Keeping your advertising campaigns on pace has never been easier. With Bionic Media Planner, you now get daily pacing reports that guarantee your campaigns are on track and avoid embarrassing discrepancies.
Have you ever been stung by a media placement that started late or didn’t deliver the results you expected? Regrettably, under- and over-delivery is a chronic problem in the media business. In some campaigns, the discrepancy rate is virtually 100%. Publishers tend to over-promise in their quest to win your business (and to make their quarterly sales quota). When you learn they’ve under-delivered, it’s often too late to get your campaign back on track.
As a steward of the media budget, it’s your responsibility to ensure that every publisher on the media plan is delivering what they promised. It’s critical to stay on top of all your campaigns while they are in flight to catch discrepancies early and to make the necessary optimizations that ensure that every campaign comes in on plan.
The problem is it takes a herculean effort to monitor campaign pacing.
The reason it’s so hard is because there’s no one system policing delivery and pacing results.
Creating a pacing report is a grueling task. In a typical media agency, the pacing data is separated across multiple systems that don’t talk to each other. The media plan data is stored in one system: typically in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet on the media planner’s hard drive. The actual delivery data is stored in a different system: typically in an ad server such as DFA or Sizmek. To calculate pacing on a given line item, you first calculate the daily delivery plan based on the media plan, then you gather the daily actual performance data from the ad server, then you marry the daily plan with the daily actuals, then you perform complicated pacing calculations, and finally you produce the pacing report.
If you’re like most agencies, you create the pacing report manually in Excel. Now, multiply the work you just did to calculate the pacing on a single line item by the dozens or hundreds of lines in your media plan. And multiply again by the number of campaigns you’re tracking on a daily basis. You’d need a dedicated team to produce these pacing reports on a daily basis. Or, to avoid the expense of the team, you neglect this responsibility and risk problems. Either way, it’s painful.
Imagine instead coming into work, grabbing a cup of coffee, and opening a dashboard that shows you the up-to-date pacing of all your campaigns with alerts to any problems. With a single click, you gain access to detailed campaign and line item delivery and pacing reports.
That’s exactly what you get with the latest version of Bionic Media Planner: delivery and pacing reports automatically delivered to your doorstep every day. When you click on a campaign, you see a pacing dashboard and the pacing status of each of the line items in your campaign.
When you click on a line item, you get all the information you need to know if the line item is on plan in a concise, graphical format. First, you see the Delivery Chart showing the actuals versus the plan:
Then you see a Pacing Chart that shows over- and under-delivery on a day-by-day basis and the overall trend of the pacing that shows if you are converging to (or diverging from) the plan:
Finally, you see all the gory details in the Delivery and Pacing Schedule:
With Bionic Planner, you no longer have to waste long hours hand-crafting pacing reports. More importantly, it makes it easy for you to guarantee that your campaigns deliver what you promised.
Delivery and Pacing Reports are 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, and native advertising support.
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://bionic-ads.com/planner/.
