asiCast 197: Signals worth trusting – media planning and the struggle for data integrity
A group of agency professionals in the UK recently launched a collaborative organisation they called The Media Planning Group (MPG) to address what they regarded as a troubling decline in the craft of media planning. They were concerned about the use of confused and inconsistent terminology when, for example, strategy vs planning vs comms planning were used interchangeably. There seemed to be a widening divide between creative and media thinking and a generation of junior planners are having their professional development shaped almost entirely by Meta and Google dashboards – short-term, bottom-up systems that threaten to crowd out broader strategic thinking.
In this podcast Brian Jacobs, Founder and CEO of BJ&A, discusses the aims of the MPG with one of its founders, Ben Cunningham, Director of Media at IMA, and with Tony Regan, who as consultant to the IPA presented the latest edition of the ‘Signals in the Noise’ white paper at our conference in Copenhagen last November. The central concern of the white paper was the extent to which Joint Industry Currencies (JICs) – the independently governed, co-funded and industry-wide measurement systems – seem to have drifted out of the daily consciousness of a generation of planners.
Several significant issues are raised throughout the conversation: the perennial apples and oranges problem; the value of JICs as a trading currency and governance model; dealing with walled gardens and unverifiable data; AI and data provenance; wider societal policy implications around online safety and social media age restrictions.
Ben Cunningham and Tony Regan talk with Brian Jacobs:
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