Why Do All Media Plans Look the Same Now?

“Isn’t it a bit boring spending in the same place and doing the same thing again and again?”

That was Imogen Fox from The Guardian, speaking at Campaign’s Year Ahead event in London last week. And she’s right. Though boring is the least of it.

The panel was discussing why brands remain so reluctant to diversify away from Meta, Google and Amazon, a trio predicted to capture 56.1% of global media spend this year. Jellyfish’s Stephanie Parry called out the “homogeneity” of these platforms. Zenith UK CEO Sannah Rogers warned that this level of concentration “risks weakening our media landscape.”

But for me, the most telling comment came from Richard Kirk at EssenceMediacom:

“I worry the ill effects of a poor diet are not felt quickly or powerfully enough to override the sugar rush of short-termism.”

That’s the crux of it. We’ve built an industry that optimises for convenience, not effectiveness.

Walk into most agencies today and you’ll see the same media plan being built for wildly different briefs.60% YouTube.40% Meta. Maybe some TikTok if the client’s feeling adventurous.

Different categories. Different objectives. Different audiences. Same base media plan.

This is what happens when test-and-learn becomes the default approach to media optimisation.

You start with a diverse plan. The algorithm tests what “works” according to platform metrics view-through rates, reach, completion. Anything that underperforms against those measures is cut. What survives are the formats that reliably hit those benchmarks: short, high-reach, easily optimised inventory.

Once something has been eliminated, it rarely comes back. It becomes codified as “best practice,” with no mechanism to revisit whether the original measurement framework was asking the right question in the first place. Over time, the system narrows. Eventually, it backs you into a corner.

And now we can put a price on it.

Karen Nelson-Field’s latest research with Peter Field and Adam Morgan, The Cost of Dull Media, found that around 75% of digital ads receive less than 2.5 seconds of active attention. That is the minimum threshold required for memory formation.

The financial impact is staggering. An estimated $198 billion in wasted media spend every year in the US alone, just from formats that fail to hold human attention long enough to work.

That is not a rounding error. It is a structural failure in how media is planned and bought.

Yet most media plans ignore this entirely. When holding companies own trading desks with volume commitments, when the platforms themselves provide the measurement frameworks used to evaluate them, is it any surprise that plans converge on the same few places?

This is the conversation we need to have. Whether our current approach to planning has created an unhealthy, homogeneous media diet and whether it is time to start diversifying again.

If you’re in Singapore and want to dig into this properly, I’m moderating a debate at Mediacorp Campus on 18 March: Uncomfortable Conversations: Why Do Media Plans Look the Same Now?