Strategy is essential in media planning and media buying because it helps ensure that a company’s advertising efforts are targeted, effective, and efficient.
Interview with True Media’s Sean Cotton
Sean Cotton, Vice President of Digital and Social Media for True Media, shares his experiences struggling to keep up with triple-digit growth at his media agency, searching for a media planning and buying solution, and eventually finding Bionic Media Planner. This 26-minute interview was conducted on February 13, 2015 via web conference by Hollis Thomases, Digital Ad-Marketing Consultant, ROI Diva, LLC. Here are the highlights from the interview: Struggling with agency growing pains (located at 4:49) “Our agency is 10 years old and has been very successful from day one. Each year has been triple digit growth that we've been in business. A couple years in and I could see that we were going to have to become better and more efficient at planning and buying to accommodate all this growth. I started talking to various companies that were just starting out in the space of programmatic planning and buying with some success, but it seems like there [...]
Create Persuasive Media Plan PowerPoints with Bionic Planner
When asking your advertiser to approve your media plan, you need a persuasive PowerPoint presentation. Here's how to make your best deck the easy way.
Do Digital Media Agencies Have a Plan?
Digital agencies used to get paid for unpacking an incredibly complicated digital landscape for marketers. Faced with all kinds of new marketing opportunities, advertisers turned to savvy digital agencies to figure out where to spend their money, and how much of it to dedicate to display, mobile and social channels. The dingy little secret was that the agencies didn’t really plan much of anything. The way it worked was that agency planners would make an Excel template, create an RFP document, instruct the media owners to send back all kinds of creative ideas and fill out the media plan template. RFPs sent publisher teams spinning into action, churning out exciting-looking PowerPoints with screenshots and suggested spending levels. Not much of this was scientific. Publishers often promised more inventory than could be delivered, knowing they would never get the full budget allocation. Agencies asked for various “budget levels,” knowing they would allocate only $50,000 per publisher – but asking to see [...]
Bionic Goes Native with its Digital Media Planning Software
Bionic Media Planner now enables you to add native advertisements, one of today’s fastest growing trends in digital media, to your media plans and proposals.
Create Kickass Allocation Charts Right from Your Media Plan
Fresh on the heels of Flowcharting, Bionic Planner now enables you to create kickass allocation charts right from your media plan with a click of a button.
The Battle for Workflow Automation
Even though programmatic RTB has seen the lion’s share of venture capital funding and an enormous amount of innovation, RTB buying only accounts for 20%-30% of all digital media dollars. The real money still flows through the direct buying process, with agencies spending up to 400 hours and $50,000 to create the typical campaign, and publishers burning through 1,600 hours a month and 18% of their revenue responding to RFPs. What a mess….and an opportunity. Everybody’s battling for a slice of that direct sales pie, and the game is all about helping buyers and sellers automate the manual processes that drive almost 80% of transactional value. The Holy Grail for both sides is a web based, connected platform that will enable planners and sellers to thrust aside Excel, and start to transact business in the cloud. Although a number of companies have tried and failed to deliver on the promise of workflow automation, the time seems ripe for true adoption, [...]
Bionic Makes It Easy to Create Beautiful Flowcharts
Instantly create advertising flowcharts. Eliminate hours of unpleasant grunt work. Eradicate tedious mistakes. Improves the look of your flowcharts.
There’s a Column for That!
The latest release of Bionic’s media planning software lets you add custom columns and free-form notes to your media plans to support your agency’s workflow.
Programmatic Direct Isn’t Just About Efficiency
When you are selling anything, it’s really easy to get caught up in pitching the benefits of your product, and ad technology is no different. Some of today’s new programmatic direct marketing solutions promise to change the very nature of how media buyers and sellers spend their time. Demand side systems are focusing on replacing Excel and e-mail with web-based, centralized systems that take the manual grunt work out of buying. Supply-side systems are tying into publisher ad servers to help create more streamlined access to inventory, without the hassles of secure it via paper insertion orders. While it’s easy to focus on all of the amazing efficiency benefits offered by today’s web-based solutions, it’s also critical to remember to ask your client what’s important to them. On a recent sales call to a large agency, my old-school sales training kicked in. After showing off all of the neat bells and whistles of my software, I asked the company’s Chief [...]
Agency Operating Systems are the New Battleground
With the inefficiencies in digital media buying today, your agency’s operating system is becoming a critical factor in winning new business, hiring the best talent, and operating profitably.