Our beloved Associate Media Director, Becky Swepston, is getting married at the end or March. Today she shares how her media planning and buying skills have helped her to plan her upcoming wedding!
After working in media planning and buying for eleven years, it is easy to see how it carries over to my everyday life. I am sure everyone gains valuable skills in their careers, but I am constantly getting compliments on how I approach every day activities using my media planning and buying skill set. I am a planner at heart, and I use spreadsheets to plan and organize everything from grocery lists to house projects. My Business Analyst fiancé and I often battle over who starts a spreadsheet first and which one is the most helpful. I have negotiated everything from my rent, to a car, to hotel rooms, to a couch! There are very few things that I don’t approach in this way – including my wedding.
Wedding planning is a beast and it is hard to know where to start; much like a media plan. I started by laying out all our planning parameters: timing, budget, geography, guest count, timeline. Once those were determined, we could focus on our objectives. What did we want to accomplish? A meaningful ceremony, an awesome party and a carefree day for our guests. That meant things like the venue, good food, booze (can we say open bar!), shuttles, and an awesome DJ were prioritized and allocated the necessary budget. But how were we going to afford everything else? We had to get strategic! With a March wedding, we are talking off season. I negotiated with every vendor we hired because the demand was lower. I sent out requests to more people than necessary to get a baseline of cost (RFP stage!), compared vendors against each other and got the best deal (buying stage!). We leveraged our current assets and borrowed table décor from previous weddings and had justification for each item that we were going to spend money on (tactical rationale!). Lastly, we had to decide what just wasn’t feasible based on our parameters, goodbye helicopter entrance and grand chocolate fountain (considered but not recommended!)!
As we were planning our honeymoon (another beast in itself!) I found myself asking St. Lucia resorts what else they could do for us since we were celebrating our honeymoon. Throw in the “romance package”? Great! Free private airport transfers? We’ll take it! Champagne in our room? Sounds perfect! (ADDED VALUE!).
At Explore, we take these steps everyday to ensure our clients advertising budgets are maximized and we are extremely proud of the end results; why not leverage it in our personal lives?!