Your media planning experience just got a lot faster. After hundreds of incremental enhancements over the course of a decade, it was time to rebuild.

Bionic Media Planning Tool

The Bionic media planning interface is our crown jewel. It’s the core of our software and one of the biggest things that differentiates Bionic from everyone else.

The first version of Bionic introduced the media planning interface almost 10 years ago. Since then, we’ve released hundreds of upgrades and improvements to the software.

As a result of this sustained effort, Bionic is the first – and still only – fully integrated, omnichannel media planning and media buying software.

The Price of Innovation

We spend 35% of our revenue on research and development of software. This is far more than the 20% R&D rule of thumb for SaaS software companies.

But there’s a cost to this innovation besides the R&D investments.  In the software business, it’s called “technical debt.”

We use an agile software development process. We ship new software every couple of weeks. We use short “sprints” to introduce our software a few features at a time.

Technical Debt Causing Slowdown

After completing a series of sprints, you end up with software that functionally works but inevitably has problems. These problems are related to the technical debt you’ve accumulated by doing this series of incremental upgrades.

In our case, after a decade of hundreds of sprints, our biggest problem was with technical debt that was causing media plans to load too slowly.

16 API Calls to Render a Media Plan

Prior to the latest version of Bionic, when you opened a media plan, your browser would make 16 different API calls to our servers to gather all the pieces of your media plan.

Once all the pieces were gathered, it would render your media plan in your browser.

On Small Media Plans, No Problem

On a small media plan with less than a few dozen media placements, this is not a big deal. Loading a media plan was quick.

On Medium Media Plans, Problems Begin

However, on a medium media plan with hundreds of placements, it might take 5 seconds, 10 seconds, or more to load your media plan.

This is too slow. It ruins your workflow. It’s annoying to wait this long for your media plan to load.

On Large Media Plans, Big Problems

On a large media plan with thousands of placements, it could take more than 20 seconds to load. Although media plans at this scale are rare, this wait is unacceptable.

Refactoring the Media Planning Tool

The solution to this speed problem was to “pay off the technical debt” by refactoring our code.

Four months ago, we committed ourselves to rebuilding the media planning interface. The latest software upgrade is the first running on this new code.

If we’ve done our job correctly, you won’t notice any functional changes in the media planning tool.  However, you should notice a huge speed improvement when loading media plans.

Here’s how it works.

Bundle Media Plan Data

Instead of delivering your media plan to your browser in small pieces with 16 different API calls, Bionic now delivers your entire media plan as single data structure through a single API call.

The result of this bundling is speed.

Every API call introduces latency with overhead, networking, and processing. Even though each is call only adds a fraction of a second, this adds up when you are making 16 different API calls.

Bundling up all the work into one API call eliminates all this latency.

Refactor Media Plan Database Queries

Behind those 16 API calls were 141 database queries.

Yes, you read that correctly. It took 141 different database queries to collect the data for one media plan. I was astonished to learn this. This is what happens when you incrementally add features.

We refactored all those disparate queries into a new set of 103 interlaced queries that deliver the bundled media plan with a single API call.

Yes, you read that correctly, too. Even with the new software, it takes 103 database queries to load a media plan. There’s clearly a lot going on in a Bionic media plan!

Despite the high count, these new queries are much more efficient than the old ones.

This database query refactoring more than doubles the speed of database fetching.

Intelligently Cache Media Plans

In software, “caching” is a technique of holding data in way that enables quick access to the data. You often cache in fast memory or near-memory, rather than on slow disk storage.

In our latest upgrade, we introduced caching of the bundled media plan.

With the latest software, your “recently accessed” media plans are cached in memory. We’re initially defining “recently accessed” as any media plan that’s been touched in the last five days. We may adjust this timeframe to optimize the caching.

As a result, instead of running 103 database queries to construct your media plan from the database, we simply grab your cached media plan from memory and send it to you.

Retrieving a cached media plan takes just milliseconds.

Media Plan Speed Tests

Our early test results show significant speed improvements.

For example, we tested the Largest Contentful Paint load times of a medium-sized, 114-placement flighted media plan.

What is Largest Contentful Paint?

According to Google, “Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is an important, user-centric metric for measuring perceived load speed because it marks the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded—a fast LCP helps reassure the user that the page is useful.”

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

To provide a good user experience, software developers should strive to have Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less.

Old Software – 8.7 Seconds

On the old software, it took 8.7 seconds to render the 114-placement media plan.

This LCP time rates “poor” by Google’s LCP standards. We agree with this assessment. This is why we’ve spent the last four months working to improve it.

New Software – 1.8 Seconds

In the new software, it takes just 1.8 seconds to render the same 114-placement media plan.

This is a 4.8x speed improvement. This rates as a solid “good” user experience by Google’s LCP standards. In testing the media plan software myself over the past few weeks, I agree it is a good user experience. I hope you agree, too!

Faster than Excel

In building the media planning experience, one of our development goals is to be “as fast as Excel.”

Most media planners come from an experience of hand crafting media plans using Microsoft Excel. Despite its many flaws as a media planning tool, one of Excel’s strong points is its speed and responsiveness.

I’m happy to report that Bionic is faster than Excel in loading a media plan.

It takes 5.6 seconds to open a bare bones Excel version of this 114-placement media plan (with no fancy design or complexities like pivots to slow it down).  If this were a web page, Google would rate loading this media plan in Excel as poor.

At only 1.8 seconds, Bionic is 3.1 times faster than Excel!

A Big Speed Improvement

Media Plan LCP Speed Comparisons

Media Plan Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) Speed Comparisons

As you can see from these results, the new software is significantly faster. The speed improvements are even bigger on larger media plans.

A Faster Media Planning Experience

The speed improvements don’t tell the whole story.

The bigger story is the improvement in your media planning user experience. You’ll now notice your media plan starts to render instantly and finishes quickly.

You won’t notice a delay. This keeps you in your creative flow.

More To Come

This refactoring of the media plan lays a solid foundation for other improvements.

Although we’re happy with this progress, we’re still not satisfied with the speed of adding placements and some other actions in the media plan. Additional improvements are already underway. You’ll get them soon.

How to Get a Faster Media Planning Experience

If you’re already on Bionic, you already have this faster media planning software.

We installed the software upgrade into your account for free as part of your subscription. You’ll notice the speed improvements the next time you open a media plan. Please let us know if you have any questions.

If you’re not yet using Bionic media planning software, you can request a trial through our website.