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Playbooks · Media planning

Split a budget across channels by media mix

This job produces a currency-and-percentage budget split across TV, digital and other channels, converted into expected GRPs or impressions per channel. It feeds the media plan sign-off and the insertion orders sent to each channel owner.

What you need first

  • Total campaign budget (media plan brief or finance approval)
  • Campaign objective and target reach/frequency (brand brief)
  • Category SOV benchmark by channel (Nielsen or Kantar Ad Intel, or local equivalent)
  • Rate card or negotiated CPP/CPM by channel (media owner or buying team)
  • Audience skew/index data by channel (TGI, GfK, or platform first-party panel)
  • Contractual minimum spend per channel (media owner insertion order terms)

The procedure

  1. Lock the total budget and the campaign objective (reach, frequency or SOV defense), which sets the ceiling and the metric the split is judged against
  2. Pull the category SOV benchmark and set the dominant channel's floor as a percentage of budget, usually TV
  3. Pull audience skew data for the remaining channels and weight the leftover budget toward whichever channel indexes highest against the core target
  4. Price each channel on its rate card, CPP for TV and OOH, CPM for digital, to convert the percentage split into currency and then into GRPs or impressions
  5. Check each channel amount against contractual minimums and diminishing-return caps, and move any shortfall or excess to the next most efficient channel
  6. Sum the split back to 100% of budget and state expected delivery per channel so the plan can be signed off

Worked through with numbers

Budget €500,000 for an FMCG launch in Poland. Category SOV benchmark from Nielsen Ad Intel: challenger brands need a TV floor of 50% of budget to register. TV floor = 50% x €500,000 = €250,000. Remaining €250,000 split 70/30 toward digital and OOH because TGI shows 70% of category buyers are urban 18-34, better matched by digital plus OOH than by more TV: digital = €175,000 (35%), OOH = €75,000 (15%). Check the sum: 250,000 + 175,000 + 75,000 = 500,000, and 50 + 35 + 15 = 100%. Convert to delivery at rate card: TV CPP €1,100 gives 250,000 / 1,100 = 227 GRPs. Digital CPM €5.20 gives 175,000 / 5.20 x 1,000 = 33.65M impressions. OOH CPP €480 in the top 6 cities gives 75,000 / 480 = 156 GRPs. Read it as: TV carries the SOV floor, digital carries reach against the urban core, OOH adds mass reach cheaply where the audience skew supports it.

Where it goes wrong

  • Split proportional to reach efficiency alone corrects to checking the SOV floor first, a plan that reaches efficiently but sits under the category's TV share still loses share
  • Convert each channel at its own rate card corrects to not applying one blended CPP across channels, TV, digital and OOH are priced on different bases and averaging them misallocates budget
  • Convert CPM to a GRP-equivalent before comparing to TV or OOH CPP corrects to not comparing raw CPM against CPP, unconverted they make digital look more efficient than it is
  • Check each channel amount against its contractual minimum buy corrects to not treating a percentage split as automatically executable, an OOH network minimum can force a smaller channel's real spend above its calculated share

How to know it is right

Re-sum the channel amounts to the total budget, confirm TV's share meets or exceeds the SOV floor, and recompute blended cost-per-GRP against last period's actual to catch a mispriced rate card.

Terms used

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