Paid media
Paid media is the planning and buying side of advertising: deciding which channels a budget goes into, what each placement is expected to do, and what the creative in it should be. CIMA plans and buys across search, social and display for Kuwait and the GCC, and produces the creative that runs in it rather than adapting something made for elsewhere.
What we do
We plan the channel mix against what the campaign is for, buy it, and build the assets to the format rather than resizing a hero image until it fits. Because the studio produces photography and film in house, a media plan that needs nine formats is a production brief rather than a compromise.
- Channel planning and budget allocation
- Search, social and display buying
- Audience and targeting strategy
- Creative built for each placement
- Landing page and destination planning
- Tracking and measurement setup
- Reporting against campaign objectives
How it runs
- 01
Plan
What the campaign is for, which channels can deliver it, and what each is worth.
- 02
Build
Creative made to each placement's format, plus the destination it sends people to.
- 03
Launch
Buying, trafficking and tracking, checked before spend runs.
- 04
Report
Against the objective set at the start, not against whichever metric looks best.
When it is the right call
- A launch that needs reach on a fixed date
- Budget being spent across channels with no plan connecting them
- Creative that was made for one placement and stretched across all of them
- A campaign running across several GCC markets from one plan
In Kuwait and the Gulf
Media planning across the GCC is not one market with six postcodes. Platform mix, cost and seasonality differ by country, Ramadan reshapes consumption and timing every year, and creative usually needs both Arabic and English rather than one translated into the other. A plan that treats the region as uniform tends to underperform in five of the six markets.
Paid media, asked and answered
- What is the difference between paid media and performance marketing?
- Paid media is the planning and buying: which channels, which placements, what creative, what budget. Performance marketing is the discipline of running spend against a measurable outcome and optimising towards it. Paid media can be brand-led with reach as the goal; performance marketing is accountable to leads, sales or installs. Most campaigns need both, and we run them as one team.
- Do you produce the ad creative?
- Yes, in house. It is the main reason to run media with a studio rather than a buying desk: the creative is built to the placement from the start instead of a single asset being cropped until it fits nine formats.
- Do we need our own ad accounts?
- We would strongly recommend it. Accounts and pixels in the client's own name mean the historical data, the audiences and the learning stay with the business if the relationship ever ends. We will work in them rather than holding them.
Talk through a media plan.