We’re freshly into fall, so what better time than now for a bunch of great Broadsign Control features to fall into your lap? We’ve got improvements to our search functionality, a precise way to create shares of loops, and an upgrade to our Monitor Sync feature all available to you now in Broadsign Control, along with some other improvements that should allow you to accomplish many detailed tasks more easily than before.
Want a closer look? Well, grab yourself a pumpkin spice latte and follow along as we walk you through the latest additions in Control 14.2, as well as a couple of features we want to highlight from our 14.1 release back in May.
You can now break loops up by milliseconds as well as percentages
If you need to break your loops up to maintain specific content ratios (ex: advertising vs. editorial), you can now do so either by percentage or by length in milliseconds. With these options, you can now get as granular as you need to ensure the right content breakdown on your displays.
This feature offers additional benefits for users of Broadsign Direct. Because Broadsign Direct only recognizes primary shares, creating a secondary share in a Broadsign Control loop will enable you to block off that time for content only bookable outside of Broadsign Direct. It’s a convenient little trick to help you better manage special content whenever you need.
We added support for cookies to Monitor Sync
If you have configured your Broadsign Control Players to retrieve files from third-party data sources (ex: lottery results, weather feeds, etc.), you can now use cookies to simplify some elements of your work.
A couple of useful possible applications include:
- Easier validation of which players are accessing specific content or feeds (session management)
- Establishing rules-based distribution of externally-sourced content to your players
There’s a lot of potential for creativity with this feature, and we look forward to seeing what you all come up with.
You can see Events in your Loop Snapshot Report
In Broadsign Control, campaigns designated as Events tend to be of high importance. To improve visibility of this content, we’ve now made Events visible in loop snapshot reports.
Not only will this make it easier for you to confirm for your advertisers when and where their event content will play, it will also improve the accuracy of your reports, since events are now included.
Advanced search functionality has gotten an upgrade
The intention of our advanced search functionality is to make it easier for you to find specific resources, like ad copies, display units, etc. However, previous iterations of this feature tended to surface more resources than desirable.
Because of an adjustment to the way search terms are handled by the system, results in search should be much more intuitive than before, and make it easier to find the specific resources you’re after.
Archaic terminology has been updated throughout the UI and Docs
We support the ongoing movement to replace the archaic terms “master” and “slave” in software. As of the 14.2 release, all instances of these terms have been updated to “leader” and “follower” in both the user interface and documentation for Broadsign Control.
This is a necessary correction to promote a more inclusive and thoughtful user experience, and we are pleased to align ourselves with other progressive technology leaders that have taken similar steps.
We made campaign performance reports easier to use (14.1 & 14.2)
Issuing month-by-month invoices should involve as little work as possible. To help with that, we added new filters to our Campaign Performance Report set-up wizards.
You can now generate performance reports:
- By week, with the option to pick which day starts your week
- And by custom date range
We also added display unit addresses to campaign performance reports (14.1 & 14.2)
When you’re evaluating campaign performance, the details matter. That’s why we added Display Unit addresses to our Campaign Reports. Now, it’s easy to get an at-a-glance, granular view of where a campaign has run.
