The version 2.8 release of the Bionic for Agencies and Bionic for Ad Sales was completed Thursday, March 20, 2014. The release features 8 major improvements in functionality and over 20 bug fixes.

Media Planning Improvements

This upgrade includes these new media planning features:

  1. Flowcharting: Now you can create an Advertising Flowchart by clicking the “Flowchart” button at the top of a media plan.
  2. Private Campaign Budget: The total campaign budget is no longer communicated to the recipients of RFPs.
  3. Per Publisher Budgets: A planner can now add an individual budget amount to each RFP.  There is now a field for creating a “Default per-publisher budget”.  The amount entered in this field will be the default budget communicated to Vendors on their RFPs, but this amount can be changed for each RFP prior to sending.
  4. Individualized Note accompanying an RFP: A planner can add a note for each RFP that is sent.  Examples of how this might be used is asking for a tiered budget proposals or asking for a repeat of past deals.
  5. Added hierarchical grouping of channels in the Media Plan’s channel selector.  E.g., “Magazine” and “Newspaper” are organized under “Print”.
  6. Changed the application URL to app.bionic-ads.com/planner
  7. Added package contents validation: if a planner creates a package and adds placements from different publishers, a warning icon is presented to the planner to indicate that the package won’t traffic as designed.
  8. Added optional columns, Placement Type and Section, which are required fields for MediaMind.  If these columns are used in a plan, they will now be exported on the MediaMind Placement Import.
  9. Media Plans can now use the following rate types:
    • Each
    • Per Day / Week / Month
    • Value Add
    • Makegood
  10. Adding a package or roadblock to a media plan now also inserts two package or roadblock placement lines.

Media Planning Bug Fixes

  • Corrected an issue introduced in the previous release where Custom Columns were not restored when the user chose to restore a previous version of a media plan.
  • Fixed an issue where the agency logo placed on exported documents was too large and was potentially blocking information on the exported documents.
  • “This campaign is being edited by another user” warning was sometimes displayed when another user was not editing the campaign
  • The Agency logo image was broken in RFP Invitation email sent to Publisher
  • The “Training mode” setting for a campaign wasn’t being saved in some circumstances
  • Some extended characters weren’t being displayed properly upon exporting a datacard.
  • The datacard view in planner sometimes didn’t include the publisher’s stated “Targeting and Profile” information that Bionic has collected.
  • Fixed an issue which caused some visual anomalies in certain circumstances which resulted in the need for a user to clear their browser’s cache (CSS retrieval date was wrong)
  • Fixed an issue where a user’s clicking on “Edit Profile” or “Edit Agency” might result in an endless loop.
  • Copyright notices were updated to 2014
  • Proposal acceptance emails did not display the customized message from the Planner
  • After pressing the Endorse button on a program, the button was not changing to ‘Un-Endorse’ until the browser window was refreshed
  • Immediately after creating a new contact for a datacard, the contact could not be edited.
  • “Add a new contact”: the save and cancel buttons were cut-off.
  • Fixed an issue with reordering packages on a Media Plan: If a package was moved to the top of the list in a media plan, its placements were lost.
  • Fixed some anomalies on exported documents.
  • Various minor visual styling & spacing issues were corrected

Improvements to Bionic for Ad Sales

  • Proposals can now use the following rate types:
    • Each
    • Per Day / Week / Month
    • Value Add
    • Makegood
  • A vendor can now submit a proposal without having a datacard in the Bionic catalog.  This allows for vendors of non-Digital media to respond to an RFP, e.g., billboards.
  • Seller sees an individualized proposal budget request from Planner.
  • Seller sees individualized message from Planner.

Bionic for Ad Sales Bug Fixes

  • In rare instances, a Seller’s Rationale was not being saved and transmitted to the Planner
  • Fixed an issue which caused some visual anomalies in certain circumstances which resulted in the need for a user to clear their browser’s cache (CSS retrieval date was wrong)
  • Fixed an issue where a user’s clicking on “Edit Profile” or “Edit Agency” might result in an endless loop.
  • Fixed an issue where the list of proposed placements in some proposals started with 0 instead of 1
  • Reduced the width of the Program field, which was unnecessarily wide.
  • Copyright was updated to 2014