As Media Planners Resign in Droves, a Competitive Opportunity Awakens

It’s that time of year when management trainees at Pakistan’s top media agencies are poised to resign. After months of being taught research, scheduling, modelling, and negotiations, the trainees of the top five media agencies are poised to become sales staff at either Google or Meta, or in-house brand managers with local companies, and ideally in-house media liaisons with multinational consumer goods companies. One may think the reasons for this exodus are purely financial, when in fact, it has a lot to do with the job itself and its refusal to evolve. Talent and culture teams that hate taking the time to understand their human assets, who they call resources, find ways to rationalise the resignations as being about money. Supervisory teams find ways to rationalise the resignations as being about generational privilege. C-suite executives rationalise the resignations as being a symptom of entitlement. Key sources at the media agencies controlling roughly 75% advertising expenditure (AdEx) spending in Pakistan suggest that there is an entirely different problem, one which was also echoed by ad industry pundit the AdMadDude: the scheduling part of a media planners job is outdated, boring, and should have been automated decades ago. “Media planners deal with an overwhelming amount of data—specifically, 20,000 rows of information across 100 channels,” said Waleed Ahmed, an associate director for Publicis Media at Brainchild. “This means I have to analyze vast datasets to create effective media strategies. The problem arises from the sheer volume and complexity of this data. It requires extensive time and effort to sift through and interpret, which leads to burnout and frustration.” Managing this amount of information is not only time-consuming but also mentally taxing, making it difficult to focus on strategic decision-making. The pressure to deliver results while navigating this complexity is a significant challenge in my role, contributing to high turnover rates in the industry. It is in the golden age of AI, where every Tom, Dick, and Harry is conjuring up a wrapper around the largest LLMs, Pakistan’s recently graduated media planners are concerned about working for a company that has held on to a standard operating procedure (SOP) that should have gone extinct by the mid-2010s. “The method used today for TV scheduling is the same one that was used by the CEO of Pakistan’s largest media agency when he started his career in the mid-90s – that needs to change,” said Muhammad Ali Rehman, a founding partner at Hefazat Technologies. “Nearly every media agency in Pakistan operates TV scheduling with a dataset of around 20,000 rows and manually compiles and analyzes the data to create a media plan. This process takes around a week to complete. They also have to manually adjust the plan to fit their budget, which can lead to inconsistencies and errors. And anyone with a slice of IT knowledge that APIs and IFTTT engineering can conjure up an automated solution in days, if not hours.” Such a solution could save media planning trainees – that just graduated from a university that forced them to endure Excel and mundane SOPs – hours of their lives. Such a solution also means that whatever morsel of the media planning job can be creative, can be the focus of the job. It also means that whatever personal preference edits of the client and of the planner themselves can be properly tracked. For without such a tool and with a reliance on the current SOP for scheduling, sources at Pakistan’s top media agencies have shared a number of ways costly mistakes are being made, wasting and misallocating AdEx – which impacts costs of acquisition, impacting costs of products, impacting final price. Media planners and trainees that spoke with this scribe explained that the current SOP for scheduling has resulted in record levels of: Planners that spoke to this scribe explained that these concerns were communicated to supervisors and to HRBPs – during employment and during the exit interview – with no change set in motion. They lamented that existing processes are heavily calculation-based, and attempting to do them manually was inefficient. There was a clear need for automation to streamline the planning process and reduce the workload on media planners. Where there was no psychological safety with supervisors or HRBPs, planners did not express their perspectives for fear of retaliation. The unspoken issues highlighted the need for a more efficient, standardized, and automated solution to improve the media planning process and enhance the overall effectiveness of the team’s work. “The advertising industry – particularly the media agencies with French and British affiliations – should develop a Pakistan specific tool that takes into account channel-wise ratings, hour-wise ratings, and day-wise ratings to provide a comprehensive view of the media landscape,” said Sheikh Danish Ejaz, the founder of Madzine, a regional trade publication that specialises in covering the advertising industry. “Similar tools already exist for digital media planning and adapting them for TV is a matter of will.” Ejaz said that such a localised tool should ideally come from ratings giant MediaLogic or media venture accelerator Z2C Limited to help media planners with: “Unlike the existing tools held by affiliated agencies, a localised tool would be tailored specifically to the Pakistani market, taking into account local data points and market nuances,” said Ejaz. “The first-mover advantage to any media agency is for the talent war – providing a competitive advantage and reducing talent attrition rates, as planners are no longer required to perform manual and tedious tasks.” Rehman said that the media agency that develops such a tool should link it to the company’s ERP system, enabling seamless integration and automation of the media planning process. He said this will further enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of media services.