NetSuite Announces Advertising Agency and Digital Marketing Agency Customer Wins, Bringing Creative into the Cloud

SAN MATEO, Calif., July 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry's leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP software suites, today announced a number of new customer wins that are leading advertising agencies and marketing firms. These new customer wins include Just Marketing, Immersa, and RTC Relationship Marketing, who adopted NetSuite cloud-based services resource planning (SRP) and professional services automation (PSA) to improve agency workflow, optimize resource utilization and gain real-time 360-degree visibility into critical business metrics. With NetSuite, advertising and marketing firms can increase profit margins, accelerate billing and financial reporting, improve bid-to-win ratios and meet client demands for superior service, on-time delivery and accountability.

The advertising and marketing industry has seen tremendous changes in the advertising mix in recent years. According to the IAB, only cable TV at 4 percent and Internet at 16.7 percent have had positive compound growth from 2005-2011. Accompanying this shift is a change in funding, as the SoDA Report found that every dollar moved from paid traditional media results in only $0.20 spent on digital. Thus, it's more critical than ever for agencies to become more efficient. Changing compensation models also put pressure on agency profitability. Today, many agencies rely on a hodgepodge of disparate systems that make it hard to have a single actionable view and require unproductive time re-entering, re-formatting, and reconciling data. Some hire freelancers when they might have less expensive or more experienced staff who are under-utilized due to the inability to see resource availability across their entire organization.

NetSuite cloud SRP and PSA enable advertising and marketing agencies to maximize profitability and resource utilization. Through the integration of customer relationship management, agency workflow automation, and financial management and reporting, NetSuite cloud solutions give agencies a 360-degree view of their agency enabling them to:

• Win more business by providing full visibility into the estimating process including resource availability and time and cost of similar past projects
• Improve resource utilization and project management with the ability to anticipate resource needs as jobs move through the pipeline, respond to client changes by delivering real-time visibility into status and resource availability by skill set
• Improve online advertising cost management through DoubleClick integration
• Close financials faster and lower days sales outstanding through automated billing and revenue recognition rules
• Manage a global workforce and contract labor through mobile, online, and offline time and expense management, and worldwide customers and vendors with software translated into 17 languages and support for over 190 currencies and local country tax compliance
• Reduce IT costs and maintain the latest and greatest features with NetSuite's industry-leading cloud ERP and professional services automation (PSA) software

NetSuite's cloud PSA solution has led the PSA market for four consecutive years, according to the SPI Research 2012 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark Report. NetSuite's PSA and services resource planning (SRP) software helps services organizations automate and manage key aspects of their business—from resource management to project management, marketing, skills tracking, service delivery, billing, revenue management, and driving repeat business from existing clients.

"The advertising and digital marketing industries have had to respond to tremendous changes over the past several years, with economic pressures, changing agency compensation models, growing workforce mobility and rising competition, all compelling them to become more effective and efficient, while maintaining their excellent creative skills," said Ed Marshall, GM Services Vertical, at NetSuite. "Our customers have found they gain a critical edge by using NetSuite solutions for dramatic improvements in visibility and control that translate directly into a stronger bottom line with more satisfied clients, more revenue, and a streamlined and productive work environment."

NetSuite enables global advertising agencies of all sizes and specialties to maximize agency profitability and resource utilization by providing a cloud workflow management and financial management and reporting system. The advertising and digital marketing firms using NetSuite include:

Just Marketing (www.justmarketing.com), the world's largest motorsports marketing agency, running about 1,200 projects a year for clients such as Diageo, Farmers Insurance, UBS, and Verizon at 75 NASCAR, Indy Car and Formula 1 races a year in the U.S., Europe and Asia, implemented NetSuite OneWorld to replace Sage and Quickbooks on-premise solutions. With NetSuite OneWorld, Just Marketing has improved visibility into budgets, actuals and project profitability, and reduced its monthly close times from 30 days to 10 days. The agency has streamlined revenue recognition, sharpened opportunity management, enabled mobile expense reporting and, with NetSuite OneWorld, handles multi-currency transactions with ease. "We're very pleased with NetSuite's capabilities and ease of use," said Greg Nordhoff, Just Marketing Controller. "We're able to easily drill down to the transactional level and supporting documentation, and we've definitely found new efficiencies in our processes, enabling us to be more productive."

Immersa (www.immersamarketing.com), a San Francisco-based agency that delivers strategic direction and experience marketing programs for some of the world's biggest brands, has gained better visibility into costs, including third-party contractors, and improved its ability to forecast costs since implementing NetSuite's PSA solution. The ability to readily share cost breakdowns with clients has improved client satisfaction. Immersa has also improved productivity through process automation and elimination of time-consuming manual spreadsheet work, gained new insights into budget vs. actuals, and streamlined invoicing and expense management. "NetSuite is having a huge transformative effect on how we manage and grow our business," said Paolo Zeppa, Immersa SVP and General Manager.

RTC Relationship Marketing (www.rtcrm.com), a full-service relationship marketing agency with offices in Washington, D.C.,  New York and Chicago, part of the Wunderman Network (#1 in AdAge's first worldwide ranking of digital-agency networks) and a subsidiary of WPP, adopted NetSuite's PSA solution to replace Microsoft SharePoint and spreadsheets for project management, utilization reporting and time management. With NetSuite, RTC has brought greater structure to services delivery and improved accountability with new capabilities to push project financial reporting down to the manager level, instead of just the CFO. RTC experienced improvements in managing projects and resources, and has streamlined its invoicing processes by creating and managing invoices in NetSuite and automating reconciliation with its back-end financials system. "The creative work our people produce on behalf of our clients is the lifeblood of our firm. NetSuite empowers our employees to more tightly integrate their time and billings into RTC's financials which is critical for our success," said Maureen Quattroki, CFO of RTC. "NetSuite provides a greater level of accountability and reliability for the operations of the firm and the billings and invoices delivered to RTC's customers."

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SOURCE NetSuite Inc.