Background

I’m employed at an advertising agency, and as part of my role as a budget manager, I’m responsible for the media plan development process for campaigns.

But what exactly does that entail?

A media plan outlines how a campaign will be executed in terms of tools, objectives, metrics, and more. Here are the key steps involved in constructing a media plan:

Receive a client brief: This includes information about the campaign’s purpose, budget, and objectives. For instance, it could be launching a new product with a 1 million NIS budget, aiming for exposure through ads and generating leads.
Select the appropriate tools based on campaign goals and past campaign performance.
Hand over the media plan to the PPC team for cost estimation and to ensure that the chosen tools are suitable and aligned with our capacity to achieve the campaign objectives, considering past media performance.
Finally, gain client approval for the media plan.

This process ensures that our campaigns are strategically executed to meet the client’s goals and maximize their budget.

The Challenge

The process of constructing the media plan encompasses several stages, including:

Identifying the tools aligned with the campaign’s objectives as specified in the client’s brief.
Assessing the costs associated with each chosen tool can fluctuate depending on factors like the campaign’s duration, the number of advertisers during that period, and the behavioral patterns of the target audience.
Welcoming and addressing comments or questions, and implementing necessary adjustments.

These multiple steps, coupled with the involvement of various systems and numerous influencing factors in the development of the measurement plan, necessitate the creation of a user-friendly system capable of efficiently processing and presenting data. Such a system simplifies the information for easy comprehension.

The solution

Designing a user-friendly system for constructing a media plan that eliminates the need to consult multiple sources for essential data and relies on past performance data to optimize efficiency.

Research competitors

During my research, I delved into systems that bridge the realms of campaign management, task management, and finance.

Here’s how I drew inspiration from some of them:

Google Ads: I found valuable insights in the structured campaign setup process of Google Ads. It offers clear stages, ensuring that users always have a clear understanding of their progress in the campaign creation journey.
IDX: With IDX, I leveraged the system’s inherent nature and its connections to various publishers. I adopted its data presentation structure, which enhances data accessibility and accommodates diverse user perspectives.
Iron Source: While my application primarily focuses on the digital advertising sector, I was greatly influenced by Iron Source’s capability to extract vast volumes of data. I admired how it transforms this data into visual and graphical representations, making complex information more digestible.

These inspirations have significantly informed the development of my application, allowing it to incorporate user-friendly, structured processes and effective data presentation methods.

Personas

Research

I conducted a survey comprising seven questions to gather insights from our specific user group. I received a total of 13 responses, with the majority of them being client managers. The key takeaways from the survey are as follows:

Survey Results:

Every participant in the survey indicated that their clients engage in sponsored activities continuously, rather than exclusively during campaigns.
A substantial 75% of the respondents reported that they create more than four media programs each month.

However, the survey results unveiled a particularly intriguing statistic:

Insights

Since this is an operation that repeats itself with high frequency, it is requested to allow the system access to the data to study the performance and optimize the next program.
To avoid a situation where a client manager chooses only tools that they know to save time searching for the costs/capabilities of the tools, it is recommended to examine the possibility of an initial definition of all the tools and their costs