New Feature: Media Vendors

Release date: December 7, 2019

Medias represent the media vendors you buy advertisement from to promote your products/services in your media plan.

It's core to MediaPlanHQ.  You use it everyday to know the supported formats, the contact information, and the procedures to book/deliver your ads.

But in most case, medias are part of a parent company that owns multiple different media. 

In the current version, you had to do gymnastics to capture the parent company, such as prefixing it in the media name. 

While it gives you insight of the structure, it has shortcomings when generating insertion orders, as it did not consolidate media from the same parent company together in IO depending on their ad sales structure:

• You may have a representative at the parent company level who is responsible for the booking of several media. 
• Or you may have a local representative for each media even thought it is part of a parent company. 
• Or maybe your media is not part of a parent company altogether.

In this release, you can now assign an optional media vendor to a media and decide who's responsible for the booking.  The system will use the information to consolidate your media insertions together when generating IO pdfs.

For existing users, all features works exactly the same as before if you don't use media vendors in your account.  

Let see how it works...

Media by vendors

The media module can now display media by category and by vendor.  Click on the "Categories" tab to view media by category.  Click on the "Vendors" tab to view media by vendors.

You can also show/hide the media from the list.  This is useful when your task is to define your media categories and media vendors.

Adding Media Vendors

Follow these steps to add a new media vendor in your account: 

Step 1: Click on the "Vendors" tab to view media by vendors.

Step 2: Click on the "New media vendor" button in the header.  This will display the media vendor form. 

Step 3: Fill the required information.  Media vendors contain similar fields as a Media including the address, booking information, and contacts.

Step 3: Click the "Save" button. 

This will refresh the media list with the new vendor.

Assign a Media to a Media Vendor

Follow these steps to assign media to media vendors:

Step 1: Find your media using the search and filters.

Step 2: Click on a media in the left pane.  This will display the media details in the right pane.  Notice that the current media vendor is displayed in the details.

Step 3: Click the "Edit" button.  This will display the media form.

Step 4: Select the media vendor.

In the booking information, you can decide whether to use the media vendor booking information.

When the "Use vendor booking information" is selected, the system consolidates the media insertions of the media based on the media vendor.  This means that they use the same IO #, are included in the same IO pdf, and the address in the IO pdf is the address of media vendor.  

The system will always display "From vendor" in the booking section when using the vendor booking information:

Step 5: Click the "Save" button.  This will refresh the media list. 

 

Media Vendor Filter

The media vendor is also available as a filter in the Planning, Production, and Accounting modules.

Media Vendor Filter

The media vendor is also available as a column in the Planning, Production, and Accounting modules.

Insertion Order

The media with the "Use vendor booking information" of the same media vendor are combine together in the insertion order.

This allows you to include media insertions of different media and media category together with the same IO# in the same insertion order PDF:

The insertion order PDF also uses the media vendor address:

That's it ! We hope you'll enjoy the media vendor feature. 

Give it a try and let us know what you think !

As always, don't hesitate to send us your great feedback or other idea for new features !

Have a great day,

The MediaPlanHQ team