MUDRAPLAN—A DSS for Media Planning: From Design to Utilization

In advertising, media planning consists of deciding where to advertise, what elements of the medium to choose, and how many insertions should appear in each vehicle. The parameters planners consider are cost and reach. Because the relationships between the variables that make up a media plan are nonlinear and often irregular, media planners have difficulty making good decisions consistently. Also it may be difficult to quantify such parameters as impact and recall. We have mathematically modeled the media-planning problem for print media as a nonlinear decision problem. In preliminary use of our DSS, a media agency saved 20 to 30 percent and obtained a solution very different from those generated by traditional trial and error methods.