Erica Brown and Pam Schneck discuss their experience bringing Bionic Media Planning Software into their advertising agency, Austin Williams.
Transcript
Austin Williams is a full-service advertising agency. We handle all types of media from traditional and digital and crossover and emerging. We needed a platform that would allow for that.
Our biggest challenge in terms of building media plans was that we were working in Excel, and everything was manual.
My job responsibility was 75% dealing in Excel to not only build the Excel plans, to manually update them, to ensure that they were correct. We had some very advanced formulas in order to make the media plans function properly. There was room for manual error.
There was a lot of people trying to get into the Excel document at one time.
That’s something that could’ve been alleviated if we had had a system put in place prior. We needed something that would really house everything and work for all the media that we plan and buy for. We wanted a system where we could input the information and it automatically generated flowcharts for us, which is what Bionic does.
The biggest thing is not having to duplicate work.
And we definitely utilize the allocations and making sure we can slice and dice how the client would like to see it. A lot of our clients have very specific campaigns that they run. We knew that we needed something that was going to be flexible and easily customizable to our needs.
When we first started using Bionic, we had a couple clients be like, “oh wow, I really like your new media plan format!”
The way we could pull spending and give them numbers easily, it’s made so many of our clients happy.
Being able to have it all in one place, it just makes it much more efficient, and you know everything’s there, and everybody’s looking at the same thing.
It’s clean. It’s easy to read. We don’t have to spend a lot of time reformatting. It’s all kind of already done for us with the click of a button.
The team has increased productivity by 50% that we can use to put into more things, like strategy, reaching out to more vendors, looking into more opportunities.
The account team is depending on the media plans to know what’s running for all their clients, to keep track of the budgets, to answer questions quickly.
A lot of the team members who didn’t feel comfortable in Excel, they feel more comfortable using Bionic.
Bionic enabled us to take on more work, take on more clients.
We can show clients and prospective clients that we have a tool to manage everything. Being able to go above and beyond my strategy and new opportunities is what the clients want to make sure that their agency is doing.