In her first feature for ExchangeWire, our new columnist Jessica Treasure, head of strategy at Bountiful Cow, looks at how most media plans are shaped by what measurement makes easiest, and why advantage lies in what others overlook…

“We usually watch a few series on Netflix or one of the other ones, and if we get to the end of one, we waste whole evenings debating what to watch next.”

That’s a fairly unremarkable comment but it perfectly captures the gap at the heart of planning today. How people consume media is fluid, messy, and human. 

AV planning, by contrast, is built around what can be measured – not how people actually behave. 

This debate has recently reignited following YouTube’s withdrawal from BARB. 

So while the industry talks a good game about Total AV planning, is that really happening in practice?

The uncomfortable reality is that siloed reporting structures end up shaping the planning process itself. There’s the gold standard of BARB reporting, which has led to heavily scrutinised but highly prized, linear TV. 

Then there’s VOD: a hybrid world of partial measurement integration and walled gardens. 

Beyond that sits the wild west of cross-platform programmatic video, often opaque and with questionable delivery quality. 

And finally, short-form video: a completely different viewing and measurement experience, with lower attention, different content quality, and a very different advertising environment.

We are trying to plan for one audience journey, but none of this was designed to work together.

Take the "should YouTube be TV?" debate. YouTube, alongside other social video platforms, is critical for reaching under-35s. But it’s consumed very differently from linear TV and BVOD. Content is shorter, scrolled through quickly, often watched solo and on the move. Don’t get me wrong I also watch YouTube on my TV (as do around 60% of viewers), but the experience is undeniably different, particularly in terms of content quality and attention.

Lumping all of this together from a planner’s perspective blurs the role each format plays within a plan and obscures where true complementarity exists. Meanwhile, agency structures often mirror the problem: TV, AV, social, and programmatic teams optimising locally, rarely designing the system together.

And for planners within network agencies, this problem is compounded further. As planners are often hamstrung by trading structures and deal commitments that favour certain channels, partners or buying routes. 

The consequence is that planners are forced into plans that don’t optimise against real viewing behaviour or, ultimately, what’s right for the brand. Instead, they have to create plans that can be measured and defended. And that measurement is flawed, not because of a lack of data, but because of a lack of genuinely comparable datasets.

Cross-platform planning becomes harder just as cross-platform behaviour becomes normal.

So planners fall back on the familiar, what is most defensible and easiest to justify. Over time, this funnels brands into the same AV choices, chasing the same reach pools, competing on weight rather than difference. 

Anything that doesn’t sit neatly within a measurement framework becomes risky, unproven, or inefficient. Measurement silently defines where planners are allowed to look leading to the standardisation of AV planning.

But it isn’t all doom and gloom. This creates opportunity, but only if you’re brave enough to take it!

Because when most plans are shaped by what measurement makes easiest, advantage lies in what others overlook. 

At Bountiful Cow, we build planning around that principle: a brand won’t win by saying the same thing, in the same places, with less budget. It wins by showing up differently, in places others have undervalued or ignored. 

Planners who understand the limits of AV measurement can use those limits as a map of opportunity - focusing on where brands truly matter to people and planning around those moments, rather than simply counting impressions. 

The most powerful AV opportunities often sit where measurement is least comfortable, because that’s where fewer brands are willing to go.

AV’s biggest blind spot isn’t that we can’t measure everything.

It’s that we’ve stopped planning for the spaces measurement can’t see.