What do I do in the Telly world?

Seeing as so many lovely people have taken the time to have a gander at my blog in the last three days since it’s ‘launch’, I thought it’d be only right to give you all a quick insight into what exactly it is I do in TV. So here goes...

I’m a Media Planner at ITV.

I’m imagining a few confused faces, so I’ll explain a little more.

What is Media Planning?

According to trusty old Wikipedia, Media Planning is “the task of a media agency and entails finding the most appropriate media platforms for a client's brand or product”. This is loosely true of a Media Planner’s role at ITV, although we have no clients (or rather we ARE the clients) and our media platforms are usually our channels; ITV1, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4 and CITV.

The ITV Media Planning department deals with the scheduling of all the ITV trailers/promotions for our wonderful programmes. Whether it’s Britain’s Got Talent, Celebrity Juice or Titanic, we are charged with the job of working out where in the schedule, according to target audience, all our promotions should go.

We work closely alongside the Continuity and Creative teams. The Continuity team is in charge of pointing the viewer in the direction of another programme that might take their fancy. The continuity announcers are the gorgeous voices you here at the end of each programme, letting you know what’s up next and what else is worth watching in the coming hours/days. 

The continuity team were responsible for scheduling the lovely Royal season Idents around the jubilee weekend:

The Creative team get briefed by Marketing about what to put in any particular promo and they go away and make amazing videos with their magic computer/camera abilities. Videos like this:

Once their marvellous handiwork has been approved by Compliance, the post-production team does lots of fiddly bits to add these promos to a complicated system. Once they’re in the system, the Media Planners can schedule them. After several conversations with the Schedule Build, Junction Management and sometimes Transmission teams, our media plans are already to ‘TX’ (be transmitted).

So next time you see Keith Lemon behaving inappropriately in a Celeb Juice promo on ITV2, have a quick think about just how much effort went into getting him there!