Start-up agency Meerkat Media is backing Oxford University’s Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz’ thesis that media reach planning has peaked and new channel and audience planning frameworks are needed, market-wide.

The agency’s co-founder and executive chairman Lee Stephens, and Managing Director Per Tinberg, are placing their bets on ‘media moments’ – media is selected based on where and when target audiences are most receptive.

Last week, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz told Mi3 media planning based on meeting audience reach targets was not working – he analysed data from 1,000-plus campaigns tracked by Kantar and found while most advertisers were near fully optimised on hitting optimal reach objectives, the associated business impacts were marginal. 

Stephens said the academic research was “reflecting reality” – new planning approaches were long overdue, he said.

Stephens also flagged advertisers needed to “own their tech and tools” in media to align with better privacy governance and minimise the flow of data in and out of companies. But media moments was the big play, he said. 

“We're not measuring clicks and impressions anymore, we're actually getting a firm objective out of clients, and only one objective – you can't have four – and actually delivery against media moments to achieve that objective,” he said.

"Part of it’s share of attention, but we’ve got to focus on the moments that are most important to those audiences – and they're all different and they're all based on deep research. You don't just go out there and see digital out of home and say, ‘it’s digital, let's do some of that’ with some blunt audience data to back it up. Channel planning has to move to being based on the message, the canvass size to deliver the message – and at the time an audience is actually open to receiving the message."

Easier said than done but Stephens said part of the solution was more customisation to beat complexity around specific client and brands. 

He cited the common practice of buying audience segments from media owners and trading desks that had set algorithms for specific sectors. “There’s no competitive advantage there,” he told Mi3. “If you're a bank and you go to The Trade Desk, and say well, ‘I'm a bank and here's my ads’, their algorithm says, ‘oh, I've got a bank algorithm so I give this algorithm to all the banks’. But they’re not going to tell you what that is so every bank is getting the same algorithm.

Stephens said Meerkat were developing algorithms based on “real clients data, their real customers and their real customer behaviour. It's much more efficient, saves money, and stops too many impressions hitting people over and over”.

The agency officially launched this week – Stephens and Tinberg said it was designed for a more strident privacy regime, including an agency policy that its clients must own the tech they use to minimise potential breaches on data flows. 

“We won’t rent clients these tools,” Tinberg sad. “They're going to own them because you don't want the data integrity risk of passing data to and from something we're renting to them. They're going to own their systems, their own data – and they're going to protect their own privacy in their own environments."

Stephens said it included much of what was coming out of the US tech sector. “You subscribe to a shiny new box out of the US, these data pipes go backwards and forwards – we're concerned about the privacy legislation coming through and just the inherent data risk, because we’ve seen Medibank and Optus [data breaches]. Our clients aren't big enough to weather those storms."

Stephens said the business had strong growth ambitions focused on the mid-market and was set up as an unlisted public company. 

“That just allows you to sell shares to partners and employees can get in. You can very elegantly get them in and out – it’s much harder as a private company but it just means the team can share in the wealth.”

The structure is the same as Clemenger’s decades-long unlisted company structure before selling out to Omnicom’s BBDO network.