Tracking Sponsors and Ad Bookings

Your sponsors are your clients

As a provider, you work with political sponsors -- parties, candidates, advocacy groups, and other organisations that place political ads through your medium. On The Taurus, each of these clients is represented as a Sponsor record within your provider profile.

Managing these records gives you a structured, auditable overview of every political sponsor you work with, which is exactly what the regulation requires.

Creating a sponsor record

To add a new sponsor, navigate to your provider profile and open the Sponsors section. Click to create a new sponsor and fill in the following information:

Identity (sponsor information)

• Name -- the display name you use for this client in your daily operations
• Email -- the sponsor's contact email address
• Legal name -- the official registered name, if different from the display name
• Business name -- the trading name, if applicable
• Postal address -- the sponsor's registered address

This information maps directly to the sponsor details required by the transparency notice. When the sponsor creates notices through your provider, these fields can pre-fill automatically.

Payer information

If the person or entity paying for the ad is different from the sponsor, you can record that here:

• Payer is different -- toggle this if the payer and sponsor are not the same
• Payer name, email, and postal address -- the details of the paying entity

This distinction matters under the regulation. The transparency notice must disclose both the sponsor (who commissioned the ad) and the payer (who financed it), even when they are the same entity.

Controller information

If a third party controls or directs the advertising campaign, you can record the data controller:

• Has controller -- toggle this if a third party is involved
• Controller name, email, and postal address

Funding defaults

You can set default descriptions for the sponsor's funding origin and methodology. These pre-fill in the transparency notice, saving time when the sponsor creates multiple notices.

Creating ad bookings

Each political advertisement you publish gets its own Ad booking record. This is the central object that links your internal tracking to the transparency notice.

To create an ad booking, navigate to your provider profile and open the Ads section. Create a new ad and fill in:

• Title -- a short description of the ad booking (for example, "Full-page election ad, issue 42")
• Internal reference -- your own booking or order number, for cross-referencing with your internal systems
• Format -- the ad format (for example, "1/4 page", "728x90 banner", "30-second spot")
• Section -- the publication section where the ad will appear (for example, "Politics", "Local news")
• Publication date -- the planned print or go-live date

Each ad booking is automatically linked to a transparency notice draft. When the notice is completed and published, the link is maintained -- giving you a direct connection between your internal ad record and the public transparency notice.

The ad booking lifecycle

Every ad booking moves through a defined set of statuses that reflect its progress from initial setup to archival:

This lifecycle gives you a clear view of where each ad stands at any moment. You can see at a glance which ads are waiting for sponsor input, which are ready for publication, and which are already live.

Sending sponsor invites

Not every sponsor will create their transparency notice independently. Many will need guidance, and some may not even know about the requirement yet. The Taurus provides a sponsor invite workflow to handle this.

When you create an ad booking, you can send an invite to the sponsor by email. The invite contains a link that takes the sponsor to a form where they can fill in their details -- sponsor information, payer, controller, and funding information. When they complete the form, the ad booking status updates automatically to reflect the progress.

This workflow is particularly useful for:

• New sponsors who have never created a transparency notice before
• Recurring clients who need to provide updated information for a new campaign
• Time-sensitive bookings where you need the sponsor to act quickly

The invite includes an optional personal message from you, so you can add context or instructions specific to the booking.

Your provider dashboard

The provider dashboard provides an overview of your current activity:

• Recent ads -- your most recent ad bookings with their current status
• Sponsors -- a list of your registered advertising clients
• Compliance status -- a quick view of which ads have complete notices and which still need attention

Use the dashboard as your daily starting point. It tells you immediately if any ad bookings require action -- whether that is following up with a sponsor who has not responded to an invite, or downloading a QR code for a notice that has just been published.

Linking sponsors to chapters

If a sponsor is also a user of The Taurus with their own organisation, you can link their sponsor record to one of their chapters. This enables sponsor data to sync automatically from the chapter to the sponsor record, keeping information consistent and reducing manual data entry.

This is most useful for larger clients -- political parties or organisations -- that manage their own compliance on The Taurus and want their provider records to stay in sync with their internal data.

Building your compliance record

Every sponsor you register, every ad booking you create, and every invite you send contributes to your documented compliance record. Under Art. 12 of the regulation, you must retain these records for at least five years. The Taurus handles this retention automatically -- your data remains accessible for the full statutory period without any manual archiving on your part.