Question 1

What is a media plan, and what does flighting mean?

Accepted Answer

A **media plan** sets out where advertising will run, when, for how much, and to whom. **Flighting** is one of the scheduling patterns it can use — concentrating spend into bursts rather than spreading it evenly.

**What a media plan specifies:**

**Objectives**, and the measures that will judge them.

**The target audience**, defined precisely enough to buy against.

**Channel selection** and the reasoning for each.

**Budget allocation** across channels.

**Timing and scheduling.**

**Reach and frequency targets** — how many people, and how often each.

**Creative requirements** per placement.

**The three scheduling patterns:**

**Continuous.** Steady spend throughout the period. Suits products bought year-round, maintains constant presence, and is generally preferred where memory decay is the main risk.

**Flighting.** Periods of activity alternating with periods of **complete silence**. The rationale is that concentrated spend achieves sufficient frequency to register, where the same budget spread thinly might never cross the threshold of being noticed. Also used to match seasonality — spending when purchases actually occur.

**Pulsing.** A continuous baseline with **bursts** on top. Combines maintained presence with concentrated pushes, and is frequently the practical compromise.

**The argument about which is better.** Flighting relies on advertising's effect persisting through the dark periods — **adstock** or carryover. The counter-argument, associated with research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, is that **buyers enter the market continuously**, so being absent means missing everyone who buys during the gap. That work favours continuous presence and broad reach over concentrated bursts to narrow audiences.

The honest position is that it depends on the purchase cycle: for genuinely seasonal categories, concentrating spend is sensible; for everyday goods bought constantly, continuous presence has better support.

**Other terms a plan uses:** **share of voice** — your advertising as a proportion of the category's; **GRPs** and **TRPs**, gross and targeted rating points; **CPM** and **CPP** as cost measures; and **recency planning**, which prioritises reaching people close to purchase.

Question 2

What is a retail media network, and why is every retailer building one?

Accepted Answer

A retailer selling advertising inventory against its own shopper data — on its website, in its app, in physical stores, and increasingly on other websites entirely. It has become the fastest-growing

Question 3

What is connected TV advertising, and how is it different from linear TV?

Accepted Answer

Advertising delivered to internet-connected television screens — through smart TV apps, streaming services, set-top boxes and games consoles — bought like digital inventory rather than like broadcast

Question 4

What is podcast advertising, and how is it bought?

Accepted Answer

Advertising inside audio programming, and its distinctive property is that a large share of it is read by the host — which is why it performs differently from almost every other advertising format.

Question 5

What is the difference between an agency retainer, a project fee and a commission model?

Accepted Answer

Three ways of paying for marketing services, each creating different incentives — and the incentive structure, more than the headline rate, determines what you actually receive. Retainer. A fixed

Question 6

Are trade shows and events worth it?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes, and rarely for the reason budgets are justified — the value is almost never in leads scanned at the stand, and almost always in conversations that would not otherwise happen. Where the

Question 7

How does influencer marketing actually work?

Accepted Answer

A brand pays someone with an audience to feature its product — and the mechanics of pricing, contracting and disclosure are considerably more structured than the casual appearance suggests. The

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