The deck and the buy

A media plan is approved twice, and the two approvals never look at the same document.

The first is the deck. Forty slides, a sentence on every page that somebody argued over. Reach the household, not the shopper. Own the evening. Protect the launch fortnight. The client signs it off in a meeting room, and everyone leaves feeling that a decision has been taken.

The second is the buy. A spreadsheet, opened weeks later, by someone who was not in the room. It has rows, not sentences. Channel, format, placement, start date, end date, rate, impressions. Every cell has to hold a value, and the value has to match inventory that exists, at a price that has moved since the deck was costed.

I built plans in that seat for long enough to know where the strategy goes. It goes wherever the spreadsheet's defaults send it.

Own the evening becomes a daypart setting, and the daypart setting is whatever the buying tool offered first. Reach the household becomes an age band, because the tool has age bands and does not have households. Protect the launch fortnight becomes an even weekly split, because even is the default and nobody wrote down that it should not be. The sentence on slide twelve had no cell to live in, so it did not travel.

None of this is a buyer ignoring a planner. The buyer is doing the job well. The job is to fill the rows with things that can be bought, and a sentence cannot be bought.

The plans I have seen survive the buy were the ones where the planner sat with the buyer before the deck was presented and turned every sentence into a line, with a rate, a date and a reason beside it. Ugly, and unarguable.

If the strategy is not a line in the buy, it was a slide.