Choosing channels based on audience behaviour, not habit
Launch library · evergreen read
Habit is a powerful trap in channel planning. A practitioner who has always used a certain mix of channels tends to reach for it again, not because the audience is there, but because the process is familiar, the reporting templates already exist, and a familiar plan is simply easier to defend in a meeting.
Audience behaviour changes faster than most channel plans admit. Where people spend their attention shifts with age, occasion and platform fatigue, and a channel that performed well eighteen months ago may now be reaching a shrinking or disengaged slice of the audience it once served well.
The correction is not exotic. It means starting channel selection from evidence of where the specific audience currently pays attention, rather than from the media plan used on the last brief. It also means being willing to retire a channel that has served the agency well but no longer serves the audience.
None of this means channel habits are always wrong, since a channel can remain genuinely effective for years. The discipline lies in testing the assumption regularly rather than accepting it by default, using audience data rather than internal comfort as the deciding factor, and treating every channel plan as a hypothesis worth checking rather than a fixed inheritance from the last campaign.