Media planning has become a game of colour by numbers, dominated by the same paid media formats and homogenous frameworks. In this op-ed, Carl Moggridge, Partner at Hopeful Monsters, urges marketers to ditch the templification and start designing media with the same imagination they apply to creative.
For an industry that talks about and apparently lauds creativity so much, it’s amazing how uncreative most media plans are.
Across categories brands are funnelling precious budgets into the same, mostly digital formats, the same platforms, in the same order.
Paid social, video, programmatic, search, repeat.
Neatly packaged in PowerPoint slides dominated by paid with token nods to owned and earned”
It’s familiar, it’s shallow and it’s predictable.
It’s also lazy.
Media planning has become a game of arbitrage and measurement. It’s been hijacked by spreadsheets, econometrics and the allure of facile metrics like cost per click and attention scores.
We’ve started treating media like a financial transaction. Media strategies are judged less on impact or originality and more on how they map to someone’s ROI model.
Here’s the problem: the more measurable our media has become, the less memorable it is.
Three-quarters of global ad spend now goes to digital. And yet, according to Lumen, 75% of those ads aren’t viewed for more than two seconds – not long enough to be recalled, let alone influence behaviour.
The industry’s response seems to be a shrug of the shoulders and then more of the same, just slightly optimised to game the algorithm.
We’ve lost the idea of media as experience. Real attention is earned through culture, conversation, and context – not frequency caps and viewability benchmarks.
When we default to formats that are easy to buy and easy to measure, we ignore the richness of how people actually engage with brands in the wild.
Think about how real influence spreads. It happens in WhatsApp groups, gym locker rooms, run clubs, or pretty much anywhere where people come together to connect. These are media channels, too – but they don’t show up on media plans. Not because they don’t work, but because they can’t be bought at scale or easily measured.
Even our definitions are outdated. Paid, owned and earned was useful 20 years ago but it doesn’t reflect the way media actually works today.
Influencer content can be paid and earned.
Social posts can be organic and transactional.
A podcast mention might come from a partnership or from the sheer enthusiasm of a host.
Instead of trying to fit ideas into buckets, we should be designing media ecosystems that reflect the reality of attention.
Coca-Cola has just brought back the Share a Coke campaign it first debuted a decade ago. There’s a reason for that – it works because it taps into some very human ideas and makes incredible use of incredibly undervalued media space – the product itself and the shelf it sits on.
Creating campaigns that behave more like culture than comms is something we actively work towards. Our recent work for ResMed is a good example. We designed a campaign around a sleep-deprived puppet – a big, furry manifestation of bad sleep hygiene. He popped up at footy games, on billboards, in guerrilla stunts and eventually made it onto morning TV.
It’s deliberately not paid media, but it was really impactful media. It generated attention by showing up in places people didn’t expect, then giving them something worth remembering. And early results are really encouraging.
Here’s the kicker: smaller budgets should be breeding more creativity, not less.
When you can’t optimise and outspend your way to awareness, you have to out-think your competitors. The best challenger brands know this instinctively. They build brands through community, relevance and bold media acts – not just another lazy photo carousel.
We also need to acknowledge the shift happening around us.
Gen Z is tired of algorithmic content. We know they are seeking out deeper, more intentional media experiences. Meanwhile, premium audiences are starting to drop out of traditional media altogether.
The media world is fragmenting. And in that chaos is a huge opportunity for brands willing to think differently.
What if media was led by ideas, not inventory? What if the question wasn’t “Where should we spend the budget?” but “Where will this idea travel?”.
It’s time to break the loop.
Instead of planning around what’s easiest to buy or measure, we need to plan around what’s likely to be remembered.
We need to treat media like a design discipline. One where creativity doesn’t end with the ad – but starts with where and how that ad shows up in the world.
If we can do that, we’ll move from media plans designed to fill space to media ideas designed to create it.
