It was inevitable that after the media planning evolution variously called channel planning, communication planning or media neutral planning, there would be a backlash. A planner at Naked in London has gone further and has come up with an intriguing modification to the method and is already gathering support from staff at Leo Burnett Toronto. Called transmedia planning, this model is likely born because some agencies are implementing channel planning badly.

Faris Yakob at Naked Communications is concerned that media neutral planning may be a misguided approach. He feels that inherent strengths of different media vehicles should not be abandoned when coming up with a campaign idea for a brand. Rather, each media vehicle should be considered as a focus, with its own merits and audience.

Faris says that these media should be used on their own strengths to feed messages to different consumers in the target with the intention that those users cross communicate to feed a greater brand idea.

He concedes out that this would only work for certain brands, presumably where the subject matter would be interesting enough to spark a dialogue.

Faris is right in that media vehicles are, in fact, important. Messages need to be tailored to the vehicle and to the audience that consumes that media vehicle. Badly implemented media neutral planning is in danger of rejecting a whole bunch of great ideas just because they may be focused on execution.

However, if communication planning is set up as a proper process within an agency environment, it will not dismiss great executional ideas. To prevent this happening, the communication planners have to have the right skill sets. More often than not, channel planning is being set up poorly. Agencies or marketers don’t have the right processes in place. The wrong staff are being recruited into the channel planning role. Most importantly, they are not being given the right responsibilities and authority in the advertising process. This is resulting in bad work.

The worry is that neutral planning puts each media in a silo and doesn’t build on individual media strengths to form a greater whole. Instead of using each channel to deliver the same idea, transmedia proposes using each channel to deliver a different idea; but all working together as part of a bigger brand strategy. The cream on the cake is the dependence on social networking to get the bigger strategy built. That’s no surprise as it’s so flavour of the month.

Transmedia planning contrives to get each media working on different parts of a target in different ways, and prompting these target members to communicate with each other. This forms a brand community that shares and develops each member’s experiences with the brand.

Transmedia planning is an insightful process that may work for some brands. A solution that may help get the communication planning, media neutral process right. If it works for you, go do it. If this new term in our advertising lexicon is able to stop the ad business creating bad communication channel plans, then let’s go ahead and plan transmedia.