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How to plan media: reach, frequency and common sense

Media planning is the discipline that decides where, when and how often an advertising message meets its target audience, so that every crown of budget buys the maximum of relevant reach. It is not buying space off a rate card. It is an allocation problem with clear arithmetic.

Daniel Votruba · 6 July 2026 · 4 min read

The five parameters a plan is built from

  • Reach: what percentage of the target group the message reaches at least once. The primary growth lever, because brands grow through breadth, not depth.
  • Frequency: how many times on average. Too few and nobody remembers you, too many and you are paying to annoy.
  • Affinity: how well a medium fits the target group against the general population. An affinity of 130 means a 30% higher concentration of your people.
  • CPT/CPM: cost per thousand contacts. A common denominator for comparing channels, but never the only criterion.
  • Share of voice (SOV): your share of category advertising investment. The metric that links the media plan to market share.

The last point deserves a pause. On IPA data, Binet and Field described a relationship known as ESOV (excess share of voice): brands whose share of voice exceeds their share of market grow over the long run, historically by roughly half a percentage point of market share a year for every ten points of ESOV. Invest below the level of your market share and you gradually hand that share to competitors. A media budget is therefore not a question of taste but of econometrics.

Which channel for what

Television remains the cheapest purchase of mass reach on CPT and makes sense for broad categories and budgets that can sustain a multi-week burst at sufficient frequency; in Czechia realistically from the low millions of crowns. Radio is a frequency machine: cheap production, fast deployment, strong regional targeting, ideal for retail, drive time and tactical offers. OOH builds presence in a place and a moment; DOOH (digital outdoor) adds dayparting, dynamic creative and, increasingly, programmatic buying. Print lost volume, not credibility, and still offers the highest quality of contact for premium and specialist audiences. Online video tops up reach where TV cannot get (younger groups), and direct buy, purchasing straight from a premium publisher, pays off where you want guaranteed context and formats the auction does not offer.

The planning process step by step

1) Business objective: penetration, share, product launch; from it the communication objective. 2) Target group defined by data (MML-TGI, Nielsen), not by a hunch from a meeting. 3) Set the budget via SOV: how much voice you need against competitors. 4) Media mix: a combination of channels by reach, affinity and role (building versus activation). 5) Scheduling: continuity versus flighting, category seasonality. 6) Buying: negotiating prices, positions and bonuses. 7) Measurement and post-buy: were the planned GRPs, reach and frequency delivered? Without post-buy analysis, planning is faith rather than craft.

One note on frequency from practice. Chasing a magic number (effective frequency of 3+) is a relic of the era when plans were made quarters in advance. The more modern lens, recency planning, says the most valuable contact is the one close to the buying situation, and that continuous presence beats intermittent bombardment. For a planner that means a longer, flatter deployment rather than two spectacular bursts with six months of silence in between, during which memory structures erode.

Where plans break

The first mistake: supplier overlap. Three agencies buying for the same brand, each optimising its own channel, and nobody seeing that half the audience is reached three times and the other half not at all. The second: chasing the cheapest CPT, because the cheapest thousand contacts tend to be cheapest for a good reason (unviewed positions, low visibility, poor context). The third: planning from the channel (we want to be on Instagram) instead of from the job to be done. And the fourth: a budget scattered across so many channels that none reaches effective frequency. Ten weak signals do not replace three strong ones.

Want a media plan that stands up to both the spreadsheet and the board? This is how we plan and buy media, or write to us directly. The first opinion is free.

Key takeaways (TL;DR)

  • A media plan rests on five parameters: reach, frequency, affinity, CPT and share of voice. Reach is the primary lever, because brands grow through breadth, not depth.
  • Set the budget via ESOV: invest above your market share and you grow (roughly +0.5 points of share a year per 10 points of ESOV); invest below it and you hand share to competitors.
  • Instead of chasing a magic frequency, recency planning applies: contact close to the buying situation and continuous presence beat intermittent bursts with six months of silence.
  • The most common mistakes: overlap between multiple suppliers, chasing the cheapest CPT, planning from the channel instead of the job, and a budget so scattered no channel reaches effective frequency.

FAQ

What does CPT mean and how is it calculated?

CPT (cost per thousand, also CPM) is the cost per thousand contacts or impressions: campaign cost divided by people reached or impressions, times a thousand. It is used to compare channel efficiency, but always in the context of contact quality. A cheap CPT on an unviewed format is expensive.

How much does radio advertising cost?

It depends on the station, region, daypart and spot length (30 seconds is standard). A regional campaign can start from the low tens of thousands of crowns a week; national coverage on major stations runs from hundreds of thousands to a few million a month. Spot production is cheap compared with TV, which makes radio an accessible frequency channel.

When is TV advertising worth it?

When you need broad reach quickly and the budget can sustain a multi-week burst at sufficient frequency, typically from the low millions of crowns in Czech conditions. For mass categories TV is the cheapest broad reach on CPT; for narrow B2B segments it is waste.

Sources: Les Binet & Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It (IPA) · Nielsen and MML-TGI audience data · our own practice across 750+ projects.