Business Software

Gawker Media is a blog-publishing company located in New York City which found it had difficulty analyzing complex and multi-dimensional advertising contracts in aggregate.

Part of the issue was poor visibility into certain types of financial information, leading to inefficient billing processes and reduced spending controls. A lack of consolidated information slowed decision-making processes, making it impossible to produce on-time, accurate reports, company officials say.

The majority of Gawker Media's income is derived from advertising, but until this year the company had fairly limited knowledge about its advertisers. The reason: Gawker's managers, marketers, and IT people were using Excel spreadsheets and QuickBooks applications to gather business information.

Gawker's ability to look at its client base as a whole was limited. There was no easy way to look at advertisers by category (such as automotive) or region of the country when deciding how to allocate limited sales resources.

"We had plenty of information; it was all over the place," said Scott Kidder, Gawker's manager of finance and business development. "It was in spread- sheets, QuickBooks reports, e-mails. But it wasn't integrated, so any consolidated reporting was a manual and tedious process involving lots of copying and pasting."

It could take "many hours" for a large report, he said, and "we couldn't vouch for" a high degree of accuracy; "We'd predicted 2009 would be a down year."

Gawker brought in the marketing automation and general accounting and bank management components of NetSuite's (News - Alert) OneWorld and its Media Bundle. This software includes tools for analyzing and managing recurring revenue recognition, the challenge for recognizing per month ad revenues.

Also, Kidder said, the NetSuite software enabled Gawker to integrate its financial operations, from order entry to billings. The integration has helped Gawker streamline a number of processes, according to Kidder -"one example is expense payments for contractors."

"We work with many independent contractors, including writers," he explained. "They used to have to send in paper expense reports, and then our staff had to input them manually into Excel spreadsheets. Now they enter expenses over the internet, via a laptop or handheld."

They're then sent to their site's Editor-in-Chief for review, approved with one click, and automatically sent to accounts payable.

"We're saving a ton of time, and we're better able to monitor the costs, and the profitability, of individual sites."

To download a free customer case study and learn more about how NetSuite's cloud-based business software improved Gawker Media's operations, click here.