MEDIA STARTS WITH PEOPLE
Maybe We Should Stop Calling Ourselves Marketers
I recently spent a few days at the MediaPost Planning & Buying Insider Summit in Chicago, and one conversation stuck with me:
What if we thought of ourselves less as marketers and more as experts in consumer behavior?
The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
Media isn’t just about finding the right audience, picking the right channel, and optimizing toward a KPI. It’s about understanding people. What they need. How they make decisions. What influences them. Where they spend their time. And what signals tell us they’re moving closer to action.
That should change how we plan media.
Start With the Person, Not the Channel
Too often, media planning can start with the question, “What channels should we use?”
It should start with, “Who are we trying to move, and what needs to happen next?”
Once we understand the audience, their behaviors, their needs, and the moments that matter, we can determine where media can actually make a difference.
The channel is the output of the strategy. Not the strategy itself.
Look Beyond the Obvious
The easiest audience to target isn’t always the biggest opportunity.
By the time someone is clearly in-market, other brands are likely competing for their attention, too. The opportunity can be in understanding what happens before that moment.
What are they searching for? What are they interested in? What behaviors are changing? What cultural moments are influencing them? What creates the need in the first place?
Those signals can help us find people earlier, when we have more opportunity to influence the decision rather than simply capture it.
Connect the Dots
A strong media plan isn’t a collection of channels working independently.
Search can capture demand. Social can create consideration. CTV can build awareness. OOH
can reinforce a message in the right place and moment.
The point isn’t which channel gets the best individual KPI. It’s how the system works together to move the business forward.
That also changes how we should report.
Instead of only asking “What happened?”, we should be asking “Why did it happen, what did we learn, and what should we do next?”
AI Can Make Us Faster. It Can’t Make the Decision for Us.
There’s no question AI is changing how we plan and buy media. It can help us research faster, analyze more data, build scenarios, and get from idea to execution much quicker.
But speed isn’t strategy.
Our value is in knowing what questions to ask, challenging the obvious answer, understanding the consumer, and knowing when the data doesn’t tell the whole story.
If AI can take some of the repetitive work off our plate, great. That should give us more time to think.
The Takeaway
For me, the biggest takeaway from the summit wasn’t a new channel, platform, or technology.
It was a reminder of what our job is really about.
Understand the consumer.
Solve the business problem.
Connect the system.
Prove the value.
Maybe that’s why I like the idea of calling ourselves consumer behavior experts. Because the better we understand people, the better we can do media.