SECRETS FOR BILLING
SUCCESS
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MEDIA
ESTIMATES --
QUICK, SIMPLE, PRACTICAL
If media
planning seems too complicated, there is a better
solution: media estimates.
While media plans are elaborate and detailed, media
estimates are concise, simple, and effective for
clients who buy small amounts of print advertising.
That's because media estimates are less structured
and more customizable. They let even an
inexperienced media buyer create a
professional-looking presentation of a media
campaign to a client.
Creating a media estimate is very easy (it's very
similar to opening a new job, actually). All you
need to enter is the client number, a job number
and task, a description of the media campaign
(i.e., objectives, target market, etc.), and each
ad that's going to run in each publication. Each
media buy on the estimate includes a publication
name, issue date, close date (which is used by the
media traffic report), an ad number or caption,
size, and cost.
Media estimates can be created for any client. The
printed media estimate has space to be approved by
up to three different people, which gives the shop
a paper trail to prevent disputes at billing time.
Once a media estimate is approved, insertion orders
can be created from it. The insertion order has all
of the same information as the media estimate, so
there's no double-entry. The entire process is very
fast.
There's nothing to limit you from using media
estimates with media plans. So it's possible to use
media estimates for your small media clients, while
creating detailed broadcast and print plans for
your larger ones.
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By Kent
Richardson
If you're buying media with SmartPlus, Strata
or TAPSCAN and re-typing those orders into Clients &
Profits, you're working too hard. There's a better way, and
it's called Media Link.
Media Link is an add-on for
Clients & Profits that imports media buys and vendor
invoices from your media buying system directly into your C&P
database -- automatically. Without it, each media order has
to be entered into Clients & Profits manually, one at a
time. Not only is this tedious, but it's easy to make
expensive data-entry mistakes.
The C&P Media Link can be
fully automated to import newly-created buys at selected
intervals. Or, it can manually import new media buys one by
one.
Here's how it works: Your
media buying system -- SmartPlus, Strata, or TAPSCAN --
exports newly created orders into a special "media buys"
folder on your server. The Media Link regularly checks this
folder for new orders, then imports them automatically into
Clients & Profits.
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The imported buys appear as
insertion or broadcast orders in Clients & Profits. As
media orders are imported, they update the right jobs and
tasks. Once imported, they can be pre-billed individually or
in a batch -- which can vastly improve your media-related
cash flow.
A detailed log tracks the date and time of every imported
media order. Media Link will even notify you via e-mail
whenever a new media order is imported.
The C&P Media Link can easily handle hundreds of incoming media buys
per day. It works on both Windows and Mac. So even if your media buying
system runs only on Windows, its media buys can be imported by Media
Link running on a Mac.
"'For high-volume, broadcast-oriented shops like ours, this
is the best setup," says Phyllis Beamer of Pepper &
Associates, which buys its media with Strata.
For more information, visit the Media
Link web site.
Kent Richardson
is a senior member of the Clients & Profits
Helpdesk.
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