A plan to declutter

I love a good clear out, especially in January. I’m planning to spend the weekend quietly sneaking out whatever I can get away with. Plastic toys; pencils and broken pens; games; art projects; piles of old pictures; bits of felt and wool, clothes that are completely unsuitable for life now. Maybe even a few of the 200 teddies that are taking up growing room in my daughter’s beds – with any luck they won’t even notice.

Clearly the best thing about a clear out, is the feeling of lightness when it’s done. A little bit of ‘joy’ to quote Marie Kondo. I don’t think it’s just because I’m a neat freak (honest), more that I need some space and control at a time when these things are hard to find.

As a media planner, my work has a number of parallels – when new media, channels and products launch, the task is to select the ones that will do the job required for the brand, dispense with the rest, and organise what remains – the good stuff – in a way that makes sense to both the advertiser and the consumer.

Without wanting to sound like an old hand, when I started working in media, the decisions I made in the pub were harder than those made on any media plan. But media planning today is full of complexity and I’ve learned that mixing my drinks was never a good idea. Times have changed.

The volume of media propositions has grown exponentially. TV, Print, Radio and Posters have become AV, publishing, digital audio and OOH, as well as social, influencers, content, programmatic display and …you get my point. And within each of these there are a host of different media owners, and within each of the media owners, there are different products, formats, targeting options, talent and so on. Innovation driving fragmented consumer behaviour, and fragmented consumer behaviour driving media planners to make sure every base is covered. To return to my de-cluttering analogy, we have houses full of rooms, full of cupboards, full of boxes, full of stuff to play with.

And it can be very hard to let anything go.

Like my living room, where (until not very long ago) I had 4 remote controls – all providing access to different content. One for the smart TV, to get amazon prime and Netflix, one for Sky, one for apple TV and one for the DVD player to watch the boxsets and movies we have collected over the years.

And then Sky Q brought Netflix and Amazon prime into the UI, we ditched apple TV and chucked the obsolete DVDs (who can be bothered to root through a shelf of plastic boxes anymore?) into the boot of the car with the teddies. Innovation is driving consolidation and consolidation will stop me filling yet another draw with remote controls I no longer need.

Back to work. To Sky media, where this month, we have launched ONE campaign. ONE campaign brings together an advertiser’s linear and on-demand campaigns in one total TV view. ONE audience across all platforms, ONE campaign performance report and ONE way to book and manage campaigns. It’s a simple change, but one where it has been surprisingly difficult to shift industry behaviour. Everyone believes in the principles behind ONE campaign but some of the details, the ‘buts’ get in the way.

To quote Marie Kondo (again):

‘The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past’

We can’t have a future where media plans are even more complicated than they are now. ONE campaign is Sky media’s contribution towards making them simpler. With more advertisers choosing to buy ONE campaign every day, we hope you will join them.

Please get in touch if you would like to find out more. I’m off to pick up some boxes.