The Role of Ethnographic Data in Media Planning & Buying
Media Planning & Buying
Media planning and buying are two crucial activities that are part of the overall marketing strategy for a company. Planning activities try to identify how to best reach the target audience to get the intended result and attempt to identify the most-suitable media platforms for the message.
Media buying consists of negotiating rates for advertising placement on these platforms. Both the buying and planning processes can be significantly enhanced when ethnographic data is incorporated into the process.
Ethnographic Data Explained
Due to recent digital advances, the collection of valuable ethnographic data is occurring in mass-scale. This data comes from several sources, including websites, social media outlets, and other digital transactions. It deals with observed behaviors in their cultural context.
The use of this data is a tremendous advancement over the primary method that marketers have historically used to get consumer information – by asking them. Asking consumers will tell you what they think they like; ethnographic data provides insight into what they truly want.
The disparity between these two data sets is shockingly significant. Access to this data has had profound impacts on marketing from transforming customer experiences (CX) to leveraging emerging technologies to deliver better service.
Data & the Media Planning and Buying Process
Ethnographic data has enormous implications for media planners and buyers as well. Digilant recently released data for 2019 on behaviors that can impact media buying, such as:
50% of all internet searches will be done via voice by 2020.
There was a 236% increase in programmatic TV ads from 2018-2019.
Nearly half of consumers are more likely to click on digital ads after seeing an out-of-home (OOH) ad.
This type of data enhances the media planning and buying process because it bridges the information gap between what a customer wants and why they want it. The data itself opens up the opportunity to understand the relationship between individuals, their motivations, and their habits, which can provide critical insights into which media strategies are working and which are not.
This information further refines and optimizes media planning and buying processes to make them more effective and budget-friendly. It also allows marketers to scale advertising to target distinct subcultures that are likely to be impacted by the messages.
The Future of Marketing
While no one can predict the future with certainty, the increasing role that data plays in shaping the entire process and industry of marketing is a near-certainty. The ability to collect and analyze ethnographic data on a micro-level will continue to advance and lead to increased capacities for personalization.
Artificial intelligence will almost certainly play a more prominent role in media planning and buying, as well.
Analyzing and incorporating this data to your current media planning and buying may seem intimidating at first, but the reality is that access to this data is not going anywhere and reliance on it for marketing applications will only grow.
This means that if you are not currently leveraging ethnographic data in these processes, you are vulnerable to your competition. As with any evolutionary change in industry practices and norms, if you aren’t continuously evolving, you run the risk of becoming irrelevant.
Embracing this data and its applications gives you the opportunity to make a real difference in your relationship with your customers – and one that will usher you into the next era of marketing technology.