Effectiveness Matters. Culture Does Too. Your Media Mix Shapes Both.

Over my 23 years in media planning, I've watched billions flow to offshore digital platforms - creating some of the most valuable companies in history. This has had real consequences for local media companies in Singapore and around the world:

▪️ Less money to make local TV shows

▪️ Fewer Journalists, smaller Newsrooms

▪️ Lower investment in the content that builds and reflects local culture

How did we end up here?

Media planners have been trained digital first. They start out in the digital activation team and rise from there. As a consequence they don't plan a linear TV schedule, call a Cinema sales team, decipher a Print rate card or negotiate a Radio deal - not because they don't want to, but because training, certifications and structures prioritise newer digital channels.

Marketers love digital because it enables dashboards with numbers they can show to Finance in real time. It feels accountable, futuristic.

Here's some real numbers:

▪️ Premium TV, CTV and Cinema generate x10-15 more active attention than Social Newsfeed ads

▪️ Over 80% of Social impressions are viewed for less than 1 second, while Premium TV delivers 13.5 seconds

▪️TV drives 71% of advertising-generated profit despite receiving only 25% of budgets

Amazon - one of the most data-driven advertisers in the world - is amongst Singapore's biggest offline buyers because they know it works.

Yet, by 2029, digital will capture 82% of Singapore's ad spend?  Is the pendulum swinging too far? Is this something we should be talking about?

The issue isn't that offline has become harder to plan or less effective. It's that fewer people are being trained to plan and buy it. The skills, the muscle memory, the confidence - they're being lost.

These are solvable problems. And a healthy, local, media ecosystem is worth solving them for.

My goal: keep advertising investment working for our region - supporting local media, local jobs, local journalism, and local stories.

Over the coming months I'll share:

▪️ Research proving offline effectiveness

▪️ How AI can remove the friction from offline planning

▪️ Why the future of media planning is online AND offline

Follow along if you care about keeping ad investment working for our region.