Media Link Software – An Intern’s Perspective (Gabe)
As quickly as the marketing landscape and consumer preferences are changing, efficient and effective media buying is vital to ensure your message is heard. Keeping advertising campaigns up-to-date, organized and consistent can prove to be a challenge when you are balancing print, radio, TV and social media, especially if you don’t have intuitive media buying tools.
Prior to working with Media Link Software™, I had very little experience with any sort of media buying software, so I had no point of comparison and thus was a blank slate. What struck me first about Media Link Software is the level of organization. Every campaign type, whether it is TV, online, outdoor, TV, broadcast, digital, specialty, is color-coded both on the main page and the Quick Launch menu to allow you to easily find the advertising medium with which you want to work. It also keeps track of your most recently used campaigns, allowing you to bounce between campaigns without having to dig around which saved me a great deal of time, especially given my novice status.
Keeping track of every vendor can be yet another challenge faced by marketers. Compound keeping track of every TV station, newspaper outlet and billboard provider with constantly shifting ad dimensions, types, costs and special promotions can turn into a mess very quickly, especially for those of us who are less organized than we like to admit. Media Link Software™ helps to alleviate this problem with a database specifically built to house vendor information including primary contacts and locations. What I particularly like is the ability to access a vendor and add new or modify old ad types with text boxes that are clearly labeled and work intuitively; something I found invaluable as keeping up dated records can quickly become cluttered.
Today’s marketing landscape is demanding and keeping up with the latest vendor inventory, organizing campaigns across a dozen platforms and executing effective media buys can become a daunting task of the highest order. As a user both new to Media Link Software™ and media buying programs in general, I found picking up MLS to be unintimidating and intuitive. Organization is far from my forte, yet I found the simple yet robust layout of MLS to be a great solution.
