Why working media still has to work
I’m in the thick of motherhood with two young kids, where getting out the door can feel like an Olympic sport. I also travel frequently for a job I love, and somewhere between packing for everyone else and packing for myself, I’ve become a panic packer.
My instinct is to prepare for every possible scenario. Another pair of shoes? Sure. Extra outfit? Probably. Something I haven’t worn in two years but might suddenly need on a two-day trip? Throw it in.
More feels safer. More feels prepared. Until you’re carrying it through the airport for a 6 a.m. flight.
A 6 a.m. flight is a ruthless editor. At 4:30 in the morning, every unnecessary bag, stop and step feels deeply personal. You stop being impressed by options and start asking better questions: Do I need this? Is it helping? Can we please just get where we’re going?
Lately, I’ve found myself asking versions of those same questions in conversations with clients, partners and colleagues across our industry.
Media has never given us more options. We have more data, more technology, more platforms, more partners and more ways to optimize. AI is changing how people access information. Search and discoverability are rapidly changing with it. Content, creators, platforms and AI-assisted planning are collapsing what used to be a more linear path from inspiration to booking.
There will only be more.
The challenge isn’t eliminating that complexity. It’s knowing what deserves our attention within it.
Because eventually, adding becomes easier than deciding.
Transparency Is Table Stakes
Transparency is a good place to start. It is a terrible place to finish.
Our industry has been talking about transparency for years. Clients should know where their media dollars go, what they are paying for, where their ads appear and what data is available. Brand safety, fraud prevention and responsible data practices should be nonnegotiable.
Those expectations have made media better. But they aren’t new. And repackaging a long-standing expectation doesn’t make it innovation.
The same is true of many things positioned as innovation in media today. Agencies can promise tools, automation, scale, access and efficiency. Those capabilities matter, but increasingly they are the infrastructure of modern media – not the strategy itself.
Innovation should create new value. It should help us see something we couldn’t see before, make a decision we couldn’t make before or solve a problem in a meaningfully better way.
That is a much higher bar.
The ANA’s Programmatic Transparency Benchmark reinforces the distinction. Advertisers with stronger quality governance converted 56.7% of programmatic spending into qualified impressions, compared with 37.5% among lower performers. The difference wasn’t simply lower fees. It was better execution and more of the budget doing its job.
The receipt is not the result.
Knowing where every dollar went tells us what we bought. It doesn’t tell us whether we bought the right things, reached the right traveler or changed an outcome.
A larger slice labeled “working media” may look good in a pie chart. But working media still has to work.
Judgment Is the Advantage
For more than 45 years, MMGY has navigated economic cycles, changing consumer behavior and major shifts in data, technology and media. There has always been a next disruption: the decline of Flash, the rise of privacy regulation, the cookieless future, increased pressure for transparency and now AI.
The technology changes. The fundamental job doesn’t.
We still must understand our target, identify what business problems we need to solve, and make good decisions about where to invest.
Most agencies can access many of the same buying platforms, inventory sources, data sets and audience filters. Access to a DSP is a login, not a strategy.
The advantage is what you do with it.
And that becomes even more important as the travel journey fragments. Search, social, content creators, partnerships, paid media and AI-assisted planning increasingly collide in real time. The lines between discoverability, influence, and conversion are disappearing.
The strongest work recognizes those connections. Programmatic precision cannot rescue weak creative. Great creative cannot overcome poor distribution. And neither matters much if a travel brand is absent when someone turns to Google, TikTok or ChatGPT for an answer.
Technology can process more signals than ever. It can automate decisions and surface opportunities at a speed we couldn’t have imagined a decade ago. But more technology also makes human judgment more important, not less.
Someone still has to know what matters, what it means and what to do next.
Pack What Earns Its Place
This is where simplification matters.
Simplification is the discipline to make choices within complexity.
Every channel, audience, technology and partner should have a clear job and add something distinct. When five partners claim the same booking, either the traveler booked the same vacation five times or the attribution model is feeling a little generous.
Before adding another tactic, ask what it contributes. What will we learn? What outcome should it change? What does it do that something else in the plan doesn’t? And what would happen if we left it out?
That is a more meaningful definition of media value.
Not the most tools. Not the most partners. Not the most channels. Not even the highest percentage of a budget that can technically be labeled “working media.”
More value from every media dollar. Real accountability against the result.
The strongest media plans aren’t the ones with the most boxes checked. They’re the ones where every investment has a reason to exist, every partner has a distinct role and the outcome matters more than the complexity required to produce it.
Which brings me back to that suitcase.
Having room for something doesn’t mean you need to pack it.
Sometimes the smartest addition to a media plan is subtraction.
