Why better media planning isn’t about finding the winning channel
Article 26 of 26 in series: The Great Reach Reset
Effective media planning is not about finding the single best channel. It is about understanding where the next part of the budget creates the greatest incremental value. As reach begins to flatten and frequency increases in one environment, another channel may contribute more by reaching people the campaign has not yet reached.
Marketing has a strange habit of turning almost every important question into a fight between two opposing camps, and media is no exception, because the industry keeps asking whether linear television will lose to streaming, whether traditional media is being replaced by digital, whether premium video is more valuable than social video, and whether brand or performance should get the bigger share of the budget, as if progress can only happen when one side wins and the other loses.
Mark Ritson has spent years arguing against this kind of binary thinking in marketing, and his idea of “bothism” is useful here because it reminds us that the strongest answer is often not choosing one side, but understanding the value of both and finding the right mix.
“Bothism” is the cure for marketers’ fascination with pointless conflict. — Mark Ritson
Why media planning doesn’t need a winning channel
The traditional question of whether linear television, streaming, online video, social video or another media category is “best” is becoming less useful, because the answer changes depending on the audience, the objective, the level of investment and, crucially, how much has already been spent in each environment.
One channel can be extremely strong at creating broad initial reach, another can reach audiences that are difficult to find elsewhere, while a third may become valuable later in the campaign because it continues to add new people after the first channel has started to saturate.
From an advertiser perspective, the more interesting question is therefore the one we used in AudienceProject’s recent MeasureUp** presentation in Australia: what does the next dollar buy, at what point does it stop buying anything meaningful, and at what point could that dollar contribute more elsewhere?
Once you look at media planning through that lens, the argument changes completely, because a channel does not have to become bad before it makes sense to invest somewhere else. It only has to reach a point where the next dollar produces less incremental value than the same dollar could produce in another part of the plan.
That is a much more practical way of thinking about media, because it moves the debate away from ideology and towards contribution, efficiency and the total outcome.
Every media channel eventually reaches a point of diminishing returns
The principle behind this is hardly new, because diminishing marginal returns describe what happens in almost every form of investment, where the first part of the spend often generates a relatively strong incremental effect while later investment gradually produces less as the easiest opportunities have already been captured.
In media, this often becomes visible through the relationship between reach and frequency, because at the beginning of a campaign additional impressions are more likely to reach new people, while later in the campaign an increasing proportion of those impressions are delivered to people who have already been exposed.
The campaign may therefore continue to grow in terms of spend, impressions and frequency while incremental reach begins to flatten.
This does not mean the channel has stopped creating value, but it does mean that the value of the next unit of investment has changed. A flattening reach curve is a signal to examine the next investment decision.
Additional frequency may still be valuable, depending on the objective, the creative and the audience. The question is whether that investment contributes more here or elsewhere in the plan.
If an advertiser tries to maximise one channel beyond the point where most of its efficiently reachable audience has already been exposed, the cost of finding the remaining audience can rise significantly, while frequency, overexposure and ultimately ad fatigue become a larger part of what the budget is buying.
This is why the conclusion in our MeasureUp presentation is that complementarity, not substitution, is becoming an increasingly important principle in media planning.
Sometimes the right decision will be to invest more in the category that is already performing strongly, while in other situations it will make more sense to move the next part of the budget elsewhere because another environment can now deliver more incremental reach.
Neither decision requires declaring one channel superior to another. It simply requires understanding the whole campaign.
Better cross-media measurement should help us find the right mix
This is where cross-media measurement has an important role to play, because if media planning becomes a question of complementarity and marginal value rather than winners and losers, advertisers need to understand what is happening across the entire plan rather than relying only on the performance view from each individual environment.
Platform and media-owner measurement remains essential because it provides depth and detail within each environment, but the advertiser also needs an independent perspective that can connect those environments and show how reach, frequency and overlap develop across the total campaign.
Without that broader view, it is entirely possible to optimise each individual channel successfully while creating a less efficient media plan overall, because every channel may look healthy on its own even though the same people are being reached repeatedly while other parts of the potential audience remain untouched.
This is one of the reasons why optimising individual channels does not necessarily optimise the whole campaign.
There is also an important implication for media owners, because independent measurement should not be seen simply as a mechanism for moving budget from one category to another, but as a way of helping advertisers understand and demonstrate where different media create genuine value.
When measurement gives advertisers more confidence in what they are buying and helps media owners demonstrate their contribution more clearly, the result does not necessarily have to be a smaller slice of the same advertising pie for somebody else.
As we argued in the MeasureUp presentation, when independent measurement helps media owners prove their value and advertisers make better investment decisions, both sides can benefit from a healthier and potentially growing advertising market.
The key to effective media planning and optimisation is to stop asking which channel will win. Ask where the next dollar will make the greatest contribution to the campaign and measure the whole plan well enough to answer.
**Jakobsen, M. S. (2026, September 2). From measurement to better decisions: Lessons from 15+ years of cross-media measurement around the world. IAB Australia MeasureUp 2026, Sydney, Australia.
This article is 26 of 26 in our series: The Great Reach Reset
About this article series
In a fragmented media landscape, reach is no longer a simple KPI - it is a strategic growth lever. In this article series, AudienceProject explores why advertisers are not failing at reach, but at measuring it properly, and why incremental, deduplicated cross-media reach has become essential to driving penetration, controlling frequency, and unlocking sustainable growth.
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