MEDIA + PERFORMANCE · 03 / 09
ATL Media Planning & Buying
Mass reach, bought smart.
ATL is where the biggest cheques get written and the biggest mistakes get made. A 10% negotiation saving on a national television plan is more than most digital campaigns will ever spend. Most brands don't have the in-house team to fight that fight properly — which is why an agency that can negotiate on rate, audit on delivery and attribute on outcome is worth the retainer many times over.
Salt N Pepper plans ATL with a single question — what's the cheapest reach against the right audience, measurable enough to defend in a board meeting? That sounds obvious. In practice it means GEC versus news versus sports trade-offs, regional language splits, daypart optimisation, OOH site recces with photo evidence, post-buy audits comparing delivered GRPs against committed, and cross-media reach/frequency modelling so we're not double-counting an audience.
The output isn't a media plan. The output is a defensible media plan — one that survives a CFO asking why we spent on a specific channel and what came back.
What we do
- TV planning across GEC, news, sports, regional
- Print across national & regional dailies, magazines
- Radio across FM networks & metro markets
- OOH — hoardings, transit, airports, cinema, DOOH
- Cross-media planning with reach/frequency models
- Negotiation, buying, monitoring & post-buy audits
Deliverables & outcomes
- Integrated media plans with channel mix rationale
- Rate-card benchmarking & negotiation savings reports
- GRP, TVR & reach delivery tracking
- OOH site recces, photo evidence & visibility scores
- Monthly media performance & spend audits
- Attribution models linking ATL to digital uplift
How we measure it
Reach, frequency, GRP and TVR for broadcast. Visibility scores and photo-verified compliance for OOH. Post-buy audits comparing committed delivery against actual. Attribution models linking ATL spend to digital query lift, branded search and site traffic.
Frequently asked questions
Partially, and we model the partial honestly. ATL spend correlates with branded search volume, direct site traffic and brand-recall surveys. We build attribution models that compare pre- and post-flight digital baselines so the ATL contribution is at least sized, even when it can't be precisely measured.
We negotiate hard against the rate card and report savings transparently. Our commercial models include fixed retainer and outcome-linked options — we'll structure whichever works for the client's procurement.
For the right brief, yes — particularly programmatic DOOH, airport and metro inventory, and category-specific placement. We don't recommend OOH as a default. We recommend it when the audience genuinely lives in that physical space.
Related disciplines
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