A Glimpse into a Media Planner’s Friday
Kevin Mendoza
I am going to talk about a typical Friday for me, since these are the most consistent days of the week. My day to day varies on what comes up with the clients I work for and other urgent asks that shift tasks and projects I might have otherwise been working on. For reference, I work for a CPG (consumer packaged goods) client in the Vitamins, Minerals, and Supplements category (VMS). There are 4 teams that do strategy for the client which are broken out by VMS, SWB (sexual well-being), HyHo, and UR (upper respiratory).
On a Friday morning, things are usually pretty calm, since it is the end of the week, but my main tasks are sending the client their weekly deck, which gives them an overview of their products and what happened with them that week, and sending out our TV goals report.
I start the deck task on Thursday afternoon, since I have to get our 5 teams (National Video Group (NVG), Digital Investment (DI), Search, Social, and the Strategy teams (my team along with 3 others) to send things over or get them started either by end of day (EOD) Thursday or early Friday morning. The first thing to come in has to be impressions from the search team. Search is usually really good at giving me the excel document either EOD Thursday, or it’s the first thing on my inbox/in the drive Friday morning. I use the previous week’s deck, save as (with the current date), and I go into every slide that has campaign activity and put red boxes. It is the other teams’ responsibility to update their respective slides with anything new that might have launched or happened that week. After all changes or lack thereof have been made, they change the red boxes to be green for me. It is then my turn to go into every slide and update impressions, GRPs, and dates to make sure everything is current for that week and anything else that might look off or might have launched or is no longer active. My supervisor or director then goes in, gives a final look, and once I’m given an okay, I send out to the clients as well as the rest of them team before they are out for the weekend (we usually aim for 3 p.m. CST, since the clients are in New York and want at least an hour to look at before they’re off as well).
In the late afternoon, I start to pull our TV goals. This is for checking to make sure that spend is matching NVG’s records to prevent any overspend or underspend. We get so many budget cuts or shift dollars around that this is something that really does need to be done weekly. I pull goals by going intoLumina, where we have our TV flighting for the year, and pull a report that is already set with certain filters such as GRPs, net cost, gross cost, and our demographics for our audiences as well as other things. Once the report downloads, I go in and make a pivot of the data in excel. I compare the pivot from this week to last weeks, if everything looks good (GRPs and budgets match), I copy the tabs from last week’s excel document and put them into my new working document. Once they’re all copied over, I just change the raw data, dates, update some tables we have with an overview of the more crucial information, save to our share drive, and email to the NVG team. Monday morning, they will let the team know whether we are matching or not. If we are, nothing further needs to be done, but if there is something off, I have to do some digging. This involves making sure my work is done right (small mistakes can happen especially with pivots), or usually it’s a budget cut or something was shifted that we weren’t aware of etc. Once the error or change is found, we email the NVG team back, and then we’re good to go.
That is what a calm Friday looks like for me as a Media Planner. There are usually other asks that come through where I have to pull a competitive report, pivot it, and send it off to the client to building an audience in GWI or updating media plans and e-Auths. It all depends on the quarter we’re in, what upcoming launches we have, and how the client is feeling about the market/competitors.