Yonder Media's Chen Cui was awarded a distinction for this Advanced Certificate in Communications Planning essay explaining why planners should act as the glue across an agency if you want to establish an award-winning communications plan.
This essay discusses the overall task of delivering a communications strategy, which is essential to the success of a communications plan. It also outlines and examines other significant traits to account for when creating an outstanding communications plan: the importance of understanding the consumer journeys, effective channel selection, creativity, and innovation. Before concluding that achieving a communications strategy is vital to developing a brilliant communications plan, it is only as important as any other single element.
In order to discuss the importance of achieving the communications strategy when creating a communications plan, the relationship between the two needs to be examined. A strategist’s job is to explore and identify a sense of aspiration and the ground the client can occupy, both in the near and long term (Lafley and Martin, 2013). In contrast, planning is to create methods of making it happen. While comms strategy defines the “what”, comms plan shapes the guiding principles of explaining the “how”. The only possible way for the communications plan to meet the pre-set hard or intermediate objectives for business growth or brand uplift is to be designed to achieve the communications strategy.
To establish an award-winning communications plan, planners need to act as the glue across an agency, inviting the right talent into the room, protecting as much time as possible for collaboration, ideation and innovation, and bringing the theoretical strategy into an electrifying reality by adhering to the science and adding a pinch of art and bravery.
In practice, the comms framework is a commonly used method to strategically tie the planning elements back to the overarching strategic tasks by mapping out, for example, media behaviour, the role of each channel, proposed media channels and asset format. Planning principles flesh out media behaviour and act as guardrails, providing significant values when briefing investment teams, creative agencies, and media owners, intending to bring the communications strategy to life.
Without nailing the target audience, the communications plan would have been aimless. Strategists should have identified the source of growth at this stage. It could be increasing penetration or engaging with loyal customers (Romaniuk and Sharp, 2021), leaving planners to build planning audiences further and conduct deep-dive audience analysis. To explore category entry points, mapping out where, when, and how people consume the product could be a good starting point when outlining the consumer journeys.
Powered by data, tools and quantitative or qualitative research supported by insight specialists, planners can profile key audiences from demographics, geodemographics, psychographics and behaviour angles, painting accurate personas of their mood, mindset, motivations and key moments across the weeks, months and years. To truly resonate with Tango’s audience, Tango ran three qualitative studies against their key audience, 16-24-year-olds. It was found that “making a show of yourself” was the main driver of panic and anxiety. Based on this piece of audience insight, Tango contextualised its media approach, making the target audience feel less awkward, translating relevance into talkability, which resulted in the brand becoming distinctive and more interesting than Fanta.
With the explosion of interconnectivity, the options of touchpoints have increased dramatically. It was revealed that the digital channels further improved the effectiveness of most traditional media (Binet and Field, 2017), which brings another layer of complexity for strategic planners to find the most impactful combination of paid, owned and earned touchpoints. To underpin the channels' hierarchy, planners utilise tools like IPA TouchPoints or YouGov Profiles, tapping into the target audience’s media consumption insights to compare reach and time spent between channels. Moreover, planners should never underestimate the potentiality of the nitty gritty aspects of channel planning.
An in-depth understanding of how each channel works increases the likelihood of standing out from a noisy category. Working with the buying team to recommend the optimal formats, placements, bidding strategy, targeting tactics and rigorous budget allocation on a channel level, aligning with each strategic pillar, planners can leverage the synergy amongst online and offline channels within the ecosystem to deliver the greatest business outcomes.
In Tango's case study, to make the target audience feel more connected while locking the balance between effectiveness and efficiency, driving emotional impact and fame became the backbone of the media strategy, creating a shared experience through cherry-picked spots converted into the headline of the media approach. Specific TV programmes, for example, Love Island, were traded to increase authentic conversations; films matching younger profiles’ tastes were deployed to secure shared moments; an interactive lens was rolled out on Snapchat to spark earned social coverage. Thanks to the sharp audience insights, Tango’s communications plan achieved a 39% growth in penetration year on year.
It has always been controversial to decide who owns the creation of the “Big Idea”. There are several different scenarios. It could come from the creative agency, the global agency, the local media agency, the PR agency or from the collaboration across several agencies. A shiny comms idea always sits at the heart of a great communications plan. Media agencies tend to believe that media creativity exists at every stage of the planning process. It requires planners to incorporate with the rest of the agency, moulding different perspectives and knowledge into structured ideation sessions as springboards, forming a safe and transparent environment. An exciting media idea can impress the clients, helping them to visualise the roadmap to success and anchor the plan, cutting through from category clutter.
Using John Lewis’s Christmas campaigns as an example, while maintaining strategic consistency by staying authentic to the brand values and purpose, they were also reinventing the creative approaches, upholding meaningful relevance with consumers annually. They broke the rules and trusted their instincts throughout the process, opening the brief to the entire agency; meanwhile, they experimented with new channels strategically and adopted them into the following year's plan, acquiring sustainable growth. Their magic potion can be named as the perfect blend of science and creativity, which delivered a staggering £411m in extra profit over the decade.
Based on this examination of various characteristics of an effective communications plan, it is crystal clear that achieving a communications strategy, although it is crucial, cannot be regarded as a single criterion to tick. Developing a robust communications plan encompasses many aspects, from understanding consumer journeys to selecting effective channels, from embracing creativity and innovation to allocating a rigorous budget for each channel, from designing a holistic measurement framework to agreeing on an approach to course correct; all additional elements are proven to impact on the effectiveness of communications planning.
To establish an award-winning communications plan, planners need to act as the glue across an agency, inviting the right talent into the room, protecting as much time as possible for collaboration, ideation and innovation, and bringing the theoretical strategy into an electrifying reality by adhering to the science and adding a pinch of art and bravery.
Chen Cui is Business Director at Yonder Media. This essay was awarded a Distinction as part of the Advanced Certificate in Communications Planning.
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