15 Things Today’s Digital Planners Will Never Know the Joy of Doing
By: Eleanor Bothwell
Internet’s down, time to go home, right? These days a connection crash is the number one threat to productivity around the media agency. After all, how are you supposed to traffic ads with no onramp? Hard to believe, but this wasn’t always the case…
A bit of backstory for those new to the game: Media Experts was Canada’s first independent media agency. We’ve been hustling our media-first mantra since 1981, and with 36 years in the biz comes a slew of prehistoric knowledge of how the game was played back in the day.
Trust us – we’ve seen some things that are enough to make the modern-day planner drop their iPhone X in shock and awe. Check out this list of top 15 things today’s digital planners will miss out on:
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Standing at the fax machine, faxing out all your IO’s, and then waiting for the fax confirmation pages for each contract to print out (which you then put in your physical paper folder) so reps can’t claim they didn’t get your fax when you know they totally did but were on a patio somewhere not paying attention to your buy.
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Knowing the difference between an FLA and a SWF file
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Having to decide between executing a Homepage takeover of Yahoo, MSN/Sympatico or Canoe.ca.
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Knowing what a Voken is.
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Attaching your creative file, backup jpeg, and click-through URL to an email, then sending it out separately to every site on your buy.
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Planning, buying, trafficking and optimizing all your own campaigns as a solo act.
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Doing a R/F run on Comscore that doesn’t require including Facebook in order to get 10%+ reach on your $50,000 banner buy.
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Collating reporting from 10 different vendors into one report, because your client won’t pay for third party ad serving (since that’s just for big fancy brands).
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Running pre-roll when your ad was the only ad in the whole show. And it played only once.
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Running text ads at a $0.25 CPM on MSN Messenger. Yes, people actually clicked on those things.
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Buying Facebook from a rep firm called Segal media because they didn’t have anybody selling in Canada yet.
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Buying mobile inventory on The Score app, a whole month at a time, for one client.
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Banner sizes for Blackberries. Yes, there was advertising on Blackberries
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Begging for 10% of the campaign budget from the planning team.
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The annual Olive Party, where everyone was invited, including competitor sales teams.
True, those were simpler times. But with progress comes more complexity, a greater need for speed, and increasing client expectations. The differences between 2005 and today are gaping – it’s hard to say for certain what the industry will look like in 10 years (though we’d bet our bottom dollar that an AI bot will be writing the follow-up post to this blog).
No matter what comes down the pike, there’s a surefire recipe for continued success. Working in an industry as ever-evolving as media means a constant commitment to staying on your toes. Keeping your skills sharp, your curiosity peaked, and your hand raised for the latest trainings are all actionable ways to stay ahead of the curve. With innovation and education already baked in at every level of our agency, we’re cultivating a future-centric team of Experts that are excited to take on the next wave of changes.