Business
How to Cure the Biddable Media Buying Migraine
If you buy digital media on behalf of your clients you’ll know it creates a ridiculousamount of admin.
And it affects a huge chunk of people.
It’s a problem for finance as they struggle to match invoices and credit card statements to what’s been spent through tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and demand-side platforms (DSPs).
And it’s a problem for media buyers as they have to get involved in this reconciliation – ferrying data back and forth between platforms and financial controllers.
One agency we spoke to was losing a huge ten days a month to reconciliation.
And all they wanted was an answer to a pretty simple question – what are we spending and where are we spending it?
This isn’t just annoying, it’s also bad for business. All of this time-consuming manual admin distracts high-value people from much more important and valuable work. Plus it saps their energy and morale.
But what’s holding you back?
What’s funny is that most agencies are aware of this problem. Yet few do anything about it.
They treat it as a cost of doing business. They have to buy media for clients so they have to tackle this admin.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
It is possible to remove this burden completely. The solution lies in how your people purchase media.
In most cases, agencies use credit cards or insertion orders (IOs) to purchase ads on behalf of clients. And as a result, they immediately lose visibility across spending.
With credit cards, this data goes to the bank. With insertion orders, it’s locked away in a data silo. In both cases, you need to do a load of legwork to join the dots between planned spending and what’s actually been spent.
There’s a Smarter Way to Buy Media
We’ve come up with a better solution for buying biddable media.
It has four components:
- A multi-user spending account – Soldo’s ‘company cards’ let you manage and track all biddable media spend from one place for each client.
- Prepaid virtual cards – so your people can make payments across different ad platforms. Use one card per platform.
- A cloud-based administration console – so that you can track and control everything in the moment.
- A mobile app – so employees can track and report spending on the go.
Together, these components tackle every stage of the biddable media buying cycle. It means your media buying process can look something like this:
- Track all your biddable spend across one dashboard: You add money to dedicated ‘company cards’ within your multi-user Soldo account. Here, you’re able to track all biddable spend across platforms via a real-time dashboard.
- Set up prepaid cards for spend across each Ad Platform: Assign virtual prepaid cards for each ad platform. You can use one card for LinkedIn, one for Twitter and so on.
- Spending and controls: Allocate funds to each prepaid card. For example, £200k on your LinkedIn card and £100k on your Twitter card. Set access controls and spending caps through the same system.
- Reporting: Create real-time reports from a single dashboard.
And you can do a lot with this spend data. Want to see year-on-year spending? Our reporting tools make it easy. Want to port data over to another system? You can download a CSV file in seconds.
We work with seven of the top spenders in digital and manage millions of euros of media budget every month. This used to create an unbearable admin burden that hampered our accounting team and, even worse, restricted our business. Then we discovered Soldo. Now, reporting is easy and our accounting team has more time to focus on bigger, strategic tasks. We’re even making savings.
Angelo Di Veroli, CEO, Blackgeek
The Biggest Benefit is No More Tedious Reconciliation
- No more nagging emails between finance and media teams
- No more comparing bank statements with inaccurate platform data
- No more trawling through insertion orders playing ‘guess the campaign’
Instead, you have more time to focus on the stuff that’ll push your business forwards. This is an all-new way to manage biddable media buying. An approach that’s better for your people, your business and your clients.
Contact us to learn more about how Soldo serves media agencies.
