• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 23, 2024

You've heard of Copilot. Now there's "CoPlanner," a new AI-powered media planning tool Microsoft says will simplify the process for advertisers and agencies.

Like CoPilot, which Microsoft brands as "your everyday AI companion," CoPlanner leverages Microsoft's generative AI technology to turn text prompts into media planning specs and recommendations.

"It uses the power of advanced language models such as OpenAI's GPT-4 to turn free-form textual order details into structured JSON data that contains relevant information such as dates, pricing, and targeting criteria," Microsoft Director of Global Data Science and Analytics Alex Iovine explains in a blog post introducing CoPlanning going live today.

Titled, "Revolutionizing Ad Operations With Advanced AI," Iovine says, "Our ambition is for CoPlanner to set a new standard across future managed service engagements."

Once a media planner enters the parameters of ad campaign details, he says CoPlanner automatically connects to:

The tool enables planners and marketers to apply seasonal models to areas of inventory when there are known, seasonal business fluctuations in a publisher’s impression volume.

For example, a sports publisher like ESPN might see a huge spike once per year in late January that corresponds with the Super Bowl.

The tool then checks to determine whether there is enough available inventory to run the campaign. It aims to reduce tedious manual tasks and features options to run multiple combinations of campaigns to test different scenarios for media planning. The tool then pre-fills fields required for object creation in the order management system (OMS), saving a large amount of manual effort.

Ironically, CoPlanner is not a self-service tool, but is part of a "new standard across future managed service engagements.

Microsoft says publishers or other sell-side companies need to work with ad reps to use the tool. It is also a way to build on Microsoft’s existing forecasting product, known as "Yield Analytics."

Another feature available in CoPlanner is its ability to use large language models (LLMs) for parsing, which analyzes a sentence into its parts to describe their syntactic roles. This allows for automation in two key areas simultaneously — forecasting and campaign set-up.

Microsoft says the tool begins with an order form, brings in forecasting via Yield Analytics, and ends with a new campaign in its order management system, which sounds like CoPlanner actually an insular tool for planning media through Microsoft's platforms and not the open media universe.

"In essence, CoPlanner is a single tool that handles the entire media planning workflow," Iovine explains.