Hasta La Creative!

Balihoo fosters knowledge sharing by archiving your company’s activity history with specific media properties.

This is the fourth post in the Balihoo series, in which Shane Vaughan explains how the product suite helps counter brain drain in media organizations through information sharing.

“Our last post focused on how Balihoo can bring efficiencies to the RFI/RFP step in the media buying and planning process. Now let’s see how Balihoo benefits media organizations by countering the knowledge drain of employee turnover and the knowledge compartmentalization that occurs when information isn’t shared.

Let’s face it, media buyers don’t stay put for very long and when they leave for greener pastures or a higher rung on the ladder essential knowledge leaves with them. That knowledge includes details on past and current campaigns that are critical to the organization’s success… both present and future.

A less obvious intellectual capital issue is simply the lack of data sharing within and across offices. Ironically enough in this age of ubiquitous communication channels, it can still be difficult to disseminate critical information throughout a company in the form, and at the speed, it’s most needed.

Balihoo offers users centralized knowledge via two features: campaign dashboards and company activity histories. Campaign dashboards allow all users within your company to view details including that campaign’s consideration set, uploaded documents, RFIs/RFPs created or released, worksheets, and internal notes; all critical data for campaign management and analysis. Company activity histories allow users to save (and share) internal notes/tips about interactions or processes for any given property in our comprehensive media database. Additionally, these histories automatically list RFPs related to the property as well as any Quick Requests (a request of owners to update their listing in Balihoo’s database).

This functionality yields shared critical knowledge and institutional memory. Both of which are essential for developing a wiser, more agile organization. That translates into reduced costs by mitigating the training burden and impact of employee turnover; and more effective media plans resulting from easy access to historical data.”

Users throughout your organization can view all campaign details (including uploaded docs & any internal notes) via Balihoo’s Campaign Dashboards.

Cutting Inefficiencies out of the Process

This is the third post in the series. Today, Shane Vaughan explains Balihoo’s RFI/RFP management features.



Balihoo’s step-by-step RFI/RFP builder allows buyers to easily create fully-customizable requests.

“My last post focused on building a consideration set. Today let’s talk about the next step in the media buying and planning process: the RFI/RFP.

Media buyers know the RFI/RFP step in the planning process is where they’d like a wormhole to appear and shorten the journey from request to fulfillment. The administrative burden is heavy and inefficiencies abound. Today information is often gathered via email with the requisite Excel attachment. Numerous emails are sent, some disappear into the ether, while others spawn responses yielding carpal-tunnel-inducing hours of cutting and pasting. Here’s where Balihoo earns the moniker “Advertising’s Best Friend”.

Whether it’s a request for information or a formal proposal, Balihoo offers a step-by-step process to build a fully-customizable RFI/RFP. Buyers can send along budget information or upload documents to accompany their request. Proposal grids within the tool allow for greater organization of data. Another time-saver is the ability to save RFIs/RFPs as templates for future campaigns; no more creating requests from scratch.

Getting an RFI/RFP to the right person and obtaining a timely response are obviously critical. To that end, Balihoo contains contact information for each property in our database. And if a buyer’s go-to rep (or property, for that matter) isn’t in the tool, they are easily added. As for responses, Balihoo’s data research team works with sellers to get your requests the attention they deserve. As those responses come in, data flow into an online worksheet for easy analysis. There’s no need to aggregate data from disparate documents into one – Balihoo securely manages the data for you.

Media sellers save resources and time by using one interface with prepopulated standard data fields. Balihoo makes the communication of necessary data easier and more efficient for sellers and buyers alike.”

[This is a post by AdLab’s advertiser]

Some time ago, I came across and posted a quick note about Balihoo, a tool for media planners and buyers, then still in beta. The company now is back to AdLab with a series of guest posts by Balihoo’s Shane Vaughan explaining how to use the tool’s many features. The first installment follows.

What is Balihoo?

Balihoo is the only on-demand media buying and planning platform that provides intelligent software-PLUS-services to media professionals across all mediums.

So what does that mean?

Balihoo makes the lives of media professionals easier.

Media buyers use Balihoo because it streamlines the media research, selection, and request-for-proposal processes and then aggregates that information into one easy-to-use location that’s sharable across their organization.

Media sellers use Balihoo to communicate with buyers in one standard interface and increase sales through enhanced visibility of their media properties.

Balihoo is designed to take the frustration out of managing the exchange of data between media buyers and sellers and reduce administrative burdens: no more wading through an overwhelming choice of advertising opportunities, cutting and pasting from several documents into one, and time-consuming attempts to harness data.

Balihoo allows media professionals to:

• Build a consideration set by searching the world’s largest collection of cross-medium advertising opportunities
• Do more with less. Fully-customizable RFI / RFP modules provide a common interface for data gathering; responses auto-flow into online worksheets for analysis; Balihoo’s on-call data services team acts as an extension of your organization
• Centralize knowledge and securely store data for sharing across teams and offices for improved decision making and reduced turnover costs.

Balihoo’s comprehensive media database, robust efficiency tools, and data archiving capabilities increase return on invested time and effort; test-drive it now.

In the next post, we’ll discuss Balihoo’s solution in greater detail. Stay tuned.

[The above is a post by AdLab’s advertiser.]