As media planners and strategists, it’s our job to understand audiences, the majority of which don’t live where we live, watch what we watch, or vote how we vote.
Therefore, we should be constantly suspicious of our own opinions and biases.
Instead, it feels like the industry rewards the opposite. Recommendations conform to the industry world view, the latest trends, or what is viewed as culturally and intellectually 'sophisticated'. Because if they don’t, you can feel out of touch and sometimes a little embarrassed.
But effectiveness results don’t discriminate. If something feels uncomfortable around an agency boardroom, then perhaps that could be a good thing? Otherwise, the consequence is actively editing potentially effective media channels, messaging, and cultural cues out of plans because they simply feel wrong to us.
The first bias to explore is the novelty bias. Agencies are constantly being asked to demonstrate 'innovation'. We create innovation teams, enter innovation awards, talk at conferences to showcase our media-first partnerships and campaigns. Newness has a professional and personal incentive for planners, independent from whether it actually works.
The result is that we can unconsciously set different standards of evidence. Established media has to continually prove it still works, while the new shiny thing can sometimes be recommended on the basis of, at best, its potential; at worst, a hunch.
Profit Ability 2 shows the enduring effectiveness of TV, yet total UK ad investment in TV dropped 14% 2001 vs. 2025. A recent WARC study of marketer sentiment found 39% planning to withdraw spend from TV over the next year.
Perhaps that's why our industry has a habit of declaring media channels dead long before people actually stop using them.
TV is dead, anyone?
On a similar theme, media consumption bias leads planners to optimise plans based on what they consume, rather than what actually works in the real world, as highlighted in the Ipsos / Thinkbox Adnormal Behaviour study.
Media planners do not demonstrate normal media consumption behaviour. We are paid to be interested in media, we try new platforms early, we understand ad products, we discuss them all day long with colleagues.
The echo chamber is real. Nobody watches that. Nobody on my socials is talking about it. Nobody is using that platform anymore. Therefore, it’s not relevant, not important.
But just being absent from planners’ lives is not evidence of its absence from anyone else’s.
The result is that channels, contexts, and audiences risk being underweighted not because the data tells us they don't work, but because planners (or clients) would never consume them themselves.
This bias extends into political bias. Whilst we think that the industry is open minded, curious, and inclusive, politically, it is left-leaning. When everyone around you believes the same things are problematic and outdated (or on the flip side, progressive and modern), it is very easy to assume the rest of the country does too. And that becomes a planning problem.
An audience’s political vote is a reflection of their attitude and identity, which informs the media they trust, the celebrities they aspire to, and even their humour. If these do not meet the industry standard of acceptability, we risk editing huge swathes of people out of plans. Dismissing certain news outlets, broadcasters, tones of voice, and personalities because they feel uncomfortable.
We don’t like what it says about us as planners, without asking: is this how the audience feel?
So, what do we do? We are human and will always have inherent biases. Even AI is built with biases (UN study 2026 found 44% AI systems had gender bias, 26% had gender & racial bias). So we can’t just default to the machines.
Of course, there are structural changes we can make such as recruitment policies, making sure we have a broader reflection of the UK in the agency room to start with.
We can reclaim some planning behaviours that perhaps we have lost along the way. Spending time with media we would never personally consume. Talking to people outside of the agency bubble who actually use the product or service you are trying to advertise.
Then we need to make sure agencies have the structural and intellectual freedom to recommend the right plan, even if it does make us feel a little uncomfortable.