- Media planning refers to the process of determining how an advertising message should be distributed among channels and audiences, in order to optimise marketing campaigns.
- A media plan should be flexible, and marketing agencies should always be willing to adjust their spending strategy based on the brand’s needs and the campaign’s ongoing performance.
- Media planning must consider the target audience, the campaign budget and the best method for getting your message across.
- The most effective media planning partners have earned their reputation by successfully navigating a multitude of media options on behalf of their clients. Ideally, your marketing partner will also know when to leave money on the table, as opposed to frittering your monthly budget away on weak or marginal returns.
Media planning refers to the process of determining how an advertising message should be distributed among channels and audiences, in order to optimise marketing campaigns. The best agencies will correlate audience understanding with advertising reach, incrementality, the creative requirements and performance measurement in order to determine the most effective channels.
Few brands are capable of running a media campaign alone, which is why they typically look for the best media planning and buying agencies that can help them to do this. After all, it’s very difficult to get under the media spotlight, for you can’t just go cap in hand, begging publications to write about you. This is where NP Digital, the7stars, Goodstuff, EssenceMediacom and Havas Media UK come in. They possess the expertise and the contacts to get your brand in front of hundreds of thousands of readers and viewers globally via high-impact stories.
If you’re searching for a media partner, note that there’s no standard methodology. Each of the agencies on this list has a very refined approach. NP Digital is all about integrated performance marketing, while the7stars is more of a full-funnel agency and Goodstuff has built a global unified discovery network.
We’ve put NP Digital in first place, not because it’s necessarily the best, but because we believe its model is the most likely to benefit the largest number of brands. But depending on your goals, one of the others may be a more appropriate media partner.
A media plan is an investment thesis
A media plan should be flexible, and marketing agencies should always be willing to adjust their spending strategy based on the brand’s needs and the campaign’s ongoing performance.
Media planning must consider the target audience, the campaign budget and the best method for getting your message across. Channel selection comes after this. This sounds obvious, yet many weaker agencies won’t do this, and instead go by rigid plans based on your advertising budget. But that is not a good strategy. The best media planning and buying agencies know that every brand and marketing campaign is different, and there’s a need to constantly adapt and adjust based on performance.
1. NP Digital: best for media allocation connected to search, earned demand and AI visibility
NP Digital has developed a comprehensive framework and tech stack that helps it to launch highly-scalable media campaigns that aim to enhance your brand’s visibility in SEO, AI search and social media.
Thanks to its proprietary search tool Ubersuggest, NP Digital uses an analytics-heavy approach to determine the best strategy and placement for brand mentions and understand how and when they should be displayed to your target audience. It operates with a productised framework that encompasses SEO audits, keyword research and targeting, reporting dashboards and campaign systems, allowing it to combine predictive investment modelling with deep funnel discovery and competitive benchmarking. With each campaign, the overriding focus is on enhancing brand trust, which is done through a creative mix of storytelling, educational content, webinars, podcasts and so on.
NP Digital also runs what it calls “continuous performance sprints” that allow it to adjust its advertising spend and cadences in real time. Its paid media placements are tightly integrated with an AI-driven SEO framework, helping to lower the overall cost of traffic acquisition. It also provides focused performance metrics that illustrate which leads are converting and where the revenue generation is coming from.
This makes NP Digital a natural partner for anyone that wants to coordinate media with their paid and organic search and AI chatbot channels.
2. the7stars: best for independent media planning and buying at scale
the7stars rejects old methods such as commoditised buying and embraces a more transparent approach that’s based on its integrated technology platforms and tailored human insights.
For each client, it assigns them a planning team, whose goal it is to come up with a non-formulaic method that can help them stand out from rival brands in their niche. Its Supernova team handles the creative media design and production, as well as the commerce infrastructure, in line with the7stars’s belief that an integrated approach is best. This allows it to process complex platform and cross-channel data to create compelling storylines for media campaigns and a robust testing pipeline. The result is more cohesive custom journeys that stretch from brand discovery to lead conversion.
The7stars is highly regarded for its creative content, its partnerships with social platforms like Meta, and its influencer work. It operates with a “people-first” culture that’s all about fostering staff well-being and nurturing their talents, with the result being that it can field multidisciplinary teams that run client accounts based on their needs and goals.
3. Goodstuff: best for full-funnel independent planning, commerce and measurement
Goodstuff delivers some very good stuff where media planning and buying is concerned, taking a broad view of how content impacts brand perception across retail media and social channels.
The agency’s full-funnel model is all about accelerating customer acquisition, and it opts for a highly-targeted approach that ignores vanity metrics such as frequency and global reach. There’s a big strategic angle to its work, as its integrated retail media, e-commerce and CRM capabilities intertwine to help teams understand the role each marketing channel plays in buyer’s journeys.
Its philosophy is based on the idea of “inventive thinking.” By starting with a blank piece of paper for each client, it can focus on the best ways to creatively disrupt markets in each sales channel. This philosophy was behind a number of highly successful creative partnerships, such as when it helped connect OVO to the UK’s National Grid, or when it helped the AA collaborate on Caitlin’s Hour, a famous radio safety project.
Goodstuff cites independent sources that show how its focus on inventive media strategy can help brands to foster long-term health that goes beyond what traditional media placement provides.
4. EssenceMediacom: best for global media orchestration and unified discovery
EssenceMediacom was created through the merger of Essence, a digital-first marketing agency, and MediaCom, a global media network, in order to fuse performance, data and analytics with global scale media planning.
The agency’s “Breakthrough” methodology tries to identify the barriers that prevent its client’s brands from growing, with a philosophy centred on accelerating sales today and growing the brand tomorrow. EssenceMediacom runs campaigns atop of its proprietary EMOS platform, which integrates tools such as WPP Open and Choreograph to support cross-channel optimisation in real time.
EssenceMediacom employs predictive analytics and AI-enabled orchestration to test campaign hypotheses on real audiences and identify hidden growth segments brands can tap into. But instead of focusing on industry-standard metrics like reach or impressions, it tries to link media buying directly to commercial outcomes. This requires a delicate balance between lower-funnel performance tracking and upper-funnel awareness.
All of this is done with an emphasis on frictionless customer journeys, with retail media and commerce tightly integrated with one another to facilitate conversions.
5. Havas Media UK: best for data-led media planning with an AI-enabled operating layer
Havas Media UK has developed a human experience or HX philosophy for media operations that emphasises entertaining, practical and meaningful interactions instead of automated ad impressions.
As a small, highly integrated agency, everything from data to creative, media to performance is housed under one roof. The teams operate under the same profit-and-loss structure, which helps to foster collaboration between them.
The agency strongly rejects what it calls “lazy, data-heavy automation,” in favour of an approach to creating media that’s designed to meet the practical needs of consumers and appeal to their emotions. Each new campaign is based on a global study that aims to reveal what different audiences value in terms of brand behaviour. It then uses its proprietary AI tools to create hard-hitting media assets that leverage these insights.
Havas Media UK can be highly effective, and its small size means it is much more agile than many of its competitors, allowing it to adjust rapidly to its clients’ needs. But on the other hand, this can also limit its ability to scale.
Compare planning models, not just buying credentials
| Agency | Planning model | Scale advantage | Best for |
| NP Digital | Integrated performance planning | Digital-heavy international brands | Paid + earned + AI-search signals |
| the7stars | Independent media planning | Large UK media accounts | Planning + analytics + commerce |
| Goodstuff | Independent full-funnel media | Commerce and retail advertisers | Media + commerce + measurement |
| EssenceMediacom | Unified discovery planning | Global enterprise advertisers | Media + search + commerce + AI |
| Havas Media UK | AI-enabled network planning | Large multi-channel advertisers | Data + planning + Converged.AI |
Incrementality matters because platforms overlap
When brands grow to a certain size, they usually tend to target several platforms because visibility and outreach across many channels can result in higher rates of return. By enhancing your organic search visibility, this can create higher demand everywhere else. At the same time, social outreach is good for retargeting former buyers who’ve previously purchased from your brand.
For your media marketing partner, they need to show a way to be able to measure this overlap and the incremental gains their content leads to.
Media planning and buying should not be separated
Media planning should not be isolated from media buying. That’s a terrible way to operate because what media boils down to is a tactical battle that can only be won when you have a strong framework. Buying and planning are intimately connected, because the planning team has to shape the strategy and allocate the budget, and then it’s the job of the buying team to execute that. If they’re working alone in siloes, that will kill cooperation, which is a sure-fire way to start wasting media spend. A competent media agency will ensure both teams are connected at the hip.
How to choose from this shortlist
Big budget advertisers that need to balance paid search, social media, programmatic ads, retail media and digital investment should consider one of the larger agencies on this list. The most effective media planning partners have earned their reputation by successfully navigating a multitude of media options on behalf of their clients.
In addition, strong planning teams will be able to tell you why certain strategic decisions were made. Why was money shifted from one channel to another? They’ll show you the reason, and back it up with strong data that shows why this was the right move.
Ideally, your marketing partner will also know when to leave money on the table, as opposed to frittering your monthly budget away on weak or marginal returns. But sadly, this is such a rare thing that if an agency does this, avoiding spending your budget just because it’s available, it’s one of the clearest signs that it can be a reliable partner.
Questions for campaign planners
What is the difference between media planning and media buying?
Planning is about determining the target audience, role, channel mix and budget allocation. Buying is about executing that plan and generating the performance data that can inform future media planning decisions.
What should a media agency prove in its pitch?
It should show how it’s able to estimate incremental gains, handle overlap between platforms and adjust budgets when marginal returns shift.
Does media planning include search and social?
For a digital-heavy advertiser it usually does. The value of media planning is being able to view those channels as part of a larger portfolio, as opposed to distinct areas of focus.
What is a warning sign in media reporting?
If a marketing agency claims it can support several channels with the same conversion rate, without a clear framework for overlap and incremental value, this is a clear red flag.
Which media planning and buying agency should I hire?
If you want a team of seasoned media pros that understands how to coordinate a media programme with paid and organic search and AI chatbot channels, NP Digital should absolutely be at the top of your shortlist. However, the other agencies have their strong points, too.
For instance, the7stars is a solid, partnership-focused independent media agency, while Goodstuff is good for commerce integration. EssenceMediacom is all about scale and frictionless customer journeys, and Havas Media is the right bet when you require an agile, creative and human-focused media team.
Media planning and buying partners earn their money when they create strategies that can adapt to the changing demands and whims of consumers on the fly and demonstrate genuine, long-term growth.
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