What is Media Buying and Planning?

The entire field of media has become highly complex, which has created a number of fragmentations. Additionally, an explosion of a number of different new forms of media has made the branches of media buying and media planning highly specialized. Traditionally, the task of both media planning and media buying used to be conducted by a single media buying agency team, however, it is no more the case. In the present market scenario, the media buying agency has two specialized teams, who exclusively deal with either media buying or media planning. Let us now delve deeper into the meaning of media buying and media planning.

Both media buying and planning refer to the task of ad placement and associated tasks, such as negotiation, purchasing, and so on. Though the fundamental task of both these areas is same, as already mentioned, they differ from each other significantly. Media planning is related to the task of placing ads in a way that benefits the company the most. In order for the ads to be more beneficial, various factors are considered, such as product type, target audience, and so on. In short, people involved in media planning are responsible for creating a plan that summarizes the objectives and strategies involved in placing the ad for the company. In addition to this, media planners are also responsible for finding the effectiveness and efficiency of the advertisement. If the media planners want their plan to be efficient, they need to develop a complete understanding of the consumer behaviour and motivation. 

Media buying is related to the act of buying media time slots and space. The process of media buying is complicated and subtle and a strategic buying requires a careful coordination of a media buying team. Precisely due to this, every media buying agency keeps a team of media buyers.

Both media buying and media planning can be considered to be subsets of media research. The media research also includes of other areas like marketing sources, creative sources, and media sources. Therefore, for conducting a successful media research, all the mentioned elements must be given due consideration.