In our previous article, we saw how virtual payment can be an ideal solution for optimizing the process of buying advertising for digital media. Let’s now take a real-life scenario of virtual cards in action to illustrate where your company could stand to benefit.
Caro is the finance manager of a food company – let’s call it Food XYZ. Her job is to centralize all expenses at the company and steer budgets that tend to overspend, like advertising.
Magdalena is the digital marketing manager at Food XYZ. She has several digital advertising campaigns on many products and promotions running in parallel across a range of channels including Google, Facebook, and Instagram. Some campaigns she handles directly while others she outsources to a digital agency called LoveMark. Her objective is to be as free as possible to design, place, and pay for her campaigns as easily, customized, and securely as possible.
Ivan is the social media manager at LoveMark, Magdalena’s agency of choice. He plans, places, and pays for many of Food XYZ’s digital ad campaigns.
Caro recently implemented a new digital payment method for the company: Virtual Cards Procurement, which use the Mastercard network for global acceptance. Caro opted for the multi-use version of the cards so that she could set up recurring online payments with simple, centralized statements. She is able to create different cards for each digital campaign that the communication department plans and give each card a distinct name according to its campaign and purpose. She can also set specific restrictions on each card, like credit limit and validity period, to reduce fraud and make sure the card is only valid for exactly what it was created for.
Caro then was able to give Magdalena the right to generate cards herself in the payment portal, making the process quicker and simpler by enabling her to quickly and directly create the cards she needs. Caro still maintains constant oversight and can control rights and restrictions. Maggie uses some cards for the campaigns she is handling directly and others she gives to Ivan for his digital ads.
From Ivan’s agency perspective, having a virtual credit card for each single digital campaign with a set credit limit is a huge advantage. He was able to keep from overspending on the campaign budget as his cards won’t function past their limit. He was able to use the ad publishing platform to pay directly into his customers’ accounts without using any agency credit cards or having to anticipate extra expenses.
All expenses will find their way back to Caro, neatly organised and detailed. Cards are charged directly by ad publishers at whichever periodic and per click or impression rates have been agreed.
From this use case involving different stakeholders within the company as well as the external digital agency, we can see how the AirPlus Virtual Cards Procurement solution allows you to delegate the payment process more efficiently but keep better control on spending and simplify reconciliation at the same time. Virtual Cards offer further benefits over traditional payment means like bank transfer and direct deposit and are your best payment method for simpler, optimized digital advertising payments.