Advertising Flowcharts are a powerful document in the media planning process. They beautifully present your media plan at a glance. But not easy to make!

What is a Flowchart?

An advertising flowchart is a media plan represented visually. It’s a timeline that shows which advertising activities are planned and when they’ll happen, along with a budget. It provides an overview of all the scheduled media placements throughout a given campaign.

Advertisers LOVE Flowcharts 😍

An advertising flowchart enables all stakeholders to easily understand the media plan’s timeline, media mix, reach, frequency, and cost at a glance. It helps ensure that the campaign is well-coordinated and that all media placements align with the overall campaign objectives and timeline.

Advertisers LOVE flowcharts.

But it’s not all roses with flowcharts…

The Problems with Flowcharts 😖

Advertising flowcharts can steal hours from your life and drain your creativity. Without the right tools, you’ll suffer problems like these:

  • Difficult to create. It takes skill to create a flowchart. Even a simple flowchart requires hundreds of calculations. Each placement’s KPIs have to be calculated and segmented into time periods. Then you have to add colorful graphics to visually represent the data.
  • Requires an Expert. Because of the skill required, creating a flowchart requires highly trained staff.
  • Time Consuming. Because of all the work involved, creating a flowchart can take hours or days to complete.
  • Error-Prone. All those calculations lay a minefield of potential errors. If you get just one calculation wrong, it will throw off your entire flowchart.
  • Difficult to Maintain. If you change the start date, end date, quantity, rate, flighting, weekparting, or any other aspect of any placement in your media plan, you’ll have to re-do your flowchart. Not fun.
  • Hurts Client Service. Delays, mistakes, and inflexibility will hurt client service. Although your clients love flowcharts, they may hate the flowchart creation process.

Wouldn’t be awesome if you could get all the beauty of flowcharts without all the problems?

Bionic Automates Your Flowcharts 😁

an advertising flowchart displayed in a computer interface

Bionic for Agencies includes a flowcharting tool that 100% automates the creation of your advertising flowcharts.

With literally one click of a button, you get a beautiful flowchart that’s perfectly in sync with your media plan, and perfectly calculated. No wasted time. No delays. No embarrassing mistakes.

Customize Your Flowcharts

a computer interface for customizing an advertising flowchart

Bionic enables you to customize your flowcharts to your needs, including:

  • Date Range: Restrict the date range to present a certain part of your media plan.
  • Time Scale: Choose the granularity of your column sub-totals: weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
  • Calendar: Choose between our standard Gregorian calendar and the broadcast calendar.
  • Grouping: Choose how you want placements to be grouped in your media plan
  • Color Coding: Choose how you want your media plan to be color-coded.
  • KPIs: Choose which KPIs to display on your flowchart, such as spending, spots, impressions, clicks, and conversions. This is not just for media planning. You can also display actual performance data.
  • Detail: You can choose between summary and detail formats, which include every placement in your media plan.

Your customizations are applied immediately and stick with your media plan, making it easy for you and your colleagues to make changes.

Share Your Flowcharts

computer interface for downloading an advertising flowchart into Excel

While it’s great to collaborate flowcharts in Bionic, you’ll sometimes want to share flowcharts outside of the system. Bionic enables you to export your flowcharts in a variety of useful formats:

  • Image (PNG, JPEG, etc.)
  • Excel Spreadsheet
  • PDF
  • PowerPoint

Start Automating Flowcharts Today

Are you ready to automate your flowcharting process? Start a trial of Bionic for agencies today.