Marketing Departments apply 80/20 principle backwards with Media Management

The 80/20 principle is a formula that can be applied to most areas of business with much success. The formula can be used in various ways by marketing departments; typically the core 20% of brands or services generate 80% of the profit, or 80% of your attention should be given to the most important 20% of your business. More often than not, this rule is applicable to most situations. Why then do many marketers reverse this rule in relation to Advertising and Media focus?

Take for example a very fortunate company that may have 10 million euro as a total marketing budget. Let's say 1-2 million is used to create and produce good advertising (20% is a reasonable amount)
To be sure this campaign will be a success, many marketers will make a strong effort to gather brand insight, engage in focus groups, and engage the ad agency over and over again using countless hours of scrutiny of every detail. Important considerations of background environment, the size of the logo, the manner and tone in the voice, color and shapes portrayed all fall under a microscope. The CEO may get involved and ask for his opinions to be considered - a new tone is considered - text adjusted, story boards altered - again many hours are used in this process. Does this story sound familiar?

Now....compare this above scenario to the process that takes place to develop a media plan. Hmmm. Let's not forget this part ...considering it is where 80% of the marketing budget is visible to the consumer!
Time was most certainly taken to create a fantastic media brief ;-)
The media agency had ample time to create the strategy and also had access to all the latest brand research ;-)
The media agency had the ability to recommend the media before the ad agency went into production with whatever was considered most relevant ;-)
Hopefully the point is clear. Often a minority of engagement is made with the media agency responsibilities. Most disturbing is the lack of engagement of marketing departments to dive deep into post evaluation of campaign performance. Here are the hidden gems. Post evalutions can unlock improvement potential of upwards of 35% based on my past experience. (Plenty of case histories available..just ask)

Between Advertising and Media, it is fair to say that Marketing spends at least 80% of its time on Advertising. It is reasonable to assume that B2C advertisers allocate 80% of their Marketing budgets to Media. If these assumptions are true, it would be fair to conclude that use of time may be somewhat out of balance.

Internal media management within companies should be improved. Though it may be neither possible to imagine nor appropriate for a Marketing Department to spend 80% of its time focused on media, it should be reasonable to expect an active engagement with the processes surrounding media planning, implementation and post evaluation.

Media management advisors have an important role with growing responsibility. For the good of the future, companies should look more to drive this development by asking better questions and posing better challenges. This will only happen if engagement in media, facts and figures is demonstrated. Some may feel numbers are not sexy...but I do. (Guess that's why I like doing what I do :-)