To fully prepare you for final episodes of Mad Men coming this spring, Bionic has doubled down on tools for old school media planning. Back in April, you got a bunch of features to enable media planning in traditional media channels like TV, radio, magazine, newspaper, billboards, and more. Now, you are getting even more powerful tools for planning and buying traditional media.
The problem with many media planning and buying tools is they only solve part of the problem. They force you to use a bunch of different point solutions: you use one tool for planning TV, another for planning digital, and another for planning print, etc. That problem is compounded when you are dealing with multiple currencies and regions because most tools just handle a single currency. So, in order to present a coherent and cohesive presentation, you end up spending hours and weeks consolidating and updating your media plan using Microsoft Excel.
“I love using a different tool for every media channel and every step of the process and manually tying it all together with Microsoft Excel,” said nobody ever.
With Bionic Media Planner, you can do all your media planning in one place. You can collaboratively plan across all media channels in multiple currencies. Or you can place an ad on a website without a lot of hassle. It gives you the right combination of power and simplicity.
The latest release of Bionic, version 2.15, gives you a bunch of new features that enable you to centralize all your media planning.
Additional Cost Methods
The Bionic media planning worksheet has four new cost methods:
- Cost Per Column Inch – for newspaper advertising
- Cost Per Point – for TV, Radio, and any media deals sold on the basis of ratings points
- Cost Per Spot – for TV, Radio, and any media deals sold on the basis of spots
- Cost Per 4-week Period – for billboard advertising
With the addition of these new cost methods, Bionic now supports 16 different cost methods (I think we got them all, but please let us know if we missed any). With all these built-in media calculations, your new junior media planner can create media plans with the confidence that all the crazy math is being done correctly.
Additional Line Item Costs
In certain media channels, it’s common to bundle additional costs into the cost of the media. Some examples include color charges, installation fees, premium positioning charges, production costs, shipping fees, and talent fees.
Bionic now supports any number of standard and custom additional costs in its line item calculations. It intelligently defaults the common fees associated with the given media channel so you don’t accidentally forget to include costs and have to “eat” the extra expense. And it enables you to add costs that are custom for that particular line item.
With the ability to add these additional costs, you provide a 100% complete picture of your media plan and never leave any money on the table.
Advanced Flighting for Packages
As an added bonus, you also got additional flighting capabilities. Back in October, you got new tools for flighting your placements. With this latest release, you can go even further by flighting placements nested within packages and roadblocks.
In Summary
We’ve been busy delivering the tools you need as a modern, multi-channel media planner. Bionic was born digital, but has grown up to support traditional media. As usual, we made a bunch of behind the scenes improvements to improve your experience using Bionic. The additional cost methods, the additional line item costs, and the advances flighting are the things you’ll really appreciate.
Go ahead and Mad Men yourself. With Bionic, you can do all your traditional and digital media planning all in one place.
For more information
The additional support for traditional advertising is latest in a series of innovations from Bionic including cloud-based media planning, online collaboration, RFP automation, digital advertising directory, private marketplaces, advertising flowcharts, cross-channel planning, allocation charts, media calculator, multi-currency, native advertising support, PowerPoint media plan exports, campaign delivery and pacing monitoring, advanced flighting, and next generation audience targeting.
All of this and more is available today in Bionic Media Planner. If you’re not already using Bionic Planner, request your access at: https://bionic-ads.com/planner/.
