Bionic just boosted the speed of its media planning tool. It helps you finish media plan updates 30x faster than the blink of an eye – a huge improvement!
The Need for Speed in Media Planning
Your media planning tool can never be fast enough. Any delay disrupts your media planning workflow. It’s annoying. It slows you down. It leads to errors.
We understand how important speed is to your media planning. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in faster media planning over the years, including these upgrades:
- The Need for Speed in Media Planning Software – June 4, 2016
- Faster Media Planning Software – August 30, 2016
- Faster Media Planning – December 4, 2018
- Faster Media Planning with Intelligent Caching – May 2, 2022
- Faster Media Plan Placements and Media Plan Downloads – June 10, 2022
- Faster Media Planning Filters, Picklists, Deletes, Exports – June 30, 2022
Still Not Fast Enough
Despite all these efforts, Bionic was still not as fast as we want it to be.
It was sometimes sluggish when performing media plan updates, especially on large media plans with hundreds of lines, dozens of advertising KPIs, requiring thousands of re-calculations with each edit.
Measuring First Input Delay
Of special concern was a user experience performance metric called First Input Delay (FID).
First Input Delay measures the time from when you interact with a page (make an edit or click a control) to the time when your browser is able to handle your next input. Although this metric is typically used to measure loading new pages, FID can also be used as a guide for measuring performance when interacting with a media plan.
Literally Faster Than a Blink of an Eye
According to Google, sites should strive to have a First Input Delay of 100 milliseconds (0.1 second) or less to provide you with a “good” user experience. To put this into perspective, it takes you about 300 milliseconds (0.3 seconds) to blink your eye. Anything slower than a blink of an eye is considered poor.
Need to Re-Architect the Media Plan
We set a goal to give you instantaneous updates while working on a media plan. We want Bionic to be as fast as working in an Excel worksheet. Achieving this goal has some challenges:
- Internetworking Delays: Unlike Excel, Bionic has the extra challenge of interacting with web servers and database servers via the internet. Each of these “hops” introduces delays.
- Database Delays: Unlike Excel, Bionic stores data in a database. While the benefits of database storage are clear, the biggest drawback of cloud database storage is speed. Database storage is often much slower than local file storage.
In order to overcome these challenges, it became clear we needed to take a different approach with our software. A typical SaaS software architecture would never achieve our objectives.
The New “Media Plan Object” Architecture
We fundamentally re-architected your media planning experience based on a new Media Plan Object (MPO) architecture, which includes these technical highlights:
- Instead of dozens of server calls to load your media plan, a single server call.
- Instead of waiting on database updates, interact with in-memory objects (backed by database).
- Instead of performing calculations in database, perform all calculations in memory.
- Because we are lightening the load on the database, all the remaining database interactions will be faster.
This project was one of the biggest projects we’ve ever undertaken.
Instead of fearing such a big project, the engineering team took on this challenge with delight and determination. They knew we needed to make this big change in order to achieve our goals. This positive attitude allowed us to accomplish in a few months what would take years with other teams. Thank you!
The Fastest Media Planning Tool Ever Built?
The speed tests are in. The new Bionic is so much faster!
Gnarly edits that used to take 1.5 seconds are now instantaneous. I’m happy to report that Bionic beats the 100 millisecond First Input Delay benchmark in every case. Some edits happen so fast it’s hard to measure because they’re done as the timer starts.
I hope this speed improvement brings you a more delightful media planning experience!
How to Get Faster Media Planning Software
If you’re already using Bionic for Agencies, you already have the new software. We installed it on your behalf as part of your Bionic subscription, which includes free upgrades. The next time you log in, you will feel the speed.
If you don’t already have Bionic, you can learn about capabilities, see a demo, or start a trial through our website.
The post Faster Media Planning with Even Faster Media Plan Updates first appeared on Bionic Advertising Systems.