Actionable data: the key to optimizing media spend

Overview

Advise Media Consulting operates in the media auditing industry. Their mission is to enable brands and advertisers to get more transparency and a better understanding of their paid media expenses. This helps lead to better and faster decisions from an ROI perspective.

To do that, they've built their Media Suite, a tool that allows to centralize control, perform objective analysis, and effectively optimize advertising communication projects. It was created to help Advise MC speed up processes and reduce costs by cutting out enormous amounts of Excel-based work.

Advise MC's target clients are international organizations and big advertisers, including Lidl across 30 markets, Kaufland, and Nikon.

The Challenge

Advise MC's clients spend millions on media and advertising, looking to the company to help them optimize these investments. Media buying is quite complex and not very transparent as it is, and in the digital environment, it's even trickier:

• There are different suppliers and value chains, and adtech is not really feasible for advertisers.
• There are many companies between the advertiser spending money and the publisher receiving a portion of that, and the value chain between these two ends is not clear-cut.
• On top of all this, the discussion about a cookie-less future contains many potential hurdles, too.

To optimize their spending and ROI, the clients first need to audit their advertising investments. And for the audits to be effective, they need to be actionable. But, out of necessity, the audits and performance verifications are often done once a year "post mortem". So if the audit concerns 2021 and is taking place in January or February 2022, it offers a retrospective view rather than a list of actionable steps.

Advise MC's main challenge in helping clients achieve their goals was clarity, which boiled down to effective data processing. Taking in all the information from clients to perform an audit and present data visualizations required a robust data processing tool like Microsoft Excel. But with a significant amount of resources behind such Excel-based projects, the process was not really cost-effective and took a lot of time.

The Solution

Media Suite resolves Advise MC's challenges in data processing by creating smarter workflows and enabling faster decisions. In the past, they processed data in Excel, but they knew they had to get rid of it to get structured data and a clean work process. They did realize, though, that people love working with Excel, which is exactly why they went for Handsontable to build a real-time, web-based data processing tool with an Excel UX.

Advise MC initially used another data grid solution that didn't turn out to be reliable enough and wasn't compatible with Mac OS. With Handsoncode's JavaScript data grid, they got smart and simple data processing in a web browser on any device, and it allowed them to build a tool that processed data exactly as they needed.

For us, Handsontable is something similar to an engine in the part of our tool where it's being used because without the engine, you can't drive. That's how an engine would improve a car, and that's how Handsontable has improved our tool.

The Handsontable feature that is most valuable to Media Suite is being able to copy-paste data from different devices. It's all about being able to create functional data grids and then copy-paste from Excel into the web browser while maintaining functionalities such as data validation and providing an Excel look-and-feel.

The Result: data that's actually actionable

Media Suite provides the desired transparency around the processed information in an intuitive and user-friendly way. Senior management is often just interested in getting the most recent, top-line numbers, but other user groups are more on an operational level, using Media Suite to optimize campaigns. What's crucial for everyone is getting the data when it's most relevant and not after a year or so after it's become useless.

Today, Advise MC's clients can get their results quarterly, monthly, half-yearly – or however they want – being faster and closer to the reality of their situation and able to make adjustments to their marketing efforts on the fly. Media Suite provides smoother data processing capabilities and more effective project management and allows for decision-making dashboard visualizations and improved storytelling.

And Handsontable has helped make all this happen. Because of it, Advise MC were able to take Media Suite to market. In finding the right engine they were able to implement the data processing part of the tool, completing Media Suite and allowing it to be offered to clients.

Currently, they're planning to keep investing in the tool and build new features to respond to the quickly changing needs of the advertising industry.

Marino Vuković

Founder & CEO at Advise Media Consulting

• Advise Media Consulting
• Hamburg, Germany
• 5+ employees
• advise-mc.com