Introducing our AI Media Planner 

As media buying becomes increasingly challenging, organisations are seeking smarter ways to plan, optimise and execute advertising campaigns.

This article introduces our AI Media Planner, explaining what it is, the difficulties it addresses, and what sets it apart from off-the-shelf solutions.

Before exploring these areas, it is helpful to understand the broader context of programmatic advertising and its potential, as this provides the basis for the growing importance of AI-powered media planning.

Watch the video below, where we explain what our AI Media Planer is, how it works, the problems it solves, and how it can transform the media planning process.

The promise of programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, offering to automate the buying, selling and measurement of digital media using software and data.

Over the following decades, significant advances in automation were delivered by the industry with the introduction of ad servers, DSPs, SSPs, and data platforms, as well as technical protocols like real-time bidding (RTB).

These innovations have transformed the way digital advertising is executed and optimised on a large scale. However, despite this progress, many critical aspects of programmatic advertising remain manual and time-consuming.

In particular, media planning continues to rely heavily on human expertise, spreadsheets and repetitive workflows, making it one of the least automated stages of the programmatic advertising lifecycle.

The media-planning process

Although programmatic advertising has automated many aspects of campaign execution, the media planning process still relies heavily on manual work.

The planning, creation and configuration of campaigns contain several common challenges that reduce efficiency and make it difficult to make full use of available data.

01. Manual media planning

Media plans are still mostly created by copying and pasting information from spreadsheets into advertising platforms. Audiences, budgets and channels are configured manually.

02. Scattered campaign information

Campaign requirements are often communicated via email, with important details often buried within lengthy email threads. Advertising agencies often report receiving a constant stream of campaign updates via email, which makes it difficult to keep track of information and maintain a single source of truth.

03. Fragmented historical data

Campaign performance data is often spread across multiple platforms, such as Google Ads and various DSPs. These data silos make it difficult to combine performance metrics, identify trends, or generate meaningful recommendations for future campaigns.

04. Repetitive workflows and limited optimisation

Advertisers and AdOps teams frequently reuse the same campaign settings across multiple channels and allocate budgets evenly, rather than using historical performance data to optimise budget distribution and campaign strategy.

05. Limited workflow flexibility

Existing media planning tools provide a broad range of features but are rarely designed to support organisation-specific workflows. As a result, teams are often forced to adapt their processes to the software instead of tailoring the software to their way of working.

To solve these problems, we built our AI Media Planner.

Introducing Spyrosoft AdTech’s AI Media Planner

The AI Media Planner is an agentic AI platform designed to help organisations build customised media planning solutions around their unique business requirements and workflows.

Unlike rigid, out-of-the-box tools, it provides an extensible foundation that can be adapted to existing processes, technologies, and operational models. The goal is to provide the flexibility needed to adapt the technology around their specific needs.

It focuses on three core stages of the media planning process:

1. Brief and strategy
2. Media planning
3. Campaign setup and trafficking

While every organisation’s media planning workflow may differ, these stages represent the common foundations of the process. The AI Media Planner can also be extended to support additional areas, including creative and asset management, reporting and measurement, and real-time campaign optimisation.

A major feature is its connection to the data layer, that enables continuous collection, analysis and activation of data from multiple sources, including first-party and campaign performance data.

The data layer operates across three main stages:

1. Data collection and storage
2. Analysis
3. Activation

By linking the data layer to the media planning workflow, the AI Media Planner can leverage real-time and historical data to create more effective media plans, pinpoint relevant audiences, optimise channel selection and enhance campaign performance over time.

The problems our AI Media Planner helps solve

The key benefits of our AI Media Planner

The AI Media Planner is designed to automate the most time-consuming aspects of media planning while improving the quality and consistency of campaign decisions.

• Faster media planning – Reduces the time required to create a media plan from hours to minutes by automating repetitive planning and configuration tasks.
• Greater operational efficiency – Enables teams to create, configure, and launch more advertising campaigns without increasing headcount, allowing organisations to scale campaign delivery more effectively.
• Improved campaign performance – Uses historical data and AI-driven recommendations to identify more effective audience segments, channel mixes, and budget allocations, helping maximise campaign results.
• Streamlined workflows – Replaces fragmented processes with a structured and automated workflow, reducing administrative overhead and minimising the risk of errors.
• Channel-specific planning – Generates campaign plans tailored to the requirements and best practices of each digital advertising channel, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach.
• Higher-value work for media teams – Frees AdOps specialists and media buyers from repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on strategic planning, client relationships, campaign optimisation, and other activities that deliver greater value.

The results our AI Media Planner produces

The AI Media Planner has been tested on live advertising campaigns managed by our marketing team, demonstrating measurable improvements in efficiency, productivity, or campaign performance:

• Reduced media planning time by 60%, enabling campaigns to be created in minutes rather than hours.
• Increased team productivity by 15% by automating repetitive, manual tasks.
• Identified higher-performing audiences and channels, improving reach efficiency and ROI by 5x.
• Enabled the team to plan and launch 3x as many campaigns without increasing headcount.

The AI Media Planner can be deployed in two ways, depending on an organisation’s technology strategy:

FAQ

Why should companies build their own AI Media Planner when they can use an existing solution?

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While there are a number off-the-shelf AI-powered media planning tools on the market, they are ultimately designed for the end user – e.g. brands and advertisers.
If you’re an AdTech company or agency that creates media plans and runs campaigns on behalf of your clients, then building your own custom solution makes a lot of sense as you’ll able to customise it around your business, processes, and workflows.

Also, building a custom solution allows you to:
– Better integrate with your existing systems, including ad platforms, CDPs, CRMs, data warehouses, and reporting tools.
– Leverage your proprietary data, so the AI models can make recommendations based on historical campaign performance, first-party data, audience insights, and internal business knowledge. It also prevents your valuable first-party data from leaving your company and being exposed to publicly trained LLMs, which is important for pretty much every company.
– Retain control over your intellectual property; you’ll have control over the features and roadmap, rather than relying on a vendor’s priorities.
– Scale and evolve the solution over time, adding new capabilities, channels, models, and integrations as your business changes and grows. And this also allows you to offer a competitive advantage as you’ll be offering something that isn’t offered by other companies.

Do you have a working version of the AI Media Planner?

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Yes. We’ve built various versions of the AI Media Planner for our clients and we’ve also built a solution that we use internally.

Each implementation is different, because each business is different. And this is why we’ve built it so that is customisable and extensible, so that it can be tailored to your business.

Who owns the software (code and IP) of the AI Media Planner?

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You do! Whatever we build, you own. There are no ongoing licensing fees, we basically build it for you and then you own it.

We can also maintain the solution for you, or you can hand it over to your internal development teams, if you have one.