Bring Out the ‘Backroom Boys’: The Role of Media Planners and Buyers in the New Knowledge Economy

Abstract

This paper outlines the relatively recent emergence of a specialised field of media services that come under the title of media planning and buying. It details the kinds of work this field involves, and the position it occupies in relation to other branches of the advertising industry, noting its increasing centrality in advertising and growing profile in the press. The history of its emergence and development as a separate field in Australia is closely linked to changes in the structure and regulation of the advertising industry. The paper examines challenges currently facing this area of advertising, including the global downturn in advertising, fragmentation of media audiences, and changes in technologies of audience measurement. It suggests that there has been increased value placed on the media planners' and buyers' specialised expertise, especially as audiences have become more segmented and fragmented, as traditional media loses its reach, and as clients have come to expect more accountability in relation to their advertising investment. The emergence of specialist media planners and buyers is situated alongside other changes occurring in the advertising industry, in the national context of particular institutional practices (commissioning system, accreditation and deregulation of the industry), and in the broader context of global economic restructuring and the emergence of the informational mode of development. The challenges faced by the advertising industry, articulated in the 2001 ratings debate, demonstrate Castells' point that ‘the diffusion of new technologies under the new mode of development calls into question the very processes and organizational forms that were at the basis of demand for information technologies’.