Here’s a bunch of articles that will teach you tips and tricks that will help you level up your media planning and media buying knowledge and skills.
How to Get Crazy Productive in Media Planning
In media planning, it’s critical to get yourself into the right state of mind before making investment decisions for your media plans. The average person has 70,000 thoughts each day, and if you don’t learn to organize them, they have the potential to wreak havoc on your productivity.
3 tricks to avoid “interruption mistakes” in media planning
2.8 seconds of interruption spawns a 200% increase in mistakes! Learn 3 tricks that actually work for media planners, marketers, and human beings everywhere.
4 Essential Questions to Ask When Choosing Your Media Buying Platform
Choosing your media buying platform is a critical decision that will make or break your media planning and buying operation. It’s a decision on a tool that you’ll be using for your daily work for years to come. It will give you a distinct competitive advantage if you make the right choice. Or it can bankrupt you if you make the wrong choice. Using Microsoft Excel for media planning and media buying drains your energy and prevents you from reaching your full potential. Excel’s inefficiency is infamous in professional media circles. But finding a media buying platform to replace Excel can be an extremely confusing and frustrating experience. It seems that everyone is offering a media buying platform these days. When you Google “media buying platform” (with the quotes to limit the search results), you get more than 20,000 results. This creates a long, confusing list of options. In reality, only a small fraction of those options actually provide a [...]
The Four Keys to Programmatic Direct Success
I was recently talking to the Chief Digital Officer of a large agency that does a lot of digital media buying. He has been working closely with a number of software providers to standardize his operations on a media management system. Getting all his vendor information, order management, and billing information has been a huge undertaking. Apparently, half the battle at an agency is getting paid (getting paid in less than 120 days is the other half)! We were talking about some of the upfront processes behind putting together a media plan, which were mostly manual: putting the actual plan together in Excel, trading e-mails back and forth with vendors in the RFP process, trafficking ad tags, collecting screenshots, etc. Wouldn’t it be valuable if computers could streamline much of that work, and connect buyers and sellers together more seamlessly? He agreed that it would truly transform his business, but accepted much of that manual work as part of the [...]
The Nuts and Bolts of Programmatic Direct
An interview with Econsultancy’s Monica Savut and Bionic's Chris O'Hara, on his recently published programmatic direct whitepaper. Econsultancy: Why now? In other words, why has this “programmatic direct” trend been on the radar lately? What’s driving all of the conversation the space? Chris O’Hara: It’s really something my boss Joe Pych calls the “Sutton Pivot,” inspired by the famous thief Willie Sutton who robbed banks “because that’s where the money was.” Over 70% of digital display dollars are transacted in a very manual way today. Despite all the LUMAscape hype over RTB, most of the digital money still gets transacted through the request-for-proposal (RFP) process. Everybody wants a piece of the action, hence the “Sutton pivot,” in which all the ad tech companies are running to try and provide automation technology for directly sold deals. It’s actually a good thing. Today’s process for buying guaranteed digital media can take over 40 steps and suck up over 10% of media budgets just in [...]