Media Planning Essentials Updates

Welcome to the “Media Planning Essentials” updates page. We want to make it easy for you as an instructor to be aware of the updates made to this courseware. As you know, the media planning industry moves fast. We update the material every year to ensure you’re teaching with the most up-to-date, relevant courseware available.

**July 15, 2022**

This latest version of Stukent’s “Media Planning Essentials” features a number of significant updates to ensure students are equipped with the necessary skills to succeed in today’s advertising environment. 

One of the biggest changes you will see is that Commspoint is replaced with a brand new Mimic simulation. While Commspoint offered a great opportunity to learn an industry-facing tool, integrating with the tool was difficult, leaving many students without any hands-on keyboard experience. This new simulation model follows the same logic as Commspoint but takes the student one step further in the process. It provides them nine rounds of activity, allows them to make vehicle selections, and see the impact of their decisions on business outcomes. It also provides a more directed experience, which makes the decision-making a simpler proposition for students. 

The second major change is the reordering of content. The old Offline and Online media chapters have been replaced with format-driven chapters, including Video, Audio, Social Media, Display and Search, and Mobile. It is impossible to separate online and offline media today, and this format allows students to understand how to approach each format in both analog and digital formats. The chapters still include current spending information and updated ad formats. While these chapters are ordered in a way to best scaffold the concepts, they are also fairly independent of each other to give each professor the opportunity to order them in the way they see fit. 

All of the basic concepts remain and much of the original content remains unchanged to make the transition to the new version as seamless as possible. However, a few new concepts have been included. There is a standalone chapter on digital media to provide students with a base of understanding of how digital media works. The media chapters begin with Social Media and provide a definition of walled gardens and a discussion of the impact these companies have on the overall digital landscape. The integrated communications chapter now takes a case study approach, which provides for robust class discussion as well as the opportunity for professors to include their favorite case study examples. Finally, the concluding chapter acquaints students with issues surrounding data privacy, ethics, and regulation.  

We hope that you find this new format easier to use and better aligned to the critical concepts students need to learn to embark on a successful career in advertising and media.

Below, you’ll find a master list of all changes that have been made to the previous version since its original publication date. The table is searchable to make browsing extremely convenient.

FREE Sample Syllabus:
Media Planning Essentials

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