21st century media planning: total customer communications experience

Natasha Ikonnikow Householder

The author traces the changing role of the (US) media planner over the last 20 years, and recommends that the future planner will be less of a single medium expert and more a 'Customer Contact Specialist'.

21st Century Media Planning: Total Customer Communications Experience

Natasha Ikonnikow HouseholderErnst & Young

I couldn't have known it then, but I started my career in the halcyon days of advertising. Remember the 80s? Those were the good old days of media planning and buying. I even heard first hand one of the agency's top executives state that media was finally becoming an 'above the eyebrows' discipline! Media was less complicated then; only a few commercial cable networks were in existence at the time, and the planning group did the negotiations of those buys. (MTV was the 'it' network.) Cable...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands