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Media Cost Center Datorama:
Optimize Marketing Media

By Lohith Paturu , Revised on July 11, 2022 at 6:10 PM EDT

Media Transparency Center, Formerly Datorama Media Cost Center, Manages Your Buy and Delivery Data

Datorama’s Media Cost Center, puts total costs in your control, and contributes to your company’s profitability.

Here are three important questions you should be asking:

Are you wasting time trying to figure out if your marketing activity is working in tandem with your initial business goals?

Do you want to know if your budget is on pace to be spent?

Want more insight into which KPIs for a particular channel or partner is worth the investment?

If the answer to the above questions is a resounding Yes, then you need to unify and simplify your data across campaigns for marketing spend optimization using AI-based Dashboards. This is key to raise your overall conversion rates and lower cost ratios. Modern marketers gravitate to AI in marketing that involves a goal-based pacing model where planned versus actual reporting is updated, automatically. This information is compared to your planned budgets and analyzed for discrepancies at the various levels of marketing.

Who Should Consider Using Datorama Media Cost Center?

Using AI in Datorama Dashboards, MCC fulfills a crucial need for brands, agencies, publishers, and advertising technology customers by optimizing the marketing budget.

What is the Datorama Media Cost Center?

Datorama Media Cost Center automates the analysis of what your media is doing versus what you planned. It dynamically associates advertising data with your media plan and calculates the costs of marketing spend optimization. By joining together your planned information with real-world results, and the help of AI based dashboards, you can mix and match relevant targeting and tactics data with live KPIs.

How does Media Cost Center work?

The first step is to load your planned data into the MTC. This is done automatically through dedicated data streams. If your media is planned through Salesforce we can populate the Datorama MTC with our Salesforce SOQL API, or our new Salesforce Reports API. If you are using Mediaocean Prisma, or a custom in-house solution, that should not be an issue either.

Once the data is loaded with planned data, including budgets, rates, and campaigns, the second step is joining your live media data. Depending on your business rules, Datorama MTC can connect to systems as diverse as 3rd party ad servers, viewability and verification vendors, DSPs, publisher direct data, mobile, social, and offline sources, without a single line of programming.

What can you do with Media Cost Center?

Once your media plan is loaded, and you’ve automatically connected it to your live media, Datorama Media Cost Center automatically calculates your media cost and tracks it against your budget. The prebuilt logic understands the most common industry media buy standards. With a few clicks, custom rules can tell Datorama MCC how your cost is calculated.

The graphic below is an example of an AI-based dashboard:

Datorama Cost Center

However, this is only the foundation. With both sides of the equation set, your plan vs actual (delivered) spend results allows for a diverse suite of use cases including:

How does Media Cost Center Cost?

Speak with your Salesforce Account Executive for details as it is a premium feature, but Media Cost Center is typically 20% of the total cost of your license.

Programmatic

Datorama’s Media Cost Center calculations can create custom alerts so your programmatic trading team can manage bid prices. These alerts inform them where they need to increase or decrease budgets and where their attention should be focused.

Viewability by Publisher

Are you concerned that you are paying a publisher partner for media that’s not being seen? By connecting Viewability, MTC, and Ad Server, you can see your average cost per viewable impression is and how it stacks up against the rest of your plan. You may be missing an opportunity to reach more people by not shifting your budget to a better performing partner.

Campaign Pacing

The bane of reporting is tracking what is being spent and where. A typical media plan with AI  marketing covers multiple channels with one source of truth for pacing and saves a lot of time.

Margin Optimization

Agencies or a trade desk can integrate net rate and use Datorama MTC to track and determine marketing spend optimization. Data is available for merge from the most granular to the client level.

Can I Implement Media Cost Center on My Own?

Although it is possible that marketers can self implement, it may be more prudent to ask Datorama or a certified partner for support.

Invoicing/Billing

Closing the account books and monthly reporting to finance teams can be a mammoth task involving tedious manual work. AI in Datorama Dashboards can publish reports the day after the month ends making reconciliation a lot easier.

Datorama Alerts/Goal Setting

Marketing teams drown in a deluge of messy internal marketing budget data. MTC is here to rescue. With AI-based dashboards, Datorama’s MTC can bridge the gap between your investments and returns to ramp up your engagement patterns.

All the previously mentioned scenarios can also use our Actions Center and Goals layer for additional tracking and automated alerting. Emails can be sent to the right people with the right information, or can automatically be paused in your DSP if the campaign is over-pacing.

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Guides Media Planning