Accountability has become a given in terms of what advertisers expect from media. But plenty of advertising continues to be planned and placed without much, if any, thought about how to know if it is accomplishing its ultimate goal -- namely, moving product.

The touch points of an advertiser's media must be identified as data. Who audiences are and what they do, as well as where advertising goes and what audiences do when they encounter it, need to be made machine-readable. While doing this casts much of human affairs and daily life experiences into the hard, institutional light of fluorescence, it does bring the marketer closer to the audience and allow a better grasp on what it is about advertising that sells product and what about it does not.

This means that before getting started with a medium, you must first articulate what that medium is supposed to do, and for whom it is supposed to do it. You need to articulate:

1. What is the product or service?
2. What is the audience?
   1. What about the audience do I want to know? What about the audience do I think I already know?
      i. Demographic
      ii. Psychographic
3. What do I want the audience to do when it encounters my advertisement?
4. What do I want the audience members to do when they get to my website (if I want them to come to my website)?
5. What kind of value can be assigned to the people in the audience I reach -- and to their corresponding data points? 

Now, I'm not suggesting that the whole of advertising's task is only to accomplish selling at the expense of all else, but it's the ultimate goal, direct or indirect.

This sounds laborious. And it sounds like a lot standing in the way of getting a media plan off the ground. But trust me when I say that if you don't go through at least some of this before your planning (or concurrent with it), you won't learn what you wanted to know because you didn't articulate what it was that you wanted to learn, and you did not adequately prepare for the collection of the kind of data that will help you to learn it. Spending the time upfront will save you from wasting your money later.