Digital advertising reached a significant milestone during 2019, when, for the first time, it accounted for half of the global advertising market. In the past year alone, worldwide digital ad spending grew nearly 18%, to $333.25 billion. While reaching that threshold implies abundant opportunity, it also presents significant challenges for companies in the advertising, media and publishing industry.

The growing emphasis on digital is highlighting the need for flexibility and speed. Agencies must take on greater volumes of smaller jobs. They must deliver on faster, tighter schedules, and be prepared for rapid changes. Additionally, they must be ready to support multiple business models and variable pricing, and offer more specialized creative resources.

Generating quality creative rapidly while keeping up with such a complex and fast-changing environment is no easy task, and NetSuite delivers a platform that can constantly offer more functionality and automate more business processes as advertising, media and publishing firms grow, helping them continuously meet the evolving needs of their customers and readers, capitalize on market opportunities and streamline their back-office operations.

With NetSuite 2020 Release 1, NetSuite builds on that legacy, with particular emphasis on agencies, to inject more automation and flexibility into everything from tracking costs to monitoring project health, empower managers and employees to trigger processes that used to fall upon HR staff, and leverage improved integration with financial services providers:

  • New time modification enhancements provide better control of billable time. Time entries can now be easily modified and an audit trail makes it possible to correct entries made against a wrong project. Plus, NetSuite Analytics now supports time modification requests and entries, improving visibility into changes.

  • Smarter analytics simplifies management of project budgets. Organizations can now easily see how costs are impacted when adding and editing project budgets. Automated cost calculations help to increase accuracy and miscoded time or expenses can now be quickly identified. What's more, NetSuite now offers system suggestions for updating time estimates when unexpected costs arise.
  • Automated calculation of key financial data raises the accuracy of project, budget and work breakdown structure records. In NetSuite project profitability reports, tracked and actual time are better categorized as either committed or actual costs, and forecast and actual charges are now easily included for better insight into project billing.
  • Tracking and payout of bonuses now benefit from a single source for employee and financial data. HR now has the flexibility to support numerous bonus types, such as spot, referral, merit or custom, enabling it to better track incentive pay, while employees have visibility into current bonus potential, providing motivation. And all of this bonus data flows seamlessly into SuitePeople Payroll.

  • Employee change requests can be handled in NetSuite by managers, while employees can approve vendor bills, all of which speeds processes, improves accuracy and frees up HR resources.
  • Seamless banking integration via the Bank Feeds SuiteApp and a new banking plug-in featuring open banking APIs enables automated import of banking data into NetSuite.

Learn More About NetSuite 2020 Release 1

These are just the highlights; there's much more for advertising, media and publishing companies in NetSuite 2020 Release 1 than can’t be covered in a single blog post. For more specifics on the complete list of new features, be sure to read the Release Notes.

New to the release process? Learn more about it here.

Finally, be sure to request access to your Release Preview account. There, you can test to see how the new features will work with your own data and get a jumpstart on maximizing the impact of NetSuite 2020 Release 1.