What is media strategy: how to buy attention without burning your budget

Media strategy versus plan versus buying

Three words that get mashed together, yet they are three different floors. Media strategy decides who and why you want to reach and what role media play in the business. The media plan translates that into specific channels, timing and frequency. Media buying is execution: negotiation, ordering and ongoing optimisation. Put simply: strategy is what and why, the plan is when and where, buying is how much and how. When someone sells a "media strategy" and means a spreadsheet of channels and budgets, they have mistaken the top floor for the ground floor.

The most important decision: reach versus frequency

If a marketer remembers one thing, make it this. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk) showed with data that brands grow mainly through penetration, acquiring new and light buyers, not by deepening loyalty among the faithful. The media implication follows: you almost always want broad reach across the whole category of buyers, not high frequency on a small group. Hitting five thousand people twenty times is easy and cheap on the report, but growth does not come out of it.

Alongside it sits recency planning from the legendary media thinker Erwin Ephron: because you do not know exactly who will buy tomorrow, the greatest value is in being present as close to purchase as possible, and continuously rather than in short bursts. One reaching exposure at the right moment often beats the fifth exposure to the same person who is not buying today.

Brand building versus activation: the 60/40 rule

Les Binet and Peter Field, on IPA data, proved that the most effective campaigns split effort roughly 60% to long-term brand building and 40% to short-term activation. Brand building creates future demand (through broad reach and emotion), activation harvests today's (targeted and rational). The ratio varies by category and stage, but one extreme is always a mistake: do performance only and you harvest a field nobody sowed, and the crop eventually runs out.

Related is the single most reliable rule in media investment, ESOV (Extra Share of Voice). It is the gap between your share of advertising voice and your market share. Invest more than your share implies (positive ESOV) and the brand usually grows. Invest less and it usually declines. Media strategy is, to a large degree, the decision of where and how to buy positive ESOV.

The three types of media spend (and why not to mix them)

The Czech strategist Tomas Hrivnak puts it well: there are three types of marketing spend, and mixing them means chaos. Fixed spend is the entry ticket to a market (without it nobody sees you). Performance spend buys a share of current demand (search, retail media, performance social). Brand spend buys a place in the customer's head for later (broad reach, video, OOH). A working budget contains all three and does not pour them into one pot, because each has a different purpose, metric and horizon.

Attention as currency

An impression is not the same as attention, and neither is viewability. The Australian researcher Karen Nelson-Field showed that ad formats differ dramatically in how much real attention they generate, and that attention correlates directly with memory and sales impact. Buying the cheapest CPM regardless of attention is like paying for cinema seats in a room where the screen is dark.

Quality also depends on how the ad is made. Orlando Wood and the System1 institute show that elements which engage the right brain (people, faces, story, humour, place) build brands better than flat rational "features". And Rory Sutherland reminds us that the media context changes the meaning of the message: the same thing said in a different place means something different. Beware media waste too: ad fraud and "made for advertising" sites swallow part of the budget without a single pair of eyes. That is why we watch where the money actually flows.

B2B is different: the 95-5 rule

If you sell to companies, a special truth from The B2B Institute research (LinkedIn, with Binet) applies: at any given moment only a small share of your prospects is in-market, on the order of 5%, while the other 95% will buy later. Target only the 5% with immediate intent and you fight the whole market over the expensive tip of the iceberg. A smart B2B media strategy therefore also reaches the 95% and builds mental availability, so they think of you when their time comes.

The role of channels: what each is for

You do not pick a channel by what is fashionable, but by the role it is meant to play. Roughly, the map looks like this (and for who offers what in the Czech market, we have a separate market overview):

How to build a media strategy, step by step

• 1. Business goal. What the strategy must deliver: new penetration, defending share, a launch. Not "we want a campaign".
• 2. Audience and its size. The whole category of buyers, not just a narrow target. Growth sits with light and future customers.
• 3. Role of media. How much to brand building and how much to activation. Start at 60/40.
• 4. Reach and frequency. Broad reach over high frequency, presence near purchase (recency).
• 5. Channel mix. By role and attention quality, not lowest CPM. Watch overlaps across vendors.
• 6. Budget. Deliberately separate fixed, performance and brand spend.
• 7. Measure and learn. Reach, share of voice, attention and incrementality. The post-buy decides the next round.

Measurement: what to actually track

Media strategy without measurement is an alibi. But you can measure smart things and dumb things. Track reach and frequency (how much of the category you reached and how often), share of voice and ESOV, attention quality (not just viewability), incrementality via geo-tests and controls (how many sales the campaign actually added beyond what would have happened anyway), brand tracking and econometrics. The economist Grace Kite shows that only modelling over a longer period reveals the true contribution of brand advertising, which last-click attribution systematically undervalues. Likes and the last click are supporting indicators, not the verdict.

How we read it: data and competitive spend

Concretely: we work with media consumption data from the MML-TGI survey (Median), so we know what media the audience actually consumes, not what we assume. We track competitive spend, how much rivals put into brand media, and thanks to tools and partner startups we can now estimate their spend on Meta and Google and the cost of their influencer collaborations. This is not spying, it is about not entering a market blind and knowing how much voice you must buy to be heard.

The most common media strategy mistakes

• Channel first, audience second. "We're going on TikTok" is not a strategy until you know who and why you want to reach there.
• High frequency on a narrow group. Nagging a small audience instead of reaching the category broadly.
• Performance only, no brand. You harvest demand nobody creates and wonder why it gets pricier every year.
• Buying on CPM, not attention. The cheapest impression is usually cheap because nobody notices it.
• No deduplication. Five vendors hit the same person five times and it looks like five times the reach.
• Chasing last click. Last-click attribution overvalues performance and undervalues brand and the upper funnel.

Who to read: the best media authors

The global best: Les Binet and Peter Field (IPA, effectiveness and 60/40), Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk (Ehrenberg-Bass, reach and mental availability), Erwin Ephron (recency planning), Karen Nelson-Field (attention as currency), Orlando Wood and System1 (creative quality and attention), Rory Sutherland (context and psychology), Grace Kite (effectiveness econometrics) and Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo of The B2B Institute (the 95-5 rule). Institutes and sources: IPA, WARC, Thinkbox, Ebiquity and the Effie awards. Czech perspectives: Tomas Hrivnak (the three types of spend), Michal Krutis (media within marketing strategy, See-Think-Do-Care), and the legend Josef Havelka, who still reminds us that without courage you get only an average nobody notices. For Czech market data follow MediaGuru, Mediar and AKTV.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: Les Binet & Peter Field, IPA, The Long and the Short of It and Media in Focus · Byron Sharp & Jenni Romaniuk, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, How Brands Grow · Erwin Ephron (recency planning) · Karen Nelson-Field, The Attention Economy and How Media Works · Orlando Wood / System1, Lemon · The B2B Institute (the 95-5 rule) · Grace Kite (magic numbers / econometrics) · WARC, Thinkbox, Ebiquity. Czech sources: Tomas Hrivnak, Michal Krutis, Josef Havelka, MediaGuru, Mediar, AKTV.

This is what we do: media planning & buying and marketing strategy. For who offers what in the Czech market, see The Czech media landscape, and for how programmatic buying works, see the RTB guide (in Czech).

Spending on media and not sure whether a strategy sits behind it, or just habit? Let us take 30 minutes. We will tell you where you can get the same reach for less, or more for the same.