Tilsim product
TV budgeting & media planning software for agencies and advertisers.
It turns a rating target into a budget you can defend in the room — and a budget back into the ratings it actually buys — without rebuilding the plan for the second question.
Move the budget and the plan re-costs itself: you see which channels absorb the change, and a warning the moment a move would drop the campaign out of a discount tier. Alternatives sit side by side as separate scenarios, so the plan you already agreed is never overwritten to try an idea. And the figure you walk into the room with stays that figure — the same inputs give the same answer today, next month and in the post-buy review, so the meeting is about the plan instead of whose file is right. How that is held in place is written out in the Tilsim methodology.
The whole market mechanic, not a slice of it: rate cards, seasonality, dayparts and negotiated discounts all live inside one chain — and the chain runs in both directions. The category view of that chain — the seven calculations any media planning software has to get right — sets the bar this product is built against.
“How much will the required volume of advertising cost?” and “how much advertising will the allocated budget buy?” are the same question read from opposite ends. The reverse path is not a second calculation with its own assumptions: cost a plan one way and it reconciles when you check it the other.
Every channel carries its own base cost per rating point for a 30-second spot. That base is never used raw: it passes through an ordered chain of coefficients, and the order is part of the result.
Each channel gets a monthly curve on top of its base rate: December air is dearer, January cheaper. The coefficient is a market input applied per month — not an average smeared across the year, and not a hidden constant.
Off-prime is negotiated as a share of money, but it delivers a different share of ratings — cheaper inventory buys more points per euro. The conversion uses the off-prime discount and each daypart's affinity, so the two units never get confused.
Monthly ladders keyed to the average monthly channel budget, contract ladders keyed to the annual seller or channel volume, plus manual extra rates. They compose the way contracts actually work — sequentially, on what remains.
The discount tier depends on the budget, and the budget depends on the discount. The plan is priced, the tier is picked, the plan is repriced — until the discount picture stops moving. If a budget sits on a threshold and oscillates between two tiers, it takes the larger budget: the conservative number a buyer can defend.
Duration weighting. A shorter spot costs less and weighs less. Raw TRP becomes weighted TRP against a 30-second reference before any money is calculated.
Affinity. TRP is measured in the brand's target group, GRP across everyone. Affinity bridges them per channel, per month, per daypart.
Shop List and Execution. The volume declared to the seller sets the tier; the money that actually runs is tracked separately, so a flight change never silently rewrites the terms it earned.
On CPP and money. CPP behaves as price inside the model — that is what planning requires — but it is not a feed of contracted rates, and the system does not blur the two. Spend, savings and return are settled against contracts in finance, not in a plan. For the full seven-step breakdown of the chain, read the guide: Media planning software: what it actually computes → A stripped-down version of the same arithmetic — one CPP, one seasonal index, one ladder — runs in the browser as the wTRP → budget calculator, if you want to check the shape of the answer before booking a demo.
Two of the screens a media buyer spends the most time on: laying out the flight, and settling the commercial terms.
A campaign moves through the same named screens every time, and each one is confirmed before the next opens. Nothing is carried forward on an assumption.
Choose the advertiser, the period and the market price list, then fix the direction: start from the money you have, or from the rating volume you need. The direction belongs to the project — it decides what every numeric cell downstream means.
Spread the campaign across the weeks of the year, spot by spot and brand by brand, with spot durations attached. Depending on the direction chosen, the cells hold either rating points or money — the grid is the same, the unit is not.
Pick the channels for each brand and set their shares. The shares must total exactly 100% — the calculation stays blocked until they do, and nothing is silently normalised on your behalf.
Assign the buying and target audiences, then load the affinity and average-minute-rating figures — from your own imported data, or pulled from the market's audience panel. Both sources stay visible, so you always know which one the plan is standing on.
Enter the commercial terms per seller — off-prime share, off-prime discount, uplift, extra rates — and run the calculation. The budget and the discount ladders are reconciled, and you are told plainly whether the two settled.
From there you can raise or reduce the plan and watch which channels absorb the change, with a warning when a move would break a discount tier. Alternatives are saved as separate scenarios and compared side by side, so the confirmed plan is never overwritten to test an idea.
Yes, and on the same formulas. Budget to TRP is not a second engine with its own assumptions — it is the same chain traversed backwards, so a plan costed one way reconciles when you check it the other way. The direction is chosen when the project is created, and switching means branching into a new scenario rather than quietly rewriting the confirmed one.
Because each discount applies to what is left after the previous one. A 20% discount followed by a 10% discount leaves 0.80 × 0.90 = 0.72 of the base, so the combined discount is 28%, not 30%. Adding them looks generous on a slide and produces a budget the seller will not sign. The rest of the deal-side arithmetic — budget-dependent tiers, CPP baselines, prime/off-prime money shares — is laid out under media buying software.
As money — that is how it is negotiated. The engine then converts it into a share of ratings using the off-prime discount and the affinity of each daypart, because cheaper inventory delivers more points per euro. Treating the money share and the rating share as the same number models a deal you did not agree to.
The loop can oscillate: applying the higher tier drops the budget back below its own threshold, and dropping the tier pushes it above again. The solver needs an explicit rule for that boundary, and it takes the larger budget — the conservative side for the buyer, reserving what can be defended rather than presenting the flattering figure.
No — and that boundary is deliberate. Rate cards behave as price inside the plan, which is what planning requires; they are not a feed of contracted rates, and the system will not let one pass for the other. Spend, savings and return are settled against contracts in finance. A planning tool that reported them would be putting its name on a number it has no source for.
The arithmetic behind the product, explained step by step.
The most useful demo is a line-by-line comparison, not a tour of screens: take a campaign you have already costed by hand and run it through both directions. Every gap should resolve to a named coefficient.
