Media planning and buying software is the system that advertising agencies and brands use to plan where their ads will run, buy that ad space, check that the ads actually ran and pay the bills. "Media" here means any place that carries ads: TV channels, radio, newspapers, websites and apps. The software covers both TV and digital ads, so the whole budget of a campaign is recorded in one place. In the industry, it is the main record of what each brand has bought.
An agency's work has four stages. First comes the plan: how much money goes to each channel, on which dates, to reach which audience. Second comes the buy. For TV, the agency sends a release order to each broadcaster. A release order is a formal order for particular ad slots at an agreed price. For digital ads, the agency sets budgets in a demand-side platform (DSP), the software that bids for ad space in automatic auctions. Third comes the check. After the ads run, the agency compares what it ordered with what each media company says it delivered. Fourth comes the bill. The agency pays each media company and bills the brand.
Take, for example, a media agency in Mumbai that plans a ₹5 crore campaign for a smartphone brand during the IPL season. The plan puts ₹3 crore into ten-second spots during match breaks on a television network, and ₹2 crore into online video and app ads. The agency sends the release order to the broadcaster's ad order management system. It sets the ₹2 crore digital budget in the DSP. Every week, the broadcaster sends a log of the spots that actually aired. The software matches each aired spot against the order. Say four spots aired in the pre-match show, when the order asked for breaks during the match. The software flags them. The agency asks for replacement spots, or a lower price, before it pays the bill.
Why does an agency need a separate system for this? A large agency runs hundreds of campaigns for many brands at once. Each campaign has hundreds of orders and invoices. Without one record, an agency can pay for ads that never ran, and nobody notices.
The results of each campaign then go to marketing reporting and analytics tools, which collect the numbers from every channel into one set of reports. Whether the spending actually raised sales is a separate question. It is answered by marketing mix modelling (MMM).