With recent advancements in data management platforms and programmatic buying technology, digital advertising is poised to deliver highly relevant, personalized, and effective advertising.

Instead of “carpet bombing” broad demographic proxy segments like “females aged 25-44” with cheap impressions, better targeting will enable you to reach specific target audiences such as “yoga enthusiasts” with high impact placements.

Digital Advertising is Looking Like Postal Mail

Many of us in digital advertising look down upon old school direct mail as being dusty and backwards. But the reality is that direct mail is light years ahead of digital advertising in terms of audience targeting. After all, when you consider it costs $750 CPM to mail a catalog (more than 100 times the cost of a typical digital campaign!), you’d better be smart about putting those catalogs into the right mailboxes or you’ll be out of business very quickly.

Digital Advertising Will Improve Targeting

As bigger and bigger marketing budgets shift to digital advertising, undisciplined audience targeting will no longer be tolerated. Digital advertising is following the lead of direct mail in improving the sophistication of its audience targeting. In this new world, the media planners who deliver optimized audiences will be the winners.

The Problem with Media Planning Systems

But the problem is most media planning systems don’t support audience targeting very well. They were built on a legacy of broadcast and print advertising where there was very little, if any, ability to deliver tailored advertising. Despite the advances in programmatic buying and big data, media planners have been held back by these old systems built for Harry Crane.

Media Planning Problem Solved

That all just changed with the latest release of Bionic Media Planning Software. Now, you can deliver next generation audience targeting in your RFPs, proposals, media plans, and insertion orders.

New Targeting Tool

The first thing you’ll notice with this latest release is a new column aptly labeled “Targeting.” This is where you’ll see each of the target audiences you are striving to reach with your advertisements. It gives you the ability to activate and deactivate the target audiences on a line by line basis along with specific instructions:

targeting-in-bionic-media-plan-3

New Budgeting Tool

Your clients will love it when you show them the new allocation report that illustrates exactly how efficiently you are reaching their target audiences with their media budget:

targeting-allocations-in-bionic-media-planner

Media Planning Speed Upgrade

You also got an infrastructure upgrade along with this release. Although you won’t notice any new features on the screen, you may notice that the media planning worksheet is snappier.

That’s because we did a major re-write of that screen. This is what software engineers call “refactoring.”

Over the last two years, we’ve added a bunch of new features and the screen started getting laggy, especially on large media plans with hundreds of line items. So, we took some time in this release to clean up the code and to build a solid foundation for the future. Now, the code is tighter than an Arsenal shirt. And that’s saying something because those Arsenal shirts are really tight!

Advanced Targeting Available Today

Advanced Audience Targeting is available to all Bionic users today. No special activation is required. You get this as part of our ongoing commitment to provide you with the tools you need to gain a competitive advantage through advanced workflow automation.

Advanced Audience Targeting is the 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, and advanced flighting.

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://www.bionic-ads.com/agencies/