In a major software upgrade, Bionic today unveiled powerful new media planning and buying tools for advertising agencies:

  • Insertion Orders – Automate the process of creating, sending, signing, and tracking insertion orders (IOs) including media placement schedule, itemized costing, advertising flowcharts, legal terms, payment terms, special instructions, and electronic signatures.

  • Vendor Bills – Automate the process of receiving, organizing, and managing vendor bills related to the delivery of advertising media.

  • Reconciliations – Automate the process of reconciling vendor bills against IOs, delivery, and performance.

  • Payments – Automate the process of managing advertising vendor account payables.

A Complete Media Planning and Buying System

Prior to this upgrade, the Bionic platform enabled you to trade messages and reports with your vendors, receive advertising program information, send RFPs, and receive proposals. However, the ordering capabilities were limited, and it lacked finance tools other than performance reports.

This new software completes your media buying workflow by adding powerful ordering, vendor bill reconciliation, and payment tools.

Below is an overview of the new tools.

Automate Insertion Orders

Without the right tool, creating advertising insertion orders is a tedious and time-consuming task. You have to create a separate insertion order for every vendor in your media plan (sometimes more than one order per vendor if you are buying multiple programs). For every IO, you have to extract and format the line items, double-check quantities and pricing, add instructions and legal terms. This is a binding legal contract, so it has to be perfect. For a big media plan, creating all the insertion orders can take days. 🥺

Bionic automates the process of creating your insertion orders – just click a button in your media plan to create all your IOs instantly and perfectly with no embarrassing mistakes! 😎

Create Perfect Insertion Orders, Every Time!

computer interface showing an overview of an advertising insertion order

Bionic automatically pulls in all the media plan data and vendor information, performs all your calculations, and presents you with a clean summary dashboard.

Customize Your Insertion Orders

computer interface showing advertising insertion order settings

With Bionic, your insertion orders are not confined to a rigid format.  You decide which elements of your media plan to include in your IOs. You can customize your costs and fees on every order to include every aspect of the negotiated arrangement.

Pre-approved Terms and Conditions

computer interface showing advertising insertion order terms and conditions

Insertion orders are contracts that sometimes get unnecessarily held up in the legal department haggling over terms and conditions. Bionic enables you to choose from pre-approved legal terms and conditions, which eliminates repetitive legal reviews and delays in the IO process.

computer interface showing administration of terms and conditions

Your legal department can rest assured your insertion orders are in full compliance. Bionic enables your legal team to create and manage a library of pre-approved legal terms and conditions.

But you are not limited to pre-approved terms. In cases when you need a special contract for an IO, Bionic enables you to customize terms or start from scratch.

Visualize Your IO in a Flowchart

computer interface showing a flowchart for an advertising insertion order

When looking at the line items in an order form, it’s hard to visualize when the ads will run.  It’s even harder to know what the monthly advertising budget for this order. Bionic solves this problem by including beautiful advertising flowcharts into your insertion orders.

Sign your IOs with Electronic Signatures

computer interface showing electronic signature on an advertising insertion order

Chasing down signatures and filing agreements is no fun. Whether you sign insertion orders online or offline, Bionic will streamline the signing process for you:

  1. Sign Online – The easiest way to sign your IO is to use Bionic’s built-in electronic signature tool. Just click the approve button, type your name, and Bionic will certify your signature because you are securely logged in and authenticated.
  2. Sign PDF – Your vendor doesn’t want to sign on Bionic? You can sign electronically on your end then export the PDF for their signature.
  3. Signature App – Your lawyers want you to use their contract signing system? You can export the IO as a PDF from Bionic then use your own electronic signature app such as Adobe Sign, DocuSign, HelloSign, and others.
  4. Sign Paper – Feeling old school Madison Avenue? You can print and sign the IO will a ball point pen.
computer interface showing a PDF version of an advertising insertion order

No matter how you want to sign contracts, Bionic will streamline your process.

Organize Your Vendor Payables

computer interface showing financials for an insertion order

With Bionic, you will always know exactly where you stand with vendor payables. Bionic gives you a finance dashboard for every insertion order, including progress on fulfillment, billing, reconciliation, and payment.

Reconcile Vendor Bills

One of the worst jobs in a media agency is reconciling vendor bills. You practically have to launch an investigation every time a bill arrives, including questions like these:

  • Did we order this?
  • Did we already pay this bill?
  • Did they deliver the advertising they promised?
  • Is this priced correctly?
  • Is this paced correctly?
  • Is this over budget?

Answering these questions often requires team meetings or passing the vendor bill back and forth between the finance and media department. It can take days or weeks to reconcile a vendor bill.

Bionic automates this process with a proprietary tool that performs an instant reconciliation the moment you receive the vendor bill.  This process answers all the reconciliation questions and eliminates all the back and forth. It eradicates your reconciliation nightmares, gets bills paid on time, and ensures you never over-pay a vendor.

Manage Vendor Payables

At agencies, the media team often has a limited view into the status of vendor payments. So, when a vendor calls about status or rejects an order because of non-payment, the media planner is caught by surprise. 😒

Bionic enables the finance team to record and report vendor payments directly in Bionic. As a result, the media team sees up-to-date payment status on the finance dashboard. 💯

Vendor Status Dashboard

At most agencies, it’s impossible to get a complete view of vendor relationships. That’s because this data is siloed by job function – media plans are in one system (or Excel 😲), insertion orders are in another system, and financials are in a third system with nothing tying them together. And worse, these systems are sometime siloed by channel – broadcast TV and radio in one system, print in another system, digital and programmatic in yet another system. And even worse, these systems can be siloed by geography – US using one system, EMEA using another, APAC using a third, … you get the picture. As you might have guessed, it’s virtually impossible to tie all of this data together.

With Bionic, you get a 100% clear picture of all of your vendor relationships. You see every media plan, every insertion order, every bill, every payment across every media channel everywhere in the world. It’s all in one place with built-in currency exchanges to normalize your costs onto one, unified report. 😎👍

Among many other uses, this vendor dashboard makes it easy to track the status of all your reconciliations payables across all your media vendors.

Live Demonstration

 

You can see a tight demonstration of these new features in this video, which is a recording of a webinar we held on March 11, 2021.

How to get these new tools

If you are already on Bionic, good news – your account has already been automatically upgraded for free with all these new tools. Please let us know how we can help you to get started with these tools. Keep in mind you get unlimited support and training with your Bionic subscription. That’s because want you to get the most from Bionic!

If you’re not yet on Bionic, you can request a trial of Bionic for Agencies through our website here: https://get.bionic-ads.com/request-account