Where the advertising money should go, and how you will know whether the answer was right.
Most media allocations are last year's allocation with an adjustment. The split between channels was set by someone who has left, defended by whoever owns each channel, and never read as a single question. Meanwhile the measurement available inside the large platforms credits them with results they did not necessarily produce.
The result is a budget that looks deliberate and is not.
Video. Display and programmatic. Paid social. Paid search. Audio. Out-of-home and contextual. Direct response and owned. Every channel a business can buy falls into one of these seven, which is what makes them comparable.
Each is read through the four lenses: does it pay, does it build recognition, does it open future options, and can this organisation actually run it. The reading then resolves to one of seven instructions.
The seven media instructions. Increase. Hold. Reallocate. Pause. Exit. Trial. Test. Each carries a timeline, a named owner inside the business, and a date when it will be checked.
You provide what already exists: the media plan, the budget, whatever channel results you hold, brand tracking if you run it, and time with the people who own the plan. The first job is a declaration: which audience the spend is aimed at, what behaviour it is meant to shift, and by what mechanism. Awareness is not an answer, and the reading does not start until there is one.
Every channel then gets read through four lenses: what it earns, what it builds in the buyer's memory, what future options it creates, and whether your business can actually run it well. Favourite channels do not skip the awkward lenses, and unfashionable ones do not skip the flattering ones. The four readings combine into one call per channel, weighted by evidence rather than seniority.
What arrives is not a report. Each channel carries one instruction from a set of seven, a stated level of confidence in that instruction, a named owner inside your business, and the date the call gets checked. Where the evidence is thin, the instruction says so, and says what would firm it up.
Illustrative composites, drawn from the pattern of engagements rather than from any identifiable client. Figures are indicative.
Marketing-mix modelling yields elasticities. Multi-touch attribution yields a narrative that the platform selling the media is delighted to supply. Volume III composes both into a single interval-scored instruction and publishes it before the money moves, which is the one step neither tradition has shown much appetite for. Attribution has spent fifteen years getting better at explaining the past to people who needed a decision about next quarter.
And commercially: you get an instruction, not another dashboard.
Twelve months after a reading, the instruction is compared against what happened. The result is recorded whether or not it is flattering. For media the method is built to a design target of 0.79, drawn from a development cohort of thirty readings. That figure is a target, not a result, and it will be replaced by the observed number once the register is running.
A media reading settles one question: where next year's budget should sit, channel by channel, and how sure anyone should be about each move. Every channel leaves with one instruction, a stated level of confidence, a named owner and a check date. It starts small: you describe the decision in front of you, and Rob reads whether the method fits it. Send one sentence: what is the decision you are trying to make?