New feature: Standardized field templates

Release date: February 20, 2018

Every marketing team work differently.  Depending on the needs of your team and the needs of your clients, you may want to capture extra information in each media insertion of your media plan.

To capture extra information, you define custom fields in your media plan. 

Now, when creating additional media plans, you may want to re-use the same field configuration.

Previously, you had to select a previous media plan as a template when creating a new media plan.  This would copy all the custom fields of the previous media plan into the new media plan.

That's ok, but there's 3 problems with this approach:

• First, selecting a previous media plan as a template was optional and many did not do it, thus your new media plans were not setup properly.
• As you create more and more media plans in your account, the number of options grows as-well, making it harder to decide which one to select.
• The options listed in the dropdown are the names of previous media plans, which does not reflect what fields are included.

In this release, you can now pre-define and manage the field templates.  This allows you to standardize the field templates used by your team.

Let see how it works...

Define field templates

The "Administration" module now has a additional sub-module for "Field Templates". 

By default, every account has a "Default template" that includes the "system" fields.  You can rename the field template and the fields, but you cannot delete them.

You can associate additional fields to the "Default template" if needed.

You can also create additional field templates if needed with different field configurations.  This is useful when different clients require to capture different information. 

Note that all field templates will have the "system" fields.

Existing accounts: We did a best effort to include the fields you've been using in your previous media plans in your "Default template".  We recommend to review your "Default template" and adjust accordingly to make sure it fits your needs.

Using field templates

Field template are used when you create a new media plan in the "Media plans" module.

If your account only has the "Default template", then the "Create media plan" will not prompt you to select a template and will automatically use the "Default template".

If your account has multiple field templates, then the "Create media plan" will prompt you to select a template.

Notice that the field template is now mandatory in the form and the list of options are the field template names (instead of the previous media plans.)

When you create the media plan, the system will copy all the field configuration of the selected field template into the new media plan.  

Finally, note that updating a field template does not affect existing media plan.  The field template is only used when creating media plan to copy the field configuration. 

To update the fields of an existing media plan, you must go in the "Media plans" module, open the media plan and click the "Fields" button.

That's it ! We hope you'll enjoy the new field template feature.  Give it a try and let us know what you think !

As always, don't hesitate to send us your great feedback or other idea for new features !

Have a great day,

The MediaPlanHQ team