Why most media-planning software fails your ad-buying operation

There’s no such thing as a simple, straightforward media plan. There’s an enormous amount of information to reconcile even if brands and agencies plan a purchase that covers just one audience (targeting them on connected TV, for instance, then retargeting them on social media or with a sponsored products ad to get them into the buying funnel).

There are the fundamentals of which audience, targeting, and creative they’re planning. Then there’s information about why this combination of channel tactic, audience targeting, and creative makes sense for their buy, and how it plays well across whatever systems they’re buying from. To capture all this campaign information, agencies and in-house teams often build painstakingly elaborate spreadsheets where they’ll do all their planning.

But if you’re a global mega-corp that needs to engage people anywhere in the buying funnel, you could be juggling any number of ad products, regional media-planning teams, retail media networks, and agency partners. The inefficiency of emailing spreadsheets back and forth containing media plans becomes even more obvious and painful.

Some ad buyers therefore use a specialist media-planning point solution like Pacvue or Fluency. This software seems ideal for brands that mostly retail on specific channels like Amazon then retarget people on a social media platform such as Facebook. But while these media-planning point solutions might be effective at buying ads on individual channels, they can leave you high and dry in every other area of omnichannel media-buying, where you remain dependent on manual data entry. So you still can’t fully shake off spreadsheets.

Integration is the missing link in media-planning software

Even if you’re running a smaller ad-buying operation that’s getting by using media-planning software to focus on a limited number of channels, you can’t successfully grow your business this way. That requires expanding into more offsite media and demand-side platforms like The Trade Desk or Yahoo DSP, with which a point solution won’t integrate seamlessly.

Because the point solution is niche, your team’s capabilities become too tunnel-visioned to spot and execute funnel-spanning opportunities for engaging people on different platforms. And even if your ad buyers wanted to incorporate a new channel into a media-planning strategy, the lack of integration makes it impossible unless they create a relationship with a separate DSP.

What you need isn’t media-planning software – it’s an operating system for media buying.

A media-planning solution that bridges the gap

Where most media-planning software is only able to serve one strand of omnichannel advertising, an operating system for ad-buying like MarketerOS connects media-planning to execution, enabling activation across every channel in a full-funnel campaign.

Rather than simply digitizing media-planning fragmentation and silos with narrow point solutions, you gain the breadth and the operational coverage that spans the advertising lifecycle. All consolidated into one central platform for planning, buying, and optimizing media.

Now, when your business outgrows a channel or needs to expand, ad-buying teams can safely onboard a new platform without the risk of spending budget that doesn’t generate a sales uplift. An integrated operating system allows teams to identify and quantify a similar lookalike audience on a new offsite channel, so they can easily prove and confidently plan a campaign strategy.

Streamlining media-planning complexity with AI

There are also speed and accuracy benefits to using a media-planning operating system with built-in intelligence.  Not only can AI accelerate the media-planning process by generating campaign plan options for you, but it can also activate them automatically when you’re  ready to go to market.

However vast your media plan becomes, AI can rapidly update or edit a campaign across numerous line items, so you no longer have to remember and perform complex click paths. And when it comes to optimization, rather than having to consult a separate LLM, the platform’s AI can identify an underperforming campaign and recommend a fix – all within the same integrated solution.

The good news is no matter how embedded spreadsheets have become in your ad-buying operation, you can still make the most of a media-buying platform. Whether you’ve relied on spreadsheets to date, or you use them for initial media planning, AI can understand and ingest them into the platform so you can start managing the rest of the lifecycle.

Simple, straightforward media-planning might have seemed a pipe dream up to now, but an AI-powered operating system for media buyers helps make it a reality. Get in touch to find out more about how Placements.io can help make your ad-buying operation more efficient, effective, and profitable.

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