TV optimizer: New step in media hiring and planning
The biggest reason why the industry is embracing optimizers now is because it needs them to manage the number of options available for a typical media plan. In 1980, when a national TV advertising plan was constructed from a base of about 20 viable national TV outlets, a media planner could do a reasonable job of sorting through the potential combinations to come up with an optimal plan. That year media planner had about 1,024 viable combinations to consider. But in 1998, with 100 national TV outlets that same media planner would need to process 1.125 quadrillion different combinations to arrive at the optimum mix for a given plan. That is simply too many variables for a human being to process and is the greatest argument for the development of optimizers. Optimizer is a tool that allow us to achieve communications objectives in a reasonably efficient manner. Optimizers are not going to replace the inherent skill of a good media planner. What they're going to do is let him go through a number of options quickly and then pick one that's quickly and then pick one that's best suited for his communications objectives.