The New Media Mindset
Aug 25, 2025
A collaborative media operation
Media still runs on Excel.
While finance runs on ERP systems, sales thrives with CRMs, and operations rely on supply chain platforms, media teams are left piecing together spreadsheets, PowerPoints, and fragments of data from agency reports.
It's ironic when you think about it. Media represents one of the largest budget lines (5-15% of total revenue), yet it operates without any foundational infrastructure. Traditional media management has meant outsourcing to agencies, but without shared infrastructure, this compounds the problems.
It's time to change that.
The new media mindset is about shifting from client-vendor relationships to becoming equal partners with your agency. And with AI advancing rapidly, we're building towards a future where your operating system actively collaborates with you as a digital agent that understands your media investments and helps navigate complex decisions.
We're not suggesting you should replace your agency. We're advocating for far more effective collaboration based on a shared operating system, where you both have access to real-time data, view the same performance insights and align on future media plans.
What this guide contains
This guide shows you the exact tools that can help you make the fundamental shift to a more strategic and collaborative media operation:
Step 1: Collect and standardise your data
Step 2: Build better plans together
Step 3: Track your media performance
Step 4: Turn data into intelligence
Step 5: Define your strategic direction
The operating system built for media teams
Here's what might surprise you: there's a good chance your media data is already flowing through our system. Global Media Platform is the system of record for post-buy data - the infrastructure that powers €227B of media investments for hundreds of global advertisers.
But we've built something much bigger than data collection. We empower companies with the foundational infrastructure needed to secure accountability and improve performance through a unified data structure and an end-to-end set of connected media systems.
Let's break down how this operating system works to help media teams become equal partners with their agencies.

Step 1: Collect and standardise your data
It always starts with data, the ultimate enabler for everything your marketing team wants to accomplish. Taking ownership means bringing media data into your own infrastructure instead of relying on fragmented agency reports.
No more "Can you send me the latest numbers?" emails. Instead, you have direct and immediate access to your data when you need it.
This isn't just about better reporting. Your structured data foundation unlocks customer analytics, effectiveness measurement, AI capabilities - all the strategic marketing analysis that requires clean, consistent data.
But having data isn't enough
Especially if that data is coming from various tools and agencies. It'll create more problems than it solves. If you're running a global media operation, you need a global media taxonomy.
When all your data speaks the same language, post-buy reporting becomes simple and consistent.
How Global Media Platform validates and standardises your data

Your offline and online media delivery data is ingested into our platform, where it's mapped to a global taxonomy framework.
Our Media AI automatically validates data accuracy and prevents inconsistent data from entering the system whilst flagging discrepancies. This eliminates the need for manual data corrections later, saving you and your team hours of data reconciliation.
So, delivery data reads the same across all markets from day one. Hundreds of metrics across TV, radio, digital, print, and out-of-home across all your markets are standardised and consistent.
Step 2: Build better plans together
How do you systematically apply your data foundation across your entire media portfolio?
Plan where the data lives
Because Global Media Platform is an all-in-one operating system, you can plan campaigns in the same place as your delivery data. The advantage of this is that every plan is grounded in your validated data and learnings. And our Media AI uses this integrated data to suggest optimised scenarios and recommendations during your planning sessions.
When everyone works in the same system to make future plans, silos disappear and both advertisers and agencies share the same understanding of strategy, execution and next steps.

The adjust loop: Collaborative planning meets real-time optimisation
The real power is connecting planning and campaign performance in one continuous cycle. We call this the Adjust Loop, linking collaborative planning directly with live campaigns so you can act on opportunities the moment they appear.
Because campaign performance flows into the same system where you plan, you can make adjustments while campaigns are running, and improve the next campaign in the pipeline. This means faster course correction and fewer missed opportunities. Over time, the Adjust Loop creates a rhythm of continual improvements so each campaign performs better than the last.

Step 3: Track your media performance
Our Campaigns solution is the command centre for all media activity (campaigns that are planned and with actual delivery data). One place to track delivery against plans and stay on top of performance.
No more waiting for agency updates or wondering if budgets are on track. With Campaigns you have real-time visibility so you can easily collaborate with your agencies to optimise performance while it still matters (not weeks after the campaign completes).

Campaign timelines, to summarise it all
Here's what you can explore:
Launch timing: Did campaigns launch on time and stay on schedule?
Performance gaps: Identify over/underperformance before it's too late
Budget pacing: See if spend is lopsided or off pace, and adjust in real time
Channel efficiency: Evaluate how each channel is performing
Quality metrics: Understand impact quality (how many ads were actually viewed)
Reallocation opportunities: Identify underperforming areas and reallocate spend accordingly
Step 4: Turn data into strategic intelligence
Campaign learnings often stop at the campaign. Without the ability to analyse performance across brands, markets, and your entire media portfolio, valuable learnings remain siloed and optimisation happens in isolation.
Insights changes that. It's an analytics solution designed to go deeper than any one campaign: surfacing patterns, trends, and strategic opportunities across your full media portfolio. It's a shared space for advertisers and agencies to align on what worked, what didn't, and where to improve.

Identify patterns that matter
Insights can surface optimisation opportunities across the entire portfolio. You can identify patterns across brands, campaigns, and markets, then work with your agency to establish a mutual set of strategic recommendations.
Our Media AI works within Insights to automatically analyse data patterns and to provide you with strategic recommendations and optimisation opportunities across your portfolio.
"Market A is overspending on low-viewability inventory. Market B has much lower CPMs on the same platform. Let's rebalance."
It's a much more collaborative and transparent way for media professionals to work with their agencies to reallocate budgets, standardise best practices, and eliminate waste.
Step 5: Define your strategic direction
One of the big challenges in running global media is making sure good ideas are implemented consistently. A winning tactic gets identified with agreement to roll it out globally. But months later, you discover only some markets made the change, because there is no systematic way to track strategy adoption.
Set the rules that guide investment
Media Guardrails solve this problem. It's a dedicated space to define planning principles and strategic thresholds. Here, you can set parameters such as audience priorities, media mix ratios, or performance benchmarks that can be applied to campaigns across markets. This ensures that what works in one market is systematically applied everywhere and that its impact can be measured.

The learn loop: Evolving your strategy
The real power of Media Guardrails is the Learning Loop it creates. Insights from campaign analysis can be fed directly into your guardrails, refining them as you discover what works best. This creates a continuous cycle of optimisation, making your media investment approach smarter with each iteration.

Ready to stop chasing updates?
Fragmented data, delayed insights, disconnected planning—they all share a common root cause: the lack of a proper operating system for media management.
By taking control of your media data and putting the right system in place, you move from chasing to confidently steering strategy. Media stops being reactive and starts becoming a true driver of impact.
And the dynamics between you and your agency change, to an equal partnership that is empowered by shared infrastructure.
Ready to see how it works? Let's bring this operating system to your media operations.