 Hi, my name is James and I'm a Librarian at the University of Alabama. Today we're going to learn how to use AdSpender. AdSpender is a database that allows users to see advertising expenditures, buy brand and other variables across 18 media types and national and local media markets. To get to AdSpender, start at the library home page and click on the databases link. Then, search for or browse to AdSpender. This is the AdSpender home page. From here, we can create custom reports or view previously created reports. Click on the create button under custom reports. From here, we will build our report. Different users build reports in slightly different ways. Here I will be detailing how I have built custom reports, but if you are advised to build it differently, that is of course fine as well. First, we select our media channels and market. The media market you select will dictate which media you can choose, so if you pick only the national market, which is total U.S., you won't be able to pick a local media like outdoor or local magazines. You can, however, select both national and several local media markets if you want to look at all possible media channels. For the purpose of demonstration, I'm going to pick total U.S. as my market by clicking total U.S. and then select. Then for media, I'm going to pick several national media channels, network TV, cable TV, magazines, business to business magazines, national newspapers, network radio, and internet display. Next, we'll select the time period. We'll be using calendar and we'll be selecting specific time period. With specified date range, we can see that the most recent data AdSpender has is from December 2019. For the start date, I'll be selecting one year previous, so December 2018. Next, we'll select the product set. Here you'll have a great deal of freedom to select the products, brands, companies, categories, and so on that will show up in your custom report. For example, if I'm interested in pizza restaurants, I can change my categories to brands and search for Pizza Hut. This search gives us 17 results, including several with Pizza Hut in the name. I'm really only interested in the Pizza Hut brand itself, so I'm going to click on it and hit select. If we want a list of competing brands as well, there are a couple of things we can do. I can go ahead and search under brands for dominoes and add that to the report. We can also see what other brands are in the same category. We still have dominoes selected, and from here, I'm going to use the drill feature. Drill lets you move between the different categories and products from the search dropdown based on the item you have selected. From here, I'm going to select categories. AdSpender has six categories for dominoes. The one I'm most interested in is pizza restaurants and delivery services. To see what other brands are in this category, I can select it and drill back down to brands. After drilling back to brands, I can see there are 245 brands in the same category. In this way, you can potentially find other brands that you would want to include in the same report. I'm not going to select all 245 brands in the report, but I will select a fee to add. Now that I have the brands that I want to include in my report, we'll click next and move to report format. At the top of this page, the report summarizes what I've selected for the report. Then I can customize how the report will look and what it will include. I generally don't change anything here, but I do want to be sure that dollars is selected rather than units. Next is report options. Again, these are options for customizing the report. We'll be able to export the report as a CSV file, so I generally advise leaving this and making any header changes in Excel. Next is the report summary. Here you can look over the report as everything you intended to select. You will need to enter a report name. While the report access is set to private, anyone from the University of Alabama who accesses this database will be able to see the report. Now we'll run the report. At this point, if you've selected any media that will not work with the media market or market you've selected, the database will give you an error. You can go back and remove whichever media is causing the error and try again. Once you run the report, you'll be taken back to the main screen and you can see the report with the date submitted. After waiting a minute or so, hit refresh on the page and it will say running or show links to the PDF and CSV under view. To see how the report looks, we can click the PDF icon. When actually working with the data, you'll want to download the CSV and open it in Excel or another spreadsheet program. Here we have the advertising expenditures by product from the brands we selected. If we want just the brands, we can go back and edit the report with the options to show brands rather than products. When looking at the report, it's important to note that the expenditures are listed in thousands of dollars. So that's all for now. Thanks for watching. And as always, if you have any questions, contact us or visit ask.lib.ua.edu to ask a librarian.