Overreliance on technology
Today's media planner is surrounded on all sides by technology, technological advances, the hopes of technological advancement, and ceaseless professional blathering about better work, work product, and the life it leads to through technology.
The problem with working in a field reliant, in large part, on technology to make it go? The field itself is not one of technology. Media, marketing, advertising -- these are not technological endeavors. They are driven by and improved by technology, but they are not themselves technological. They are psychological, behavioral, and ultimately human goings-on.
Behavioral targeting can do some great things. And I truly believe it should be among the consideration set of tactics, if not a standard part of every media plan. But it is not what is going to win or lose the day for a media plan. Widgets and apps are cool. I find many to be fun and terribly useful. (Nationwide Insurance has perhaps one of the most useful I've seen -- and it's using mass media to promote it.) But behavioral is a targeting tactic used to extract more value from media; an application is a pull-tactic to elicit brand engagement. Neither of these are a media strategy.
The same can be said for tools that amass and process data. It's too easy for a media planner to miss the media opportunities that best suit a client because a particular vehicle's representation does not communicate with the agency through its third-party ad server's media console, where RFPs are collected.
Another example is creating your own audience ad network using data gathered from myriad websites to find prospects in "cheaper" locations. Yes, you can find less expensive media, but you bypass the consultative sales process and avoid interaction with a category or content specialist that might be able to bring you a media opportunity that goes far beyond simply achieving a CPM goal or a data point that might indicate proclivity to action. The client may miss the opportunity to develop a much deeper connection with a potential customer if all its planners are looking at is cost of media at an intersect with a calculated right time and place for interaction. Choosing the right time and place is only a necessary condition for a relationship to begin -- it is far from sufficient.
Many behaviors can be rendered as machine-readable data to be plugged into algorithms, but human motive remains simple, mysterious, and ultimately unpredictable. Love or money may be frequent motives for behavior, but it is not always easy to predict which one might instigate a behavior that might elicit the same results.
