You met paid, owned and earned media in Module 1, as parts of a marketplace map. Now they become the parts of a plan.

• Paid media is space you buy: search ads, social ads, posters, sponsorship.
• Owned media is channels you control: your website, email list, social accounts, packaging and premises.
• Earned media is coverage and sharing you don't pay for: press, reviews, word of mouth, customers' own posts.

Integrated marketing communications means planning all of these so they work together towards one objective, with one idea. Three tests tell you whether a plan is integrated.

1. One idea. Could someone who saw your advert, your email and your shop window say in one sentence what they have in common? The idea comes from the proposition you wrote in Module 4, told in a way people remember.
2. A consistent look and voice. The same colours, logo, tone and key phrase, so each contact adds to the memory the last one left. Consistent doesn't mean identical: a search ad and a video do different jobs.
3. Hand-offs. Each channel should pass people on to a next step. An advert sends people to a page that answers the question it raised; a free sample carries a code that leads to sign-up. A broken hand-off wastes the money spent before it.

Without a plan, most organisations drift the other way: the social posts say one thing, the website another and the price promotion a third.

UK example: Cadbury. On 10 October 2022 the IPA (the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) announced that VCCP's work for Cadbury, "There's a glass & a half in everyone", had won its Effectiveness Awards Grand Prix. The IPA reported that the campaign drove a 22% increase in annual value sales, and that Cadbury's annual revenue was £261m higher in 2021 than in 2017. Kantar's account of the work (February 2023) describes two strands under one idea, generosity: "storytelling", advertising that shows people being generous, and "storydoing", initiatives such as the Secret Santa Postal Service, first run in 2018, which let people send a free bar of chocolate to someone. The adverts and the thing people could take part in told the same story. Those results are the IPA's and Cadbury's; the full award paper sets out the evidence.

You won't have Cadbury's budget, but the test is the same at any size: one idea, told in each place in the way that place needs.

Not all communications do the same job.

Brand building creates memory and preference among the many people who will buy from your category later, though they aren't looking today. Its effects build slowly and last. Think of a distinctive video, a sponsorship or a well-known local presence.

Sales activation prompts people who are ready to buy to act now: a search ad, an offer, a reminder email. Its effects come quickly and fade quickly.

You need both. Activation harvests demand, and much of that demand was created by brand building, often years earlier. Cut the brand building and activation can keep sales up for a while, then it has less to harvest. Brand building alone may be too slow for an organisation that has to hit this quarter's numbers.

The evidence. Les Binet and Peter Field studied campaigns in the IPA's databank of Effectiveness Awards entries. In The Long and the Short of It (IPA, 2013) they found that, on average, the most effective campaigns put about 60% of spend into brand building and 40% into activation. Read it carefully:

• It's an average across many categories and brands, not a rule for yours. The IPA describes their later report, Effectiveness in Context (2018), as showing how the best mix can differ with brand type and context.
• The data come from award entries, which lean towards campaigns that worked.
• Your organisation, its budget and its category may look very different from the brands in that databank.

So treat 60:40 as a starting question, not an answer.

What this means for a small organisation. Brand building doesn't have to mean television. Consistent packaging, useful content, sampling, a community and local press can all build memory. When you choose your balance, ask three questions:

• The category: do people buy it often or rarely, and do they search when they need it, as they do for an emergency plumber?
• The objective: is it a short-term target, or growth over years?
• How customers buy: from your path to purchase, how much of the decision is made before anyone searches?

A short, sharp target pushes the balance towards activation. Just be honest that you're borrowing from memory that someone else, or an earlier campaign, built. Write the balance down with your reasons, so you can test it later.

Media planning decides which channels to use, how much of each and when. Start from your customer, not from the channels your organisation happens to use already.

Match channels to stages. You mapped a path to purchase for your persona in Module 3. Now give each stage a channel with a clear job.

A stage with no channel is a gap. Two channels doing the same job at the same stage may be a waste.

Reach and frequency. Reach is how many of your target audience see a message at least once. Frequency is how many times, on average, those people see it. Too little frequency and you're forgotten; too much and you pay to annoy the same people. Brand building usually needs reach. Activation needs to be in front of the right people at the right moment.

Phasing. Timing matters as much as choice. You can run always on, in bursts, or building to a peak. You met seasonality in Module 6: if your customers buy before Christmas or in spring, plan the money to arrive before the peak, not during it.

One communications objective. You set KPIs with baselines in topic 6; now each campaign needs one communications objective, written as a KPI moving from its baseline to a target by a date. Every channel's job should help that one number move.

AI activity. Give an AI assistant your campaign budget, your objective and the stages of your path to purchase, with no personal or confidential data. Ask it for three different ways to split the budget across channels. Then challenge each split against your path and your baselines. Which stage does each channel serve? Is any stage empty? Note every assumption it made that you can't support, such as a cost per click or a conversion rate it didn't get from you. Keep the three splits and your notes in your portfolio: they show your judgement.

You now know what the plan needs to do. The budget has two questions: how much in total, and how to split it.

Setting the total. Four common methods, each with a weakness:

• Percentage of revenue: simple, but backwards. When sales fall, the budget falls, just when you might need it most.
• Matching competitors: you rarely know what they spend, and their objectives aren't yours.
• What you can afford: whatever is left over, with no link to what you're trying to achieve.
• Objective and task: list the tasks needed to meet the objective, cost each one, and add them up. It's the most defensible, and the hardest, because you have to estimate what each task will achieve.

In practice many managers start from objective and task, then check the total against what the organisation can afford. Say which method you used; a finance team will ask.

Splitting it. Working spend buys media that reaches people: ads, search clicks, promoted posts. Non-working spend pays for everything else: making the content, agency fees, tools, managing the work. Some costs, such as sampling at events, could go either way; decide, and say how you counted them. Too little non-working spend and you buy plenty of space for weak work. Too much and good work is seen by too few people.

Contingency is a part of the budget held back for problems or opportunities you can't predict: a channel that works better than expected, or creative that needs fixing. Decide in advance who can release it, and for what.

The target cost per new customer. Divide the budget by the extra customers you need. "Extra" matters: you set baselines in Module 6, and some customers would arrive anyway. Counting them makes the campaign look cheaper than it is. The answer is a limit to watch: if a channel brings customers in at more than this, question it. Whether the limit is affordable depends on what a customer is worth, which comes later in the course.

Your task. Read the worked example first. Then set a budget for one objective from your strategic audit and split it in the Communications Budget Calculator. If your organisation has no budget you can see, use a stated assumption, such as a share of its published revenue, and label it as an assumption.