MX Product Roundup vol. 3
Spotlight | Our experts’ favorite tools for media buying and finance teams
Introducing Campaign Options.
A game-changing enhancement for National Radio and Local.
Products
BuyerAssist™
Initiative
ROAS
Users
Buyers
Workflows
Planning
Scheduling
Purpose
Make it faster and easier to present different strategies to client / brand team during the Campaign planning process—and ensure the best results.
Next Up
Today this capability is live for Local TV, Local Radio, and National Radio, with possible other media types down the road.
Learn More
View release documentation for this feature here.
Thoroughly explore a range of schedule options without the hassle of building and rebuilding plans.
At Hudson, we’re always looking for ways to free up buyers to find creative solutions that help advertisers reach the best audiences at the best price. We also know that iterating and collaborating are at the heart of this process. So naturally, when we heard from buyers how much tedious labor was involved in simulating multiple versions of campaigns, we wanted to help. We observed how each version is built and saved—and then rebuilt when edits were required. While this is at least tenable to peak at the impact of small, single tweaks to a campaign, rebuilding campaigns over and over again to present a number of different potential adjustments that could really “move the needle” for brands quickly becomes a laborious, manual burden.
With this new, game-changing enhancement—now available to National Radio and all Local users, with possible expansion across more workflows on the horizon—users have the ability to create and save as many potential campaign options as they might need for any campaign. After considering different strategic options for a campaign—for example, whether to load up on daytime or go deep on news shows—buyers can simply build and save options once, with the assurance they can switch between, make changes to, and move forward with any of them. This capability makes it much easier to present to team and collaborate without tedious re-work, as well as make additional edits “on the fly.” This enhancement is a great example of how our development teams seek to make life easier for users while delivering the best possible results for advertisers.
A look at how it works
From inside Schedule Units, click on the vertical three-dot menu next to the ScheduleAssist toggle and select "Save Version.”
Enter the desired Version Name and click Save.
The newly created version can then be found under the “Active Worksheet” menu.
“As a general principle, creativity and workload should never be at odds. Challenging this status quo enables teams to optimally leverage talented buyers—and eliminate the risk of underserving brands.
The buyers we work with have no shortage of good ideas. We obviously want to make it as easy as possible for them to bring different strategies to the table. This campaign options functionality is a great start—a new capability that I could see being foundational for the future. From expanding it to new media types and cross-media campaigns to creating new ways to compare and contrast during Prebuy, to even fully simulating how different campaigns options will perform, there are many ways we can help buyers innovate, collaborate, and delight advertisers without burning the midnight oil.”
— Bobbie Perez,
Product Lead, Hudson MX
New Ratings Explorer functionality.
Quick and convenient “cascade” demo functionality.
Product
BuyerAssist™
Initiative
-
Users
Local TV
Workflows
Estimation
Negotiation
Posting
Schedule/Media Plan
Purpose
Improves Accuracy | Helps Achieve Best Results for Advertisers | Greater Convenience | Greater Ease of Use | Reduces Manual Entry / Steps
What’s next?
-
These latest enhancements allow local workflow users to quickly and easily replicate or “cascade” ratings across multiple demos and forecast with unparalleled ease.
This suite of new features directly resulted from our clients' invaluable input. During sessions with a particular client leadership team, we uncovered ways they were interested in taking advantage of our technology infrastructure to make the Local TV buying and forecasting workflow more efficient. Specifically, the task was to have a tool that would make it possible to negotiate across multiple buying demographics simultaneously—while retaining complete visibility of key data points as they progress in the workflow.
From a product design and user experience standpoint, we saw this as an opportunity to meet a need and build in that value-add for our clients—as well as optimize the user experience across our rating tool.
This feature also lays the foundations to continue to innovate this and other workflows, as the meaning of “TV” and “video” continue to converge in meaningful ways for our users. For a while now, Local TV buyers have been eying opportunities to employ new, more advanced targeting demographics. Our optimizations make integrating and buying against these new, more advanced measurements easier.
A look at how it works
Our entire platform is powered by a sophisticated rules engine, so we were able to leverage this to allow our teams to create custom rules that are automatically applied across all demographics. Users can now change primary demo projection books fields to automatically populate, or “cascade,” that information across all available demos.
Beyond the new cascade functionality, we’ve reconfigured Ratings Explorer screens from a vertical to a horizontal view, enabling users to work within larger, more detailed screens and view more historical data at a time. This enhancement has made this process much quicker and easier as negotiators are going through their estimating journey.
The mark of a genuinely successful product enhancement goes beyond what it can enable. It is often measured by how intuitive it is and how quickly users can ramp up and adopt that functionality in their everyday work. Making this or any feature release truly successful requires taking advantage of the full breadth of what virtually every one of our teams can offer.
“We’re fortunate to have created ways to work across teams to seamlessly deliver what I like to call “white glove” client service as we deploy genuinely top-notch, innovative, and user-friendly features.
In this instance, we made it our mission to ensure that all of our Local client teams that work in the MX Platform™ each day were well-versed in the new feature and prepared for the update. As clients see further opportunities to optimize this and other elements within the platform—and this will always be necessary as users continually evolve the way they work—we have a holistic strategy and team to get their vision mapped, tested, released, and optimally utilized.
Based on what we’ve heard from our clients so far, it feels great knowing that our collective efforts have made all the difference!"
— Zufiya Edwards,
Product Solution Specialists Lead, Hudson MX
Introducing the Buyer Wallet+
Support for Multiple Products & Estimates in a Single Campaign.
Product
BuyerAssist™
Initiative
Buyer “Wallet”
Users
All Buyers (except Local)
Administrators
Workflows
Campaign Planning
Purpose
The new “wallet” enables holistic, real-time visibility into all approved, allocated, and available budgets for a campaign in one central place. When utilizing a Wallet, buyers can get a jumpstart on planning before estimates and products are even created—then add as many of each as desired once they become available.
What’s Next?
Today the Wallet supports PreBuy workflows. In the coming quarters, look for Wallet functionality to integrate incremental workflows and features which may include: LiveBuy Worksheet, Ordering, MAF, Deal Management, and more.
Managing the entire budget for an advertiser’s strategy or goal in one unified “Wallet” enables buyers new levels of speed and agility while providing spend visibility and control in real-time.
For many buyers, keeping track of what they can spend and how much is left can be a real hassle given the realities of different funding sources, multiple estimates, and staggered approvals. The traditional approach of having one estimate and one product per campaign is time-consuming and error-prone—and can result in a leftover budget that could have been avoided by using better tools.
The concept of a centralized digital “Wallet” is becoming more prevalent in day-to-day life—for example, the Apple iPhone Wallet streamlines contactless credit card payments and more. Fundamentally, it’s an easy way to allow several methods of payment to be defined within the wallet (for example, several different credit cards, gift cards, coupons, etc.) and keep a running total. Similarly, with the new Wallet in BuyerAssist, buyers can add and manage all the products and estimates relevant to their campaign, client or brand, and / or goal without having to wait on estimates or worry about how information needs to be communicated to t or utilized by finance.
By effectively insulating buyers from the tracking and process logistics of other teams, the new Wallet concept frees up time and headspace for buyers to do more of what they do best: getting the best results for advertisers.
Now buyers can create a new campaign, even before knowing the product and estimate — enabling them to start building a media plan immediately while they wait for the right products and estimates to be created. Once created, a buyer can then add them all to their “Wallet.” Multiple products and estimates can be added to each Wallet and therefore to a campaign where the entire budget can be tracked, managed, and edited by permissioned buyers and / or administrators.
“This is just the beginning—our big picture vision is to turn planning into more of a sandbox environment where you can build, save, edit, and share without commitment.
The Wallet concept makes it so much easier to track and control all spending for a given campaign or goal in real-time all in one place. All of the necessary information for communicating with client / brand team, paying vendors, and syncing with an ERP tool are all still there—but behind the scenes, where the system automatically takes care of keeping everything sorted. For instance, today buyers will appreciate being able to easily add new estimates when an advertiser commits to increasing spend or being able to holistically manage a promotional campaign spanning several products. But in the not too distant future, I can also see cross media and cross channel Wallets that even incorporate deals, and it really becomes interesting…”
— Alex Nunnelly,
Head of Product, BuyerAssist™, Hudson MX
Want to learn more?
If you’re interested in learning more about our solutions, please let us know. We’ll be in touch!