Nuances of Media Planning in New Media Age

Introduction

Today’s youth wakes up to a good morning message sent by a close relative / friend. While having breakfast he/she quickly catches up with the news around the world on his/her favorite mobile app. He/she is listening to a Soundcloud or YouTube while on the go the office or college. He/she quickly checks out the updates on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn during short breaks or during meetings. While in the late evening he/she probably browses Netflix / Hotstar to stay updated on the TV series that he/she missed watching live, or reads through blogs for one’s education. Each one of us could relate to the above scenario. We, new media age consumers have segregated digital platform consumption based on the time frame and the mental state we are present. As a corollary, increasingly media multi-tasking (Chang,2016) or also referred as simultaneous media usage (Pilotta et al, 2004) is observed across the world. With the help of uses and gratification theory and arousal theory, Chang (2016) contributed to literature that media multi-tasking is high amongst high sensation seekers, thereby helping them reach optimal level of arousal. Hence, the media planning exercise is emerging to be more and more complicated (Soberman, 2005) with increased hyper-connected, multi-device media consumption behavior.

In the pre-Internet era, a media planner’s primary media vehicles were television, print, radio, outdoor. With the advent of Internet, internet advertising was a new media vehicle that media planner had to think and plan of, along with traditional media vehicles. As time passed by, new technologies evolved, several legs of internet advertising emerged. These included search engine marketing, display advertising, social media advertising, affiliate advertising and mobile advertising etc. In the last decade or so, with the advent and introduction of wearable devices, smart televisions, smartphones, artificial intelligence and virtual reality based devices, the media vehicles that the media planner has at his/her disposal is enormous. Though Internet is the premise of most of these new media vehicles, the human interaction and content consumption pattern of users on these devices vary a lot. Internet / digital advertising empowers marketers to reach and target individual consumer almost at n=1 level, thanks to the targeting parameters that are available in the new media vehicles. This makes it necessary for us to first understand the Internet penetration at a global scale. As of March, 2017 the total number of Internet users worldwide was 3.58 billion, as compared to 3.39 billion in 2016 (Statista, 2017a). The highest number of Internet users, as of June 2017, were in China with 738.54 million, followed by India with 462.12 million and United States at third position with 286.94 million (Statista, 2017b).

Given the fact that almost 50% of the global population is now connected with Internet, it would be a logical sequel to understand the global advertising spends that are made on the digital platforms. The global media advertising outlay in 2017 is expected to be around $583.91 billion (eMarketer, 2017). The global digital advertising outlay is expected to touch $223.74 billion in 2017, approximately 38% of overall media advertising outlay (eMarketer, 2017).

The increasing Internet penetration, staggering digital advertising spends explain just supply side of media industry. The demand side of media industry is equally exciting with increasing media channels, excessive video consumption, e-commerce penetration, mobile device adoption across the world and not to ignore increased social interaction on digital platforms thanks to the connect that Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, LinkedIn have established.