In June 2020 TV 2 Danmark went live with Promoplan, the strategic promotion planning tool by MEDIAGENIX that enables a company’s marketing department to draw up a strategic 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.
Morten Engberg Stensgaard, Media Planner at TV 2 Danmark: “One of the reasons why we started looking for a replacement of our in-house built promotion strategy tool is that marketing television programmes has changed drastically over the past 10 years. 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, and as a consequence we need to change our media plans constantly. That is a new reality for all broadcasters. We did not go for a standard marketing tool because doing marketing is fundamentally different for broadcasters than for, say, retailers. Being able to talk with people who know the TV business, is key. That is why it was so great to work with MEDIAGENIX.”
TV 2 Danmark was in need of additional functionality. One of the things they missed was seeing ratings in multiple target groups. Another was information about the presentation items in the schedule, which are one-off promos or graphics on the linear channels. They also wanted to simplify the workflow. At the time 5 unconnected systems had to work together and it took 2 to 3 people to constantly copy and paste all the frequently changing information from one system to another manually.
MEDIAGENIX and TV 2 Danmark started working on a much simpler workflow, with Promoplan and Broadcast Management Platform WHATS’ON replacing the bulk of Excels and manual entries. MEDIAGENIX decided to build an application next to WHATS’ON and integrate it with WHATS’ON through APIs. For TV 2 Danmark this would mean they would not have to do a major WHATS’ON upgrade to be able to use Promoplan. The fact that Promoplan is built on top of the WHATS’ON technology stack has the added advantage that Promoplan can run on the same database as WHATS’ON, even though both have their own Database schema. There is no need to set up a separate database.
An overview of all promotional activity
Promoplan is designed as a standalone application for any company’s marketing department, not only for broadcasters. It provides an overview of all past and future promotional activity of the organization. Promotions include trailers, social posts, posters on buses, ads in magazines and even merchandising — basically everything with which any company can promote products, events or services.
“Promoplan is designed as a standalone application for any company’s marketing department.”
Per promotion plan you can manage a media plan over multiple media vehicles, and per media vehicle the available inventory over all active media plans. Execution of the media plan is facilitated by integrating with various media vehicle management tools. For TV and radio channels this ideally is WHATS’ ON Trailer Campaigns.
Morten Engberg Stensgaard: “Promoplan gets from WHATS’ON all the information regarding transmissions that need to be promoted. Users are notified whenever there are changes in the schedule, and they can have Promoplan update the media plans automatically.”
The promotion life cycle
It all starts with a list of promotion plans, i.e. a list of things a company wants its promotion department to promote during a certain period. There is information about who is responsible, the period of time, the importance, the awareness in the audience, strategic and tactical goals, milestones, type of campaign, effort required, validation, what other departments will be involved, etc.
“The marketing department can constantly monitor how they are reaching the goals for the various promotion plans.”
In the media plan you define all the elements in your promotion, across all media: the TV or radio channels your promos will be running on, your social campaigns, posters, ads, T shirts … The media plan also specifies how the promotion plan has targets for various media vehicles over certain periods of time.
The next step is building up your promotions on a specific media vehicle. This application makes sure, for instance, that the available promo time on a channel is optimally distributed over all promotion plans.
As the promotion plans are running and the schedule changes happen, the marketing department can constantly monitor how they are reaching the goals for the various promotion plans. This will then start the cycle again.
Morten Engberg Stensgaard: “Mediaplanning, Production Administration, Sponsorship Admin, Campaign Lead Management, Trailer Admin, all these departments are working 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 it gives us. We all sleep better at night, knowing that everything is aligned and in synch.”
Read the interview with Morten Engberg Stensgaard, Media Planner at TV 2 Danmark.
