What is media planning, and why is it so hard?

Imagine throwing away $123.1 million. That’s how much digital advertisers wasted in just three months, according to Next&Co’s Q2 2024 audit. On average, brands lost 44% of their budgets before campaigns even had a chance to perform.

With numbers like that, it’s clear that marketers need to plan better. The problem is that media planning is harder than ever. Fragmented markets, siloed data and budgets that never stretch far enough are just some of the challenges marketers face when trying to optimize the media mix. 

Every decision carries the risk of wasted spend. It’s like trying to juggle seven different things while walking a tightrope in a hurricane. 

So, how do you pull your data together and cross that tightrope with confidence? Here’s exactly what media planning is and how to master it like a seasoned pro. 

What is media planning in marketing?

Media planning maps out how, when and where your message will connect with your target audience. It involves analyzing consumer behavior, market trends and campaign objectives with the goal of ensuring your brand shows up in the right place, at the right time, with the right message. 

As Funnel’s Performance Marketing Manager, Lee Riley describes it, “It’s the jigsaw of marketing strategy. It's a declaration of collaborative intent, justifying analytics, creative concepts and the resulting spend, and something to iterate on and pivot around as brands and agency teams strive to drive new customers, reduce churn and build short and long-term value.” 

So what does a media plan look like? Let’s take a look at the types of plans, the why behind them and what to put in one.

Types of media planning 

There are so many ways to reach an audience, including search ads, TikTok videos, email, broadcast media and even print. Most strategies fall under these three types of media plans: 

Digital media plan: Includes everything from search engines and websites to apps, social media and streaming services. Digital media plans offer more precise targeting and near real-time tracking and optimization. 

Traditional media plan: Think classic, time-tested channels, such as TV, radio, print and OOH. They still offer massive reach and build credibility with an already established audience. 

Integrated media plan: Blends digital and traditional media types into one brand experience. A campaign might pair a TV ad with social media retargeting and in-store promos. 

Why you should be media planning

Why should you invest serious time, resources and brainpower into media planning when your team has so many other priorities? Because in this day and age, just running ads doesn’t cut it. A good media plan helps your team stay focused so your advertising and marketing efforts drive real impact. 

Align your marketing goals and media strategy 

Your campaigns need to align with your marketing goals. Without alignment, you’re just paying for impressions that lead nowhere. 

A solid media planning strategy fixes that. It takes those high-level KPIs and translates them into actionable goals that your team can execute. So, all your advertising campaigns are tied to a unified and measurable outcome like revenue growth or brand authority. 

It’s easier to decide which channels deserve budget, what creative direction supports the strategy and how success will be measured when you have a plan. It’s how you avoid wasting ad spend on campaigns that aren’t moving the needle and build strategies your CFO will actually sign off on.

Reach the right people every time 

Everybody is fighting for attention in the media space, but just shouting louder isn’t working. A media plan ensures that your message lands with people who actually want to listen. 

It helps you improve ad targeting and gauge market interest more accurately, so you’re not spending on the wrong audiences. When you track data from all your media channels in one unified marketing intelligence platform like Funnel, you can understand who your audience truly is, where they spend most of their time online (and off) and what makes them want to click, sign up or buy. 

There will be far fewer wasted ad impressions and higher engagement and conversions because you’re focusing on the right people. 

Optimize your budget, stretch every dollar

Media planning justifies the dollars spent because every investment has a clear purpose. A good media plan breaks down channel costs, potential reach and expected performance. 

That way, you’re able to find the absolute smartest and most efficient way to allocate your budget. You can prioritize high-performing channels, cut low-value ones and reallocate spend when performance shifts. 

Build a consistent brand across all channels 

It’s important that customers recognize your brand instantly, whether they open up a promo email, scroll through an Instagram reel or walk past an ad in the subway. Brand consistency builds trust, loyalty and credibility.

The media planning process helps you create a cohesive brand experience on every channel. That way, the YouTube pre-roll matches the story you’re telling on social and the ad copy running on Google.

Of course, media planning looks different depending on who you are. A fast-growing DTC brand needs agility and ROI proof. A global enterprise needs cross-market consistency and governance. Agencies need scalable reporting that proves client value. Funnel’s Marketing Intelligence Platform scales across all of these contexts, giving each team a single, reliable foundation to plan from

What should you include in a media plan for marketing?

A media plan for advertising and marketing pulls together audience, goals, budget and strategies into one: 

Your target audience

Every strong media plan starts with knowing exactly who you’re talking to. You’ll define your ideal customer beyond just demographics. 

What motivates them? Do they make decisions quickly or after a lot of research? What problems are they trying to solve? Their behaviors, interests, pain points and media habits all provide important context. 

Understanding your target audience is important so you know how you speak to them, how to create content that attracts them and how to guide them through the entire customer journey. For example, if you’re selling project management software, a startup market is going to have a completely different set of problems and reasons to purchase than buyers at established brands. All of your ads, content, brand messaging and strategy decisions would reflect which market you’re targeting.

Your media plan holds those details, not just so you have documented information to keep your marketing and ad teams on the same page, but also so you have a jumping-off point for making changes when goals and priorities change. Speaking of which, your goals and objectives are the second component of a good marketing media plan.

Clear objectives

Are you aiming for brand awareness, lead generation, website traffic or direct sales? You might need different strategies, budgets and channels for each goal — and all of these strategies should fit together to create one cohesive, overarching strategy.

It can get complicated, and things might look even hairier in the coming years as marketers turn to more niche channels in response to AI’s disruption of search marketing.

Always define your objectives upfront so the decision your team makes is aligned with what you're trying to achieve. 

And use SMART objectives: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. If, say, your goal is lead generation, a SMART objective could be “generate 1,000 qualified leads in Q3 through paid social campaigns at a $50 CPL.” When the target is clear, your team is more likely to hit that mark. 

Media channels

What are the specific media platforms you’ll use to reach your core audience? Even the best creatives can fall short if you pick the wrong channels. 

A strong plan blends paid, owned and earned media. But don’t just throw money at every channel available. Base your choices on your audience’s habits and campaign objectives so you can focus on the most effective media channels for your goals.

If you’re going after Gen Z, TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts might be your best bet. But if you’re trying to reach B2B decision-makers, LinkedIn and trade publications will deliver better results.

Your defined budget

A budget sets the boundaries and helps you prioritize what’s most important. It outlines how much you’re prepared to spend, and more importantly, how that budget will be distributed across all your chosen media channels. 

Channel costs, expected ROI and the overall financial goals of your advertising campaign should all be factored in.

Different channels use different cost models, like CPM, CPC or CPA. Your media plan needs to evaluate which model makes the most sense for each channel and weigh those costs against expected returns.

Campaign timing and frequency

Include clear timing and frequency guidelines in your media plan to map out how often your message will be seen or heard. 

The trick is to schedule your advertising campaigns around seasonal trends, product launches or peak buying periods so you maximize recall without causing ad fatigue. 

Also consider recency, competitive pressures and where the customer is in their journey. The right schedule makes you present, not pushy. 

Measurement

The job isn't done when the ads go live. Measurement is what closes the loop on your media plan. Define your KPIs and analyze data regularly to see if you’re on track and hitting the mark. 

Tracking performance and gathering insights shows how effective your campaign really is. And it gives you the evidence you need for smarter campaign optimization. 

Measurement is where media planning succeeds or fails. Relying on a single approach, like last-click attribution, modeled guesses or a one-off incrementality test, leaves you with only part of the picture. Funnel solves this by triangulating three proven methods: marketing mix modeling (MMM), MTA and incrementality testing. Together, they cross-validate one another, so you’re not betting your budget on biased or incomplete data. The result is trusted, actionable insight into which channels are truly driving incremental sales and where your next dollar will deliver the greatest return.

Strategy, execution and optimization all depend on each other. Juggling them at once is easier said than done — which brings us to the next question:

Why is media planning so damn hard?

At its core, the biggest obstacle isn’t a lack of talent, tools or ideas...it’s fragmented data. When every channel reports differently, specialists guard their own metrics and attribution models contradict each other, you’re left planning in the dark.

Everything else marketers struggle with (black box automation, broken attribution, siloed teams) flows from this same root cause: no single, trusted source of truth.

This is exactly why Funnel was founded. Our founders experienced firsthand how siloed data crippled decision-making. Today, the same challenge has only intensified as channels multiply and privacy rules evolve. Funnel’s Marketing Intelligence Platform solves this by unifying all your marketing data into one reliable hub, so planners can move past contradictory signals and make confident, evidence-based decisions.

According to Lee Riley, another challenge is that there’s no one way to plan. 

That's why so many teams struggle to get it right. 

It’s not one-size-fits-all

Unfortunately, there’s no universal media planning template that you can just copy and paste. What works for a B2B SaaS company will likely fall flat for a direct-to-consumer fashion brand. That’s just the nature of the game. 

As Riley puts it, “It's difficult because every channel needs a bespoke media plan.” 

You'll need experience to tailor each channel, optimize for brand goals, navigate multi-touchpoint customer journeys and still find ways to outperform competitors.

Layer in unique product life cycles and budget realities, and you’ve got more problems than you bargained for. 

Media fragmentation and data silos

The hyper-fragmented media universe isn’t exactly making things easier for us. If yours is like most teams, you’re trying to reach an audience that’s scattered across hundreds of media platforms, each with its own rules and metrics. The worst part? Data from each of these media platforms often lives in its own silo. 

Your social data won’t sync with search. CRM data is walled off from sales figures. And that gap creates internal chaos. Riley points out, “Proud specialists and their disparate opinions must all work together, despite their channel strengths, weaknesses and metrics being siloed, competitive and contradictory.“

So, you’ll often find channel specialists fiercely protective of their own metrics, or CMOs and CFOs making calls with half the picture. Conflicting insights pile up, and you're left with the infuriating inability to see true cross-channel performance. 

The broken promise of attribution 

Digital marketing dangled the promise of perfectly clear, objective attribution, but reality hasn’t lived up to that hype. 

Riley says “Digital attribution has always been limited, biased and subjective, and yet many still treat is as fact, and even more so as it flagrantly struggles against the tide of data privacy and fights with difficult concepts like incrementality, all of which have Google scrambling for ways to increase profit before the next margin call.”

Legacy attribution models, like last-click, disproportionately credit the final touchpoint, often ignoring the complex customer journey. Evolving data privacy regulations (hello, cookie deprecation) are actively blocking marketers from tracking users across platforms. 

On top of that, proving incrementality is a headache. Did your media spend actually cause a conversion, or would it have happened anyway? It’s almost impossible to know with biased and incomplete data. 

Loss of control to automation 

Automation and AI in media buying were supposed to bring efficiency, but they’ve sidelined media planners and media buyers from having real control over budget and strategy. 

Many platforms push 'black box' AI systems that operate without transparency. This leaves little room for marketers who understand brand nuances. 

It doesn’t end there.

“Brands (often blindly) ‘trust’ agencies with it, despite retainers being too small and demands for automation high,” Riley says. “Advertising agencies don’t get the data necessary to plan and measure success, creating false positives that are the media planning equivalent of last-click attribution.”

So in the end, you’re making critical calls based on a fraction of the truth. 

How to media plan like a pro

Yes, the media planning process is tough, but there are ways to simplify the process when you can access analysis-ready insights and plan with confidence. Here are a few tips to help improve your media planning.

Know your audience inside out 

If it takes you more than two minutes to describe your target customer, you don’t know them well enough.

Know your people at a granular level. Know their behaviors, motivations, media consumption habits and pain points at every stage of the customer journey. 

First-party data is your best starting point. It gives you direct visibility into your customer interactions, purchase histories and on-site behavior. Pair that with market research to understand industry trends, competitor activity and consumer shifts. 

Analytical tools will help you track behavior, engagement patterns and conversion pathways and get rid the guesswork. But first, you need to integrate all of that marketing data. 

Build your single source of truth 

The biggest enemy of media planning is probably fragmented media and the resulting data silos. To effectively plan, measure and optimize, you must have a unified, consistent view of all your marketing performance. 

Pull data from every single channel into one central, clean and accessible data hub. This makes your metrics consistent and comparable across platforms. 

A dedicated marketing intelligence platform like Funnel can really help here. Our software automates the process of consolidating, cleaning and organizing your marketing data from hundreds of scattered sources. The connections are fully managed, so your data is reliable. Get clean data that you can act upon. And, with Funnel reporting tools, you can even create dashboards to visualize the data and keep everyone on the same page. 

Measure beyond the last click 

Last click is so 2015. We’re full-steam ahead into the 2030s, and advanced measurement techniques, like MMM, are the way forward. 

Marketing mix modeling analyzes historical data to understand the combined impact of marketing and non-marketing factors. For example, it can show how your media spend, seasonality and market changes influence results. 

With these insights, you can strategically allocate budget to the channels that actually drive new customers, reduce churn and deliver long-term value.

But MMM is only as good as the data behind it. Without a robust ETL pipeline, you end up with biases, blind spots and unreliable insights. 

Funnel does the heavy lifting of data integration, model validation and optimization, so you don’t have to. With a clean flow of data, advanced measurement becomes possible. 

By triangulating MMM, multi-touch attribution (MTA) and incrementality testing, Funnel delivers cross-validated insights you can trust. That means reliable forecasts, transparent reporting and confidence in every decision you make. 

Iterate and adapt with trustworthy data

Your media plan should be a living document — you iterate and adapt based on fresh data insights. It’s a continuous cycle of testing hypotheses, measuring performance, learning from results and applying those learnings. 

But, of course, that’s only possible if your data is up-to-date. 

With Funnel, you not only get reliable connections that refresh daily with the newest data, but also scenario planning tools and saturation curve visualizations. 

You can model “what if” outcomes before you commit to budget changes and pinpoint when diminishing returns kick in. That agility is how you stay sharp and competitive. 

Examples of great media planning

Smart media planning can turn a good campaign into a revenue driver or even a cultural phenomenon. Let’s take a look at some examples of great media planning in marketing. 

Basic Fit

Not every great media planning story is about a viral campaign. For Basic Fit, one of Europe’s largest fitness chains, the breakthrough happened internally.

Challenged by scattered media buying and reporting across teams and regions, they partnered with Funnel and Artefact to centralize data and streamline reporting. Setup times dropped 10x, and teams finally had one clear view across all markets.

Deuba GmbH & Co. KG

Deuba GmbH and Co. KG was stuck in the past with last-click attribution. However, once they used Funnel to optimize with MMM, the blind spots became clear: their social ads were under-attributed by up to 80%. 

This realization empowered them to reallocate their budget, improving both their CPA and ROI.

Old Spice 

Instead of targeting men directly, Old Spice’s "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign cleverly targeted women, who often buy body wash for the men in their lives. 

Their media mix blended traditional and digital media beautifully. Viral TV ads sent audiences to YouTube, where Isaiah Mustafa delivered personalized, real-time video responses to fan comments and celebrity tweets.

The campaign blew up online, generating billions of impressions and a significant boost in sales. 

Simplify the media planning jigsaw with Funnel

Media planning is complicated, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. Funnel is the Marketing Intelligence Platform that unifies all your marketing data, cross-validates insights with advanced measurement and helps you make smarter budget decisions with confidence. Instead of juggling disconnected tools, you get a single source of truth powering reporting, measurement and planning.

Ready to simplify the media planning jigsaw? Discover how Funnel helps you plan smarter, prove impact and grow with clarity. Sign up for free.