In June 2020 TV 2 Danmark went live with Promoplan, the MEDIAGENIX system that enables the marketing department to draw up an optimal promotion plan for all the promotion efforts of the organization and manage the complete promotion life cycle, from the definition of the goals to building and executing media plans.
We called Morten Engberg Stensgaard, Media Planner at TV 2 Danmark, to hear his impressions about the collaboration with MEDIAGENIX, the implementation, and — of course — Promoplan itself.
What made you decide it was time to replace your in-house built promotion strategy system?
Morten: “One of the reasons why we started looking for a new system is that marketing television programmes has changed drastically over the past 10 years. Earlier, if you had one big channel or a couple of channels, then you would just promote your programmes on those channels. But today we are using a lot of different media vehicle types — radio, social, outdoor you name it. Also, TV scheduling has become much more dynamic. Our half-yearly planning used to be pretty static. It didn’t change all that much. Nowadays we are inserting new programmes, and moving programmes around all the time. Especially now with the pandemic. So we also need to change our media plans constantly. That is a new reality for all broadcasters and we need a new system that can assist on those terms.”
“Marketing TV is a whole other game than marketing retail products.”
Why didn’t you go for a standard marketing tool?
Morten: “We looked at a lot of standard marketing tools, but marketing TV is a whole other game than marketing retail products. Take Microsoft. They can make use of a whole range of different media channels and within their budget they can buy the media space they need. Broadcasters on the other hand own the channels. We don’t only buy or book space for advertising: We need to take the point of view of the TV-platform itself. We need to fill up the marketing space in our schedules. That makes our way of doing marketing fundamentally different. And that is also why it was so great working with MEDIAGENIX. They know about the scheduling issues, how trailers are inserted into the schedule, and what happens when programmes change. Being able to talk with people who know the business, is a great advantage. You will never have that with suppliers of standard systems.”
“They didn’t just develop what we wanted. They were our partner in co-creation.”
How did you go about that collaboration with MEDIAGENIX?
Morten: “We collaborated very closely on the project because they really needed to understand the way we thought about this and the dynamics and logics of our workflow. And it was good to see they wouldn’t start developing until they got a deep understanding of exactly what we needed and what we thought we needed but didn’t. They came up with a lot of good insights, challenged our views and didn’t just develop what we wanted. They were our partner in co-creation.”
And how did the implementation go?
Morten: “I have been involved in a number implementations of large systems before, and compared to that I would say that this is going almost too smoothly. Admittedly, you could say that to some extent we brought existing functionalities together into one system, but we had a pretty clear idea of what needed to work and what the pitfalls and traps were. I think that is why we were on the right track right from the beginning.”
“It took 2 to 3 people to constantly copy and paste new information.”
Happy about the result?
Morten: “Before, we had 5 pretty big systems and plenty of large Excel sheets. It took 2 to 3 people to constantly copy and paste new information from one system to another manually. All this has now been taken over by Promoplan and other WHATS’ON functionality.
In Promoplan we have a media plan with all the trailers on the different channels and the trailers are generated into the schedules with the WHATS’ON Autoslotter. We can also manage what we call ‘external media’ — a radio spot, an outdoor poster, social media …. Promoplan enables us to manage and plan all those things ahead in a comprehensive media plan. Say you have a trailer campaign that spans two weeks. You will have that nicely displayed on a graphical chart, together with your campaign on Facebook, for instance. Parameters such as budget, cost, rating points, impressions … we can enter all that into the system.”
Which TV 2 departments are using Promoplan now?
Morten: “Mediaplanning, Production Administration, Sponsorship Admin, Campaign Lead Management, Trailer Admin, they all work with the system now. About 40 people in all. More staff will follow given the new possibilities Promoplan has opened up and the clearer overview we have now. More departments are looking at how they can connect to the system. We are organizing ourselves around this and looking at making that match between our workflows and the possibilities in the system.”
And how are the users experiencing their new tool?
Morten: “The users are remarkably positive about Promoplan. With our previous systems they weren’t able to drag and drop, for instance. For people in marketing that is a basic functionality. They are very happy that all those basic things just work. Another thing that people are very happy about is the fact that they don’t only see the media promoting the programmes in the mediaplan, they also see the programmes as scheduled in WHATS’ON. They can make sure that whenever our scheduling department moves the programmes, the campaign moves along with it. Before, all this had to be done manually. That is a huge difference. Not only does that make our lives easier, we can sleep better at night because we know things are synched up and aligned.”
Thank you Morten.
