jekim1112

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4 Excel tips in media planning for a college senior

I saw a post on Quora in which a university student threw a question about how to use Excel and what is the important functions for the media planner role. When I just started my career, back then, I didn’t know what I could do with Excel either. In fact, I had an Excel certification from Microsoft but, you know, getting certified is actually different from applying the knowledge in real life. Luckily, I met a great boss to mentor me so that I could learn and grow.

Likewise, I’d like to share some Excel tips that I frequently use as a media planner with people who are newer to this area. If you learn proactively and get used to these things before starting your career, it will pave the way for a successful career.

1. Let’s play around with basic media math

There are fundamental metrics we need to know for media planners. For example, CPM, CPC, CTR, and conversion rate, etc. I’m sure that having a good command of manipulating these will be a great asset for your upcoming work life and also lead you to get a sense of relationships between measurements and metrics. Make sure you understand how and why it works. I suggest looking at this blog that would be helpful for you to have a grasp of the metrics!

2. The more you use shortcuts, the quicker you work

If you are comfortable with excel shortcuts, especially when you are soring out raw data and pivoting it in order to look into it in a multi-faceted way, it will be really useful because you don’t waste your quality time anymore. Filtering tables, autofill data, find and replace characters, freezing panes, and jumping between multiple spreadsheets are some examples that I typically use on a daily basis.

Hey there! If there is a media planner who is coming up with something more on this, please leave a comment to support future media planners working with us in the same industry.

3. Charting graph is life

When we devise and present a media strategy to clients, it is normally based on lots of supporting data to back up our market insights by including visual material such as graphs and charts. Since most of the market data is vast and complicated, we resort to graphs with multiple axes & pivot charts.

4. Organizing data is a key to finding meaningful insights

Pivot tables, conditional formatting, protecting spreadsheets with complex formulas by password, VLOOKUP, IF, SUMIF, and IFERROR are my favorite functions that I use a lot. Furthermore, if you are good at Macro which is an advanced excel skill to save tons of time and potential errors, it would be a huge advantage for your future career as well. Please refer to this blog for further information.

Conclusion: Don’t forget the purpose of it all

Be mindful. However important the 4 tips above may be, we shouldn’t lose sight of the goal: persuading your clients.

How well we visualize data in various formats to help our clients easily get the gist of it is the key and that’s why we use Excel, PowerPoint, and various kinds of marketing dashboards.

If you would have a question, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I always welcome enthusiasts. Plus, as a person who has got great help from my colleagues and bosses, I am willing to share my humble knowledge with you who are looking for an opportunity to learn from.

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4 things I've learned from working as a media planner for 12 years

When I was a university student, I dreamed of becoming a copywriter. I’ve always admired creative thinkers and was often inspired by their novel ideas. However, after graduation, I got to have an unexpected job interview one day and I became a media planner dealing with lots of data since then.

Even though I was an up-and-coming media planner who wasn’t fully prepared for the position, I loved my job. For me, media planning was similar to cleaning a room.

Imagine. When you clean your room, you might be bothered because it looks like a lot to do. However, after cleaning it, you can feel a sense of satisfaction that your efforts eventually pay off when you look at the polished room.

Media planning at that time was like this to me. In the beginning, you might be overwhelmed by tons of complex data sets and PPT slide decks, but at the end of the day, you can create some values out of the data and serve your client, which is a very meaningful process.

Here are 4 things I learned in 12 years of media planning.

Work is dignity

To be honest with you, even for me, sometimes media planning looks tedious. Nonetheless, I believe we should approach our job with true enthusiasm and respect. Some people have advised me that if I think as if the media spend is mine, it would make me inspired to achieve better performance. However, I don't agree. If it was my money, I could easily give up. So, I believe thinking like the money isn’t mine makes me more responsible since I am spending my clients' precious money and the success of the execution depends on myself, their media planner.

Honesty is the best policy

Achieving KPI is challenging. The KPI goal is always tight to accomplish and the market situation is getting more competitive every day. So, if you assume you cannot achieve the KPIs, you must be scared of reporting the result to your client. However, you are better at being honest and facing it now from a long-term perspective because that fear you are feeling will be a great motivator for you. After you experienced the extreme feeling, you definitely don't go over that again. Therefore, if it happens, just admit it and then try finding ways to make up as much as you can. Then you can move forward and this way is more realistic.

Reflecting on what you've done is the best teacher

In the professional community, there is no official teacher for you. Don’t be confused, mentors are not your teacher. We need to keep in mind that our biggest critics are ourselves. Try to reflect on what you've done and let yourself think of why you made that mistake, what you could have done better, and how you will deal with the same situation later on. Keep training yourself until you are fully equipped with the skillset that you’ve learned from the lessons.

Measure twice and cut once

For media planners, strong attention to detail is the key qualification for sure. As a professional dealing with complex data, we should pay attention in order to minimize the risks from the misinterpretation of the data. Be focused and precise. As long as you try to be accurate, the result will be more predictable than you don't.

Are you still with me? Thanks. I'd like to introduce this video to you. I think this is a good sharing to give us a sense of who a media planner is, what we do, and what we feel and learn from our daily work.

If you want to share your thought or just be curious about media planning jobs, please feel free to leave a comment below or add me to your valuable LinkedIn network. I always welcome to chat about what I love in what I'm doing.