Media is a broad term. Summarized, it is a means of mass communication. It can refer to a wide variety of subjects. Broadcast, publishing, and the internet are all different forms of media.

Here at Pathlabs, it is our job to make sure our partner agencies are executing media in the most effective way. But first, it is important to understand the nuanced, but important difference between media buying and media execution. These two activities are often lumped together into one bucket under media buying.

Media buying is researching, strategizing, negotiating, and placing a media buy. This activity is the same across traditional media and digital media. 

Media execution is strategizing at the digital tactic level, tracking, analytics, bidding techniques,  audience identification, optimization, creative trafficking, tagging, pacing, and all other aspects of deploying a successful digital campaign.

Media execution is reactive to how the current state of advertising technology, privacy, regulation, and the global environment might affect an advertiser’s ability to place, track, target, report, and most importantly perform on an individual media buy. The internet and the plethora of ad buying platforms are a complex web of ever-changing parts that require the full attention of a media execution team while a campaign is in flight. 

It isn’t just sending over an IO or entering a budget into a biddable platform and pressing go. It’s setting up pixels, uploading data sets, building audiences, setting up data connections, building reporting dashboards, setting a bid strategy, trafficking creative, wrapping tags, performing QA, and the list goes on. All of this happens before you even get to the spending money part. After that, the list is just as long and you can’t just set it and forget it. A great campaign is monitored and optimized regularly. This means monitoring pixel activity, adjusting tagging strategy, tweaking bids, testing audiences, moving budgets, and I won’t bore you with the rest.   

The unfortunate reality is that agencies are being paid by their clients for media buying, but are expected to execute as well. With media departments already having so much going on, it often creates the need for compromise between great media buying and great media execution. It is important to remember the differences between these processes. Agency leaders should leverage the skill sets, resources, and organizations to succeed in both buying and strategizing media effectively - as well as execute on that strategy.

Media planning and media execution - you must do both. Great execution and great strategy must go hand in hand. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if it isn’t executed to perfection, you have nothing. The same goes the other way. It takes separate skill sets, resources, technology, and trained teams to do each of these successfully. You can’t just “buy Facebook” and “buy programmatic” there is much more to the iceberg than that. It is vital to consider the importance of both sides of the coin when building contracts, setting strategies, creating plans, and choosing partners.

Here at Pathlabs, our focus is on offering the absolute best media activation, optimization, and analytics services for agencies and in-house teams. If you’re looking to grow your clients’ business via paid advertising, we want to be your modern media team.

This is precisely the kind of work we have done for hundreds of agencies across thousands of campaigns. We want to do it for your agency too.