The 25-year-old media planner

Today, I’m revisiting an issue that amazingly still exists in advertising: the fear of a screenshot of a “bad” ad placement and why the legendary 25-year-old media planner gets blamed.

Also: a final dispatch from Advertising Week, courtesy of Mike Shields of . Mike and I also recorded a new episode of The Rebooting Show to discuss. I appreciate Mike’s help this week. I’m interested in doing more collaborations like this, and in 2024 will add a full-time writer to augment my own work. More on that later.

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The screenshot industrial complex

After a while of covering the media industry, I came to a conclusion that the most convenient scapegoat was the 25-year-old media planner. This composite character was blamed for anything that didn’t make sense in how ad budgets are allocated. At conferences and in private, publishers would roll their eyes at the callow employees who controlled enormous ad budgets and made decisions for obscure reasons that usually were about what was easiest and would put them at the least risk of getting in trouble.

And of course, there was truth to this. My shorthand for the power of the 25-year-old media planner goes something like this. The marketing function inside most companies is looked at with suspicion by the CFO. Enter procurement. Nobody likes transaction fees. And to a company looking for distribution, agencies are transaction fees. So the procurement people cram down the agencies’ already thin margins.

Enter the 25-year-old media planner, who isn’t paid all that much but historically got perks from ad sellers like free trips to Knicks games, suite life at Taylor Swift concerts, booze-filled boondoggles conferences, free mani-pedis, SoulCycle outings, jeans parties, Apple picking… you get the idea. I have to laugh when I hear people act like the allocation of ad budgets is a science with formulas that neatly fit on spreadsheets and dashboards. It’s not even art. It’s magic.