Every media plan now speaks to two audiences. People still choose the brands they feel connected to, and AI systems increasingly shape which brands people discover, compare, and consider. BERA.ai’s LLM Brand Rankings connects these two perspectives, helping marketers compare how AI models rank their brand with how consumers perceive it.

Media planning was the focus of one afternoon conversation at BERA’s Multiplier Playbook Day. WARC Americas editor Ann Marie Kerwin sat down with Slavi Samardzija, chief data and platforms officer at Stagwell, to discuss how brands can build plans fast enough for machines while preserving the emotional pull that wins people over.

Plan for two audiences

AI is changing media from both ends. Meta, Google, and Microsoft are automating planning, buying, and activation, while consumers are moving between discovery and purchase in fewer steps. Generative AI search can bring discovery, comparison, and recommendations into a single experience. The same shift is happening on connected TV, where viewers can shop from their remotes, and on TikTok, a major social commerce platform.

Brands still need emotional connection to be chosen by people. They also need structured, consistent content that helps AI agents discover and recommend them. As both behaviors and technology change, agility has become an important advantage in media planning.

Leave room for big ideas

AI tools make it easier than ever to fine-tune targeting, bids, and budgets. That precision has value, but brands focused only on lower-funnel optimization risk limiting future demand.

Brand investment reduces the cost of lower-funnel work. In one four-year BERA client analysis, cost per conversion ran approximately 23% lower in months when brand equity was highest than in months when it was lowest.

Brand building with a strong media plan makes room for big ideas, cultural moments, and distinctive creative experiences that build emotional connection, alongside the data and signals that help platforms and AI agents do their work.

Start with one brief

Ads are turning into full experiences, where a single ad unit can carry a brand message, answer product questions, and complete a purchase. Yet many organizations still manage brand, performance, commerce, and influencer budgets separately, each with its own goals. Many teams lack the systems, data, and expertise to allocate budget across every channel at once, and many lack an executive mandate to try.

The organizations that make connected planning work have CMOs and CFOs working together at the top and channel experts aligned beneath them. A practical first step is a single marketing brief shared across media, creative, brand activations, influencers, and commerce, so every team works toward the same objectives.

Build the mix around growth

WARC research found that using four channels drives 55% more demand on average than using a single channel. The right combination varies by brand and category. Finding the best mix starts with identifying the audiences that will drive growth, then building response curves that show how each channel moves the KPIs that matter, whether sales, brand love, or both.

BERA.ai analysis adds brand equity to the measurement picture. Its integration with existing mix models helps marketers understand how media builds brand equity and connects those gains to customer growth, share of wallet, and revenue.

Incrementality testing helps teams understand what each channel contributes. Controlled experiments, including tests that pause media activity, can complement mix models and provide a clearer picture of incremental impact. Teams can adjust their mixes as conditions change while accounting for media effects that build over time.

Give search the right credit

Consumers rarely search for a brand without an earlier influence. Advertising, experiences, and brand associations help create the interest that eventually becomes a search. Attribution and mix models can give search too much credit when they miss those earlier influences. BERA.ai analysis helps measure the indirect path through brand equity, giving marketers a clearer view of how brand investment contributes to performance.

Treating search as an intermediate step, measuring how the rest of the mix drives search and how search drives sales, gives a truer read and helps brands avoid overinvesting. WARC research identifies search spending above roughly 25% of budget as a warning sign for most brands, though the appropriate allocation varies by category.

Generative AI search adds a new layer. During the discussion, Samardzija described Stagwell’s brand knowledge graph, which maps AI visibility against reviews, influencers, publishers, and owned content, with BERA.ai brand equity as a core input.

The approach brings brand perception and digital visibility into the same conversation. It also highlights the importance of consistent brand information across sources as AI systems compare and recommend brands.

Close the gap between people and AI

Closing that gap starts with measuring both audiences. BERA.ai tracks how consumers perceive a brand and how AI models describe the same brand, then compares the two to show where they diverge.

The next step is identifying which perceptions matter most for growth. Some gaps may weaken a brand’s visibility in AI recommendations, while others reveal perceptions that limit consideration among the people a brand needs to reach.

The final step connects perception to performance. BERA’s Brand-to-Business™ analysis ties brand equity to customer growth, share of wallet, pricing power, and revenue, so media teams can see which investments build the brand with both audiences and what that brand building is worth.