How to Build a Media Plan That Thrives in Economic Uncertainty

Marketing decision-makers are facing increasing pressure as they grapple with shifting market dynamics, changing consumer behaviors, and budgetary belt-tightening by leadership. Media planning in economic uncertainty must prioritize flexibility, clear attribution, and dynamic budget allocation. In this blog, we discuss how brands can adapt their media strategies to thrive despite increasing volatility.

The Impact of Economic Uncertainty on Media Planning

2025 has been a challenging year for many industries, and marketing departments are feeling the strain. The announcement of tariffs caused alarm, with 94% of advertisers worried about how budgets might be impacted¹. In general, US ad spend growth for the year is forecasted downward, from 7.5% to 6.3%². Social media spend alone is expected to drop by as much as $10 billion by 2026³.

Marketing professionals are expected to spend smarter and generate more impact with less money. Big, flashy budgets aren’t the flex they once were, as expectations for return on investment (ROI) increase. It’s no longer about how much you have to spend but about how far you can stretch each dollar.

Adaptability is turning out to be the ultimate competitive advantage. From being able to tweak ad creative for maximum impact using A/B testing to adjusting where money is spent based on what’s converting, the power lies in the pivot. Agile media plans that are flexible, responsive, and data-driven are the key to staying competitive in a tough market.

Embrace Incrementality as Your North Star

When it’s time to pinch pennies, it’s important to identify which ad efforts are working and which ones aren’t. Incrementality testing is the answer. This methodology determines the true causal impact of marketing activities by comparing outcome metrics, like an email sign-up or sale, between a test and control group.

One example is geo-testing, which involves running campaigns in some geographic markets while keeping similar markets as controls and then measuring the sales lift in the test markets compared to the control markets. Another example is a holdout test, which excludes a randomly selected portion of your target audience from seeing your ads, allowing you to compare conversion rates between the exposed and unexposed (holdout) groups.

Incrementality testing helps identify conversions that result from causation rather than correlation. This information provides more granular insights than return on ad spend (ROAS), which can help guide more precise and effective media spending decisions when money is tight.

Flexible Budget Allocation: Dynamic and Defensive Strategies

Media planning in economic uncertainty requires flexibility. Already, rigid media contracts and upfront commitments are falling out of favor. Instead of annual static planning, consider developing three distinct scenario-based budgets:

• Proactive: Maintain or increase investment to capture market share. As competitors retreat, leverage reduced competition for ad inventory and lower cost per mille.
• Defensive: Strategically reallocate from high-cost brand channels to performance-driven channels with clear ROI. Maintain presence without upping spending.
• Moderate: Carry out precise budget cuts focused on eliminating spending that’s the least efficient while preserving high-performing channels that drive incremental revenue.

With this kind of flexibility, you can reallocate spending according to real-time performance data. This could include daily or even hourly budget monitoring to pinpoint which channels are underperforming and which ones are doing well. Automated bidding strategies combined with clearly defined performance thresholds can help scale spend up or down quickly.

Socium has already helped a number of clients take a more versatile approach to media planning with great success. When women’s fashion brand Amanda Uprichard came to us looking to scale orders while maintaining ad spend, we leveraged real-time performance data to identify winning channels and reallocate budgets accordingly. The result: a 590% increase in orders and a 60% decrease in cost per click.

Cross-Channel Integration Is Critical

A siloed approach to media planning is rarely a good idea and is especially risky in times of economic uncertainty. Operating channels in isolation without communication creates blind spots. Siloed teams may compete for the same audiences across platforms, for example, or duplicate efforts, compounding inefficiency and wasting budget.

Cross-channel media integration backed by open communication can help avoid resource misallocation. A holistic approach will include paid search strategies like search engine optimization, paid social, and connected TV (CTV).

An integrated strategy ensures that each channel amplifies the others, creating a unified customer journey rather than potentially cannibalizing conversions. Here’s how to make it work:

• Coordinate your creative: Develop a master framework that will ensure consistent branding across messaging and visuals.
• Establish a cohesive strategy: Each element should support the bigger picture. For example, while CTV may be best for capturing customers at the top of the funnel in the consumer journey, paid search may be better for driving the loyalty of mid-funnel consumers.
• Synchronize audience targeting: Develop unified audience segments that can be deployed across all channels. Using first-party data and lookalike modeling are invaluable toward this end.
• Establish clear metrics and attribution: Use incrementality testing across channels to understand how they’re working together to create impact. Unified dashboards that show performance metrics for various platforms in a single view help avoid siloed analyses.
• Optimize budget allocation across channels: Hold regular cross-channel budget review meetings, drawing on data-driven insights to reallocate spending as needed. Integrated reporting and decision-making processes are essential.

Building and implementing a cohesive multi-channel strategy is a big job. Socium’s dedicated teams can help, handling everything from creative to analytics.

Creative Agility: Fast Iteration and Modular Designs

An agile media strategy isn’t just about what platforms you use and how you control spending. Creative is another consideration. This is another area where shifting consumer habits are creating pressure. People are inundated with digital media these days, making it increasingly difficult to stand out from the digital noise. There’s even a phrase for it: ad fatigue, a phenomenon where users tune out ads because they’re so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content constantly coming their way. This can result in lost engagement and a lack of connection⁴.

Well-crafted and targeted creative is key to re-engaging with bored and jaded audiences. To maintain performance over time, try using modular creative formats. This involves breaking creative elements like headlines, visuals, CTAs, product images, and value propositions, into interchangeable components that can be mixed and matched for A/B testing, enabling rapid audience feedback and quick responses to changing market conditions.

Measure and Adjust Rapidly: The Importance of Real-Time Attribution

Media mixes are evolving, with brands seeking more flexible platforms and emphasizing those that allow for real-time attribution, or the process of identifying which marketing touchpoints and channels deserve credit for driving conversions. By giving marketers visibility into what’s actually driving conversions, attribution allows them to adapt as needed.

The problem is that traditional attribution models often misrepresent the customer journey. In the case of last click, which only credits the final touchpoint before a conversion, disproportionate credit is often given to bottom-funnel touchpoints, while upper-funnel activities that created initial awareness are ignored.

Socium’s White-Box Attribution (WBA) approach helps to address such reporting mistakes by providing complete transparency into how conversion credit is assigned. Unlike black-box attribution systems that hide their methodology, WBA shows exactly how each touchpoint receives credit by allowing you to:

• Set custom business rules that exclude known attribution thieves, like visits from known coupon sites.
• Apply sequential logic that recognizes the influence of upper-funnel touchpoints by analyzing the complete customer journey rather than just the final click.
• Adjust weighting based on your understanding of how different channels contribute to conversions in your specific industry and sales cycle.
• Create channel-specific exclusions that prevent certain touchpoints from claiming undeserved credit.
• With WBA, budget allocation can be tweaked to reflect genuine marketing impact.

Strategic Communication: Aligning With Leadership and Finance Teams

Today’s marketing decision-makers aren’t just facing economic uncertainty beyond their organizations. They must also deal with scrutiny within their organizations, as higher-ups call for budget cuts and scrutinize every dollar spent. This makes it more important than ever before to translate media plans into clear business outcomes and risk assessments.

To speak the language of business impact, establish transparent reporting measures and provide data-driven insights. For example, incrementality data can show that marketing is an actual revenue driver, not a fluffy expense. Articulating business value with measurable insights will be critical to maintaining confidence (and budgets!) going forward.

In times of economic uncertainty, you want to know you can count on your strategic partners. Find out how Socium can help you make your marketing dollars go further using data-driven approaches that prioritize flexible budgets, cross-channel media integration, and creative agility.

FAQ 

Why is incrementality testing crucial during economic uncertainty?

Incrementality isolates true causal impacts, ensuring each dollar spent genuinely contributes to growth and enabling precise budget optimization.

How can we ensure our media plan remains agile?

Build scenarios into your budgets, regularly test incrementality, maintain modular creative, and employ real-time attribution for rapid adjustments.

Should we cut back on brand spending in uncertain times?

Not necessarily. Prioritize performance-driven brand activities and test aggressively to validate incremental impact.

How frequently should our media team reevaluate strategy during volatility?

Continuously monitor performance, but formal strategic reviews should happen monthly, with more frequent, informal check-ins driven by real-time data.

Sources

1. Von Hoffman, C. (7 March 2025). 94% of Advertisers Concerned Tariffs Will Lead to Cut in Ad Spending: IAB. MarTech. Retrieved June 23, 2025, from https://martech.org/94-of-advertisers-concerned-tariffs-will-lead-to-cut-in-ad-spending-iab/
2. Goldman, J. (18 March 2025). US Ad Growth Slows in 2025 as Economic Uncertainty Looms. EMARKETER. Retrieved June 23, 2025, from https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-ad-growth-slows-2025-economic-uncertainty-looms
3. Lebow, S. (11 April 2025). Tariffs Could Trim $10 billion from US Social Ad Spend. EMARKETER. Retrieved June 23, 2025, from https://www.emarketer.com/content/tariffs-could-trim-10-billion-us-social-ad-spend
4. Gluzman, I. (28 September 2023). Ad Fatigue and Creative Diversity: Navigating the Digital Advertising Landscape. ThingOrTwo.com. Retrieved June 23, 2025, from https://thingortwo.com/2023/09/28/ad-fatigue-and-creative-diversity/