams to optimize their advertising mix while simultaneously reducing wastage.