Interactive Media Planning Primer

Rohit Bhargava, who writes an excellent, excellent blog on interactive marketing, has a primer on what not to do when planning an media campaign.

The two that strike home for me are Number 1, ignore the small sites, and Number 4, ignore blog and social media.

Number 1: Ignore the small sites. This is the easiest and most common method used to avoid doing any real work with interactive media planning. Simply decide on a demographic (say, women 25-34), and buy ad units on the top four sites for this demographic based on easily accessible data, and you're done. Smaller sites often seem like too much effort to plan and require that you might actually have to contact someone to get pricing and units rather than just cutting and pasting from a plan used for a previous project or client. Yet the benefits are a much larger share of voice on the site and possibly connecting with more of your target consumer. Smaller sites can pay off big.

The problem with small sites is the amount of work that goes into them. If you sit down at your computer with the intention of finding advertising and publishing partners, and just move down the list, you're going to waste a lot of time.

At the same time, simply purchasing large blocks of advertising on the big traffic sites is not effective. When I look at ESPN or CNN or most of the other big sites, I don't see the ads - I've trained myself not to, even before I got into social media.

Smaller sites have less clutter, and the potential to target your advertising is much greater. But how do you find them? I'll be writing a post on this later in the week, on trying to find that "secret sauce" that determines who is influential, but for now, I would suggest you consider creating a industry map of the top 200 sites in your space.

Spending your money on the bottom 195 could be just as effective, and cost less than advertising in the top 5. To do that - you have to know what makes a site important, which means someone has to do the work.

As for Number 4, Blogs and Social Media - this only works if you are actively involved in that space. The high-touch, one-to-one interaction required to be effective in this space doesn't fit well into the agency budgets. How do you pay someone $150/hour to search blogs?