Digiday just announced Bionic has been selected as a finalist in the “Best Marketing Automation Platform” category of the 2022 Digiday Technology Awards for the launch of our media planning + buying platform.
About the Award
The Digiday Technology Awards recognize the technology modernizing media and marketing. Being named a finalist means that the work stood out among hundreds of submissions. Here are the 2022 finalists for the award. The winners will be announced on Thursday, November 17th.
Every nomination needs to demonstrate goals, challenges, and results. Below is the rationale that garnered Bionic’s recognition.
What the Platform Aims to Achieve
Bionic’s goal is to deliver an end-to-end, omnichannel, global, fully-integrated media planning and media buying system through the Bionic for Agencies platform.
Media Planning
Media planning capabilities include:
- Capture creative brief
- Establish media budget
- Research media placement options
- Look up vendor contact info
- Send RFPs online
- Import vendor proposals
- Create media plans
- Predict KPIs and business outcomes
- Estimate cumulative reach
- Create flowcharts
- Generate PowerPoint media presentations
- Secure media authorization
Media Buying
Media buying capabilities include:
- Send personalized IOs electronically (with electronic signatures)
- Generate tracking URLs
- Generate placement naming conventions
- Traffic ads to ad servers
- Track pacing of ad delivery
- Track pacing of budgets
- Track pacing of all KPIs
- Pull instant client reporting
- Create client dashboards
- Reconcile vendor bills
- Track vendor payables
Challenges the Team Had to Overcome
Here we are in 2022 and most media planners still create their media plans in Excel. This is true even at big agencies where many aspects of the media buying process have been automated.
Building a solid media planning system is a major technical challenge. Many have tried and failed, including large, well-funded technology companies. This challenge is even more daunting when the software needs to be end-to-end, omnichannel, fully-integrated, and global.
Building a solid media planning system requires perseverance. We’ve put in 12 years of sustained effort and have invested more than $25 million to build the product we have today. And we expect this effort and investment to continue for the foreseeable future.
This is not a challenge for the meek. You have to be “all in” for the long haul.
Results, Impact on Business and ROI for Customers
More than 46,000 media plans have been successfully delivered through Bionic by more than 500 agencies representing more than $7 billion of media spending. Media plans have been created in every media channel and in dozens of currencies from around the world.
Bionic is the #1 ranked media planning system with a rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars by users on Capterra.
Although still only a small portion of global ad spending, our customers have proven there’s finally a way to ditch Excel for media planning.
Thank You
Many believe the hardest part of building a software company is building the software product. Not true. While building good software is truly a challenge, the biggest challenge is knowing what to build. Without good advice and feedback, you can’t build a good product.
Thank you to all of you who have contributed ideas and feedback to improve Bionic. We could not have gotten this far without you!
