By & ; Mediasmith, Inc.

Editor's note: This article comes from a series written by Karen McFee and Dave Smith that is currently running on MSN Advantage. The next article, on stewardship and optimization will be posted in early March.

In the early days of the Web there was not much differentiation between planning and buying. We determined the client budget, surfed the Web, found sites that seemed to make sense, and figured out if they took advertising at all, tested them, and watched businesses develop as a result. Much has changed.

First of all, there are many resources available to help you determine what sites to buy as indicated in earlier articles in our series on MSN Advantage. Second, traditional media strategies have been overlaid onto the Web (after all, this is just another medium, right?). Third, there has been a lot of learning on the part of agencies, clients, Web sites and technology vendors that can be brought into play when developing plans. Fourth, any agency that has been buying Web media for a while has a tremendous amount of history on what works and what doesn't. Fifth, we have learned a lot about negotiation, tracking and optimization.

Breaking this process down into planning and buying as separate buckets was not easy at first. Internet specialists like to do it all. This was great when the Internet was a smaller medium. But the reality is that planners and buyers are different types of personalities. Sure, they are all media people, with good analytical skills, able to multitask, good negotiators and good at selling their concepts through. But the people who gravitate to planning are by nature more analytical and strategic. On the buyer side there are people in our business who live to cut deals. They are generally naturals to haggle out the details.

At Mediasmith, as with many agencies which handle media mix, the planners are responsible not only for Interactive planning but for all media as well as the media mix. They also need to be experts on the client and the client category and are often the first contact within the agency for client inquiries (some agencies use media account executives for contact).

Buyers should be dedicated to understanding the sites and developing deep relationships on the site side including a complete knowledge of the site's content and user characteristics. A good buyer understands the economics of the sites and what type of deal will work with acceptable ad rotation and service. Buyers are also generally the experts on deploying various rich media and other technologies on the sites and the associated costs.

Some Interactive organizations tend to have a single person handling planning and buying, but in our opinion, this is not optimal. The emerging model at the larger full service media agencies is one of planning by the traditional media planner and buying by specialists, similar to the national and spot TV planning and buying model.

It should be noted that if a long-term development deal is being negotiated, both the planner and buyer should probably be involved.

Planning process
The media planning process for online is not dissimilar to that of traditional media. The steps are as follows:

• Do a media brief. Have this as a standard part of your operating procedure. Find out what the client's marketing objectives are. Get clear on the goals and metrics by which they will judge success. Be clear on the competitive set. Get target audience definition or be prepared to develop one yourself (always a good idea to investigate this even if the client says they have a clearly defined target).
  
  
• Get some history including product definitions, and purchase cycles, total sales and sales patterns. Find out what the client has done before to support the product or service. This includes sales, research, promotions and media support.
  
  
• Develop media objectives. Include target audience, seasonality, regionality, metrics and goals, special considerations, budget and timing as well as any merchandising objectives.
  
  
• Develop some top line strategies. Are you doing search (usually the first place to go if there is any DR element involved)? Do you need the portals for reach? Vertical sites for targeting? Is rich media appropriate? If so, how should it be deployed and what are the site policies of those you are considering? Which is more important: Reach or Frequency or a balance?
  
  
• Gather the data and crunch it yourself. Nothing like normalizing the data between sources to truly understand a problem. You might be tapping into resources like your buying group, SRDS Interactive, your agency and client history, AIM or @Plan, etc.
  
  
• Check your strategies against the data you have crunched. Separate them into clear segments for client presentation. Don't worry about having all the sites that might be bought on the list. Just be sure to have enough examples so that there are no surprises later when the buy is presented.
  
  
• Present your plan/get agreement from the client (and of course, revise as often as necessary to get the final agreement, hopefully before the inventory is gone). As with broadcast, this is a key issue because there is a finite amount of inventory available, dictated by the number of visitors and pageviews.
  
  
• Further develop any tactics before handing the buy request over to the buyer.
  
  
• If the strategies and tactics are complex, don't hesitate to generate some buying guidelines for the buyer. Nothing like putting certain things into writing.

• Read through the specs and the buying guidelines and make sure that you are clear on the deliverables.
  
  
• Take the site list provided by the planner and make it deeper through the experience of you and others on the buying team, through syndicated research runs, etc.
  
  
• Send out an RFP. Be willing to RFP 2-3 times as many sites as you will buy, but not so many that you are not willing to talk to them after their hard work in preparing your submission.
  
  
• Crunch the data as it comes in from the proposals. Use of MediaVisor from DoubleClick or the Atlas DMT Digital Marketing Suite for automated RFPs is highly recommended for efficiency in sending out the RFPs and for less data input on your end.
  
  
• Negotiate your best deal. Make sure that technology and tracking are nailed down. Ideally you are running the whole campaign through a single third party ad server.
  
  
• Set up any Dynamic Logic or other research that will track the branding efficacy of the campaign.
  
  
• Present your thinking internally and then to the client. Get agreement.
  
  
• Before you call the winners, call the losers. Sometimes there are two prices on media, one if they think they can get the order and another if they think or know that they will be shut out.
  
  
• Set up the tracking tags on your client's site. Coordinate any technology needs with creative and the sites.
  
  
• Traffic the ads (through your third party ad server).
  
  
• Be prepared to optimize the campaign regularly. If DR, use the third party ad server to optimize against the client's CPW (cost-per-whatever the client is trying to measure). If a branding client, be prepared to use whatever tools are available to track the delivery of your campaign from a reach and frequency standpoint and optimize on that basis.
  
  
• Document your learnings so that both planners and buyers can benefit from what you've learned for a future campaign.

Media planning and media buying are separate functions for most other media. By following the process we have laid out here, an agency should be able to provide a client with the best of all possible situations. Quality strategies and plans with aggressive buys using the best technology.

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