In today’s evolving world of media and communication, markets are developing into specialized MBUs, Media Houses & Creative Agencies. Margins on media bookings are leaner and only volume talks. Media Managers, Planners and Buyers are increasingly eager for cutting edge solutions to gain better control over their business, keeping them one step ahead of the competition.
Visual Dolphin Media is the answer to these market changes. Tailor made specially for agencies, MBUs and media houses. it is designed by media professionls and is the result of a 30 years partnership with the world of media and communication. It is the ultimate media tool, designed by media experts for the media industry, letting you spend less time gathering information and more time using it.
Its great advantage is the fully integrated system of management throughout every department in your agency, from defining clients media strategies to the collection of receivables and payables settlement; It seamlessly supervises the operational flow of an agency as a collaborative management tool: forecast, plans, schedules, booking orders and variations, sponsorship deals, monitoring, vouching, client billing, supplier reconciliations, volume rebates, alerts system, incentives, volume rebate… you name it, Visual Dolphin Media handles it all.
Advertisers demand a measurable return on their advertising spending, challenging the agencies to provide quantifiable evidence that their campaigns are successful and to guarantee the best return on investment to their clients. Visual Dolphin Media drills deep into the multitude amount of information and provides the right analysis that supports the agencies with the superior decision making.
Visual Dolphin Media supports media buying units with centralized capabilities for budgeting and forecasting at the client, brand, media types and account handler levels. Such a tool gives the people in charge a clearer picture to make efficient decisions. You can anytime revise your budgets and track the achievements accordingly.
A media strategy specifies the means for achieving the media objectives. A strategic decision is how to allocate the media budget geographically; that is, deciding in which markets and media to advertise and how much to spend in each. Quoting the client is an easy and complete procedure in Visual Dolphin Media. It starts with the creation of plans/ schedules with all the related information such as client name, agency, party to bill (client or brand agency), market, contact person, campaign, campaign brief…
setting the budget and allocating the spots by media…
Several campaigns, months and media types may be grouped under same schedule and plan.
With Visual Dolphin Media, you can directly enter the schedule or start by setting a monthly or weekly plan and then distribute over days.
With Visual Dolphin Media, following plans and schedules is made easy. It is a real time, graphical page allocation tool for planning and managing the selling and production of advertising space within different media.
Start by a yearly plan deal, allocate the spots by month or week and drill down later to a monthly schedule where spots are spread on a daily basis and distributed in a 31 days sheet… Or just create directly your schedules and distribute them over different media, programs…
The agreed rate for the booking is defaulted from the rate card value and may be amended or modified specifically for a certain insertion.
Quotation entry is very flexible. It can be entered manually or imported from Microsoft Excel; and can be received as well electronically from agencies and imported automatically with a status “ready to be approved”.
Entries are managed in a form of an excel look like grid, where spots appears in their current status (booked, aired, invoiced) in various colors to make reading easy, friendly and fast. Spots can be booked with various spot kinds preset by the media buying unit (paid, free, compensation, resold spot…).
Subtotals by media, month with a direct comparison with the preset budget are displayed.
Each account executive/ handler may see only the schedules related to his clients.
Pro-forma invoices can be generated at the level of the schedule for clients who require official document for granting payment advances, prior to issuing the final invoices
As VD Media supports all types of media, info to be entered for each type while booking is different than the other… For radios, you may enter by day part or program the ads, whereas periodical booking (from date till date) is possible for quoting cinema, outdoor…
As a planner, knowing when and where to broadcast your ads is very important to reach the clients campaign goal. For that, a well-designed entry is done in VD for TV plans… Set your budget by media, expand to their programs grid, import the different market ratings and here you go… VD Media will now automatically calculate key ratings for you (GRP, CPRP…) and interact online with your budget set and incentive deals while you are spreading your spots over weeks or days.
Booking component work in tandem with the approved schedule. A client can agree to a part of a proposed quotation. In other words he books for campaign partially leaving the decision on the remaining spots for a later stage. Each transaction displays the cost and the selling prices, hence allowing a visual (and on the spot) comparison to profit margins. An alert system informs the user on bookings generated but not yet printed or sent, as it might alert as well that the required material is not ready.
Changes in booking orders frequently occur for various reasons due to market and environmental circumstances. It sometimes creates confusion between clients and account handlers. Visual Dolphin Media instantly alerts all the entities concerned by the changes, facilitating smooth co-operation between the various players. Any change to a confirmed booking order will be saved as well in a log history so you can track later all the changes with their time stamp.. You may as well decide to print those changes as booking amendment order…
With Visual Dolphin Media, centralize all the information about your clients and agencies, such as contact names, phones, activities, addresses, brands and materials… You may cluster several under one group, define their maturity days, billing method, specify their credit limit, set their grace period rules and see their accounting statements. It helps you define a strong base for your reporting…
Visual Dolphin Media allows the MBU to categorize their media under several media types and may be combined in one quotation. Programs, day parts, press positions, websites, theaters, panels and circuits may be pre-defined with a set of rules. These rules determine by media their validity period and time, their applicable or installation days, classification and rate category. They may be published on cloud and imported by the branches to standardize and minimize redundancy in data entries.
With the numerous quantities of events, agencies and vehicles available, media, client and agency deals are huge. Add to this the wide variety of rate cards, positions, incentives, agency discounts, taxes or fees, and media planning becomes unpleasantly complex.
With Visual Dolphin Media, being able to preset all these parameters, and entering multiple basic prices for different media’s upstream and one time only, transforms designing booking orders into a profitable pleasure!
In visual dolphin media, multiple discounts and extra loading formula may be added by the MBU defining the structure of the deal from the rate card price till the net receivable.
Rate cards may be published on cloud and imported by the offices with one click.
Visual Dolphin Media allows you to create your materials for each brand identifying its name, unique reference to be shared with the stations; user will be able as well to confirm if material is received or not, approve its duration / dimensions and specify its language and validity period.
Vouching enables to control the quality of the advertisement, specify the exact timing or position ad got published and to tell the financial department which bookings are to be billed, paid or disputed. A certificate of diffusion can be emailed from the system to the client or brand agency.
Booking can be totally or partially invoiced. Different bookings can be generated into one invoice, over many months, detailing the position, the number of insertions, the special discounts, special prices, and any type of tax (VAT, stamp…).
You may invoice one specific ad, set of ads or bulk by order, by month or by media.
Same invoice can be shared by several clients or branches and can be addressed to the ad agency or directly to the advertiser.
Invoice transaction always shows at the same time the cost and selling break down, hence allowing a visual (and on the spot) comparison of profit margins.
Supplier reconciliation streamlines supplier invoicing to achieve outstanding payments. For a specific supplier all pending invoices are listed by spot date and booking order. Every invoice has to be checked to reconcile it with the reconciliation amount.
Once the sales and reconciliations are confirmed, they are registered immediately in Visual Dolphin Accounts Payable according to the predefined payment terms. After that no modification is allowed except via credit and debit notes.
From the media system, you can issue a credit or debit note on a specific invoice or globally on a client, supplier or any third party allowing you to register commissions on sales, cash discounts, VR, tickets and travel accommodations and allocating them financially on several clients, suppliers and media…
Visual Dolphin Media fully automates the posting of the accrual transactions , revenues and cost deductions due to upfront sales or cost recognition.
- Volume Rebate: Set the VR deals with the clients and agencies. Deals with suppliers by media or group of media. MBU can analyze the profit margins generated from the media operation considering regional clients and media VR deals, as well as other elements not recorded in the media system (PPD, commissions…).
- Incentive: Incentive deals by media, client, campaign for a specific period… track at any time the status of the deal, what is outstanding from the booking order screen or through a report
- Barter: Flag a schedule as barter so all invoices generated will be categorized under another receivable ledger. This way user can split his receivables and will be able to
make the proper allocations. - Stock & Sponsorship deals: MBUs can sell a bulk of space for a specific amount to be distributed on the programs or positions based on predefined factors. In Visual Dolphin Media, space consumed from the initial deal and the balance can be checked at any time.
Invoicing as well can be separate by spot or on monthly basis
Visual Dolphin Media presents a powerful set of reports that helps any media buying unit get the most of its media dollar. Reports were designed to include all the information required for analyzing media type, media, and agencies, clients and campaigns performance by market segment (total billing and profit margins by sector of activities such as leisure & tourism, home appliances, food stuff…)
The usage of a standard reporting tool provides the required flexibility to produce effective reports and enables the users to export all report data to an external file, utilizing most of the standard supported data types, like pdf, Rtf or Excel.
You can extract all your reports by frequency, spending and cost, grouped and filtered by media type, media, market, client, group of clients, handler, agency, and many other dimensions…. Most important reports such as monthly spending, expenditure, forecast vs realized, selling variance, sales and cost breakdowns and many others at a one click away with Visual Dolphin Media Reporting tool.
Visual Dolphin gives you the flexibility to set up alerts to get instantly notified when a specific incident happens or a periodical checkup over data entries. Some alerts you may activate:
- User no more within range of additional discount levels or not meeting contractual obligations.
- List of booking orders at loss; bookings clashing with other ads; overbooking detection.
- Material not yet received.
- Agency or client exceeds his credit limit or grace period.
- Canceled or modified ads.
- Ads ready to be invoiced