A Nightmare on Ad Street
Chilling tales of omnichannel omens, demonic data and more
As you stare at the campaign brief before you, the empty office illuminated only by the glow of your computer screen, a pit in your stomach grows. After weeks of toil, blood, sweat and some tears, you’re finally ready to activate. Yet, you hold back before pulling the trigger. Are the macros set up correctly? Are all media channels properly supported? Did something fall through the cracks? Will the client be satisfied?
You’re frozen by the creeping feeling that everything is about to go wrong. Your mind begins to spin. Your eyes blur. Consciousness is fading. You struggle to stay in control.…
Harrowing stories of agency disasters sure to haunt
your dreams. Who will make it to launch alive?
*Cue ghoulish laugh sound effect.*
Omnichannel marketing is the way of the future, offering a holistic experience that spans across devices seamlessly. Thankfully, the tech is already out there to support an equally seamless build-out for those responsible for creating those customer experiences.
I know what you did
last quarter
Chapter one
“Ping!” The searing sound of your workplace chat wakes you from a peaceful slumber. “Ping! Ping! Ping!” You look, bleary-eyed, at your iPhone clock. It’s 3:45 a.m., and your overseas client is demanding data on the performance of your freshly launched campaign, immediately.
Advertisers know this fact well: Data is king. But in 2022, the maxim could use the addition of “real-time”. In a study by the Harvard Business Review, 60% of respondents said the ability to use real-time customer analytics across devices and touchpoint is extremely important.
Meanwhile, your creative team is harassing you about adding a trademark symbol to every catchphrase. OK, breathe, no big deal. OH WAIT. BIG HAIRY MASSIVE DEAL! You have 150 creatives running across three channels.
"Ping!" Oh no! It gets worse! Your campaign manager incorrectly trafficked a tag. It needs to be fixed and your plea for access to his Google Sheet is met with an
“Out-of-Office.”
“Ping!” The barrage of messages continues. Suddenly, your phone begins to ring—your boss is calling. “Hello?” you answer, eyes still half-open. “Hello, Jane,” she says, her voice sending chills up your spine. “Where are the insights?”
According to Forbes, 95% of businesses deal with the need to manage unstructured data. They need a unified platform that centrally aggregates data from all sources, leading to better segmentation, more accurate insights and, above all, insights that are easy to make sense of.
You scan your tired brain for an answer. “The insights? But the campaign just launched a few days ago—we’re not even mid-flight,” you reply. She lets out a grunt of frustration, the disapproval palpable across the airwaves. “Figure it out now—or else!” she says, before hanging up with a bang.
As you sit on the edge of your bed, shell-shocked, an email comes in. Your heart sinks as you scan the all-caps subject line: “I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST QUARTER.”
CLOSE
CLOSE
CLOSE
Making the move to more sophisticated, optimizable and digestible data means the ability to fix what’s not working before it’s too late, or build on momentum to maximize a campaign that’s already heading in the right direction.
CLOSE
Monster X: The Three-Headed Omnichannel Beast
Chapter two
As you watch the last of your colleagues file out the door of your agency’s HQ, you reach for your bag to head home. Just before hitting the light switch on your way out, an email lands in your inbox.
You groan. OK, just one more email to read. Crouching over your screen, you pull up the thread—from the client you submitted a proposal to the week prior. Oh no! You read the heart-stopping note.
“Please see our requested changes in the attached doc. Looking forward to seeing the finished product TOMORROW.” You open the shared document and, as soon as you lay eyes on it, your blood pressure begins to mount. Like dribbles of blood, red-inked edits crowd the length of the file. Strikethroughs rip through your work.
You put your bag back down on the desk and gear up for a long night ahead. You take a second look through the document and can hardly believe your eyes: With each second that passes, the comments are multiplying, growing at an inconceivable pace. What was once a simple display-only campaign has grown into a multiheaded monster glaring mockingly at you!
Automating processes—from media planning to copy, design and analytics—can help safeguard agencies from unnecessary time spent across teams. Robots get a bad rap, but in the case of campaign activation, they’re friends, not foes.
CLOSE
CLOSE
Attack of the Evil
Analytics Platform
Chapter three
It’s Sunday night and you’re lying on the couch, enjoying a family movie night. But a creeping feeling reminds you of what’s to come in the morning: a presentation you’ll be spearheading to deliver the outcome of a recent campaign to a major client.
You head downstairs to your basement office to take one last look at the campaign tracking you set up weeks ago and have been closely monitoring ever since. Hitting the “on” switch, your trio of screens reveals a masterpiece of media: The end of campaign flights spanned across five different channels, each with complex and varying strategies and assets and a plethora of data—from views to conversions, geographics to demographics and more.
Agencies are no stranger to last-minute requests and demands, but automating workflows can help mitigate the drain on time and resources while boosting revenue: According to a 2019 McKinsey study, 63% of survey respondents reported increased revenue resulting from AI adoption.
CLOSE
When only one person—or group of people—on a team possesses the technical know-how to tinker with and draw key audience insights from analytics, the result is too many people flying blind. Equipping staff with the tech they need to do their work effectively levels the playing field and helps the whole team win.
The rest of your team is sure to be wowed by all the work you’ve put in—hours spent by a small army handling different platform setups, overcoming errors and ensuring proper delivery across all channels. It’s been an uphill battle to make it here, and it’s all ready to show off tomorrow. Phew.
You relax, assured that those countless hours and precious data are ready to share, then shut your screens off to enjoy the rest of your evening. But as you walk away from the computer, a strange sound reverberates from the machine. It’s like a soft cackle! "I better review everything one last time,” you think.
CLOSE
Approximately 20% of respondents in Deloitte’s 2018 RPA Global Survey cited “lack of IT readiness” as the biggest barrier to scaling process automation. It’s time to leave the machine work to the machines via the platform that make things like A/B testing, feed management and CRM integration simple, accurate and effective.
You turn on your screens and reach a horrifying realization: You’re unable to define the true success of the campaign! Numbers shuffle across every page in a dizzying rotation, like a never-ending slot machine. You’re incredulous. Nothing makes sense! Siloed metrics and KPIs trapped within the walls of the media itself!
You hear yet another soft cackle coming from the machine and jump backward as the figures finally settle. Chills ripple down your spine as you read the horrifying number repeated across every value, dredged from the pits of the underworld: 666.
Suddenly, you begin to feel a tugging sensation toward the screens. Your wheeled office chair slowly begins to roll across the floor—your body planted in it, frozen in terror—closer and closer to the computer until you’re sucked clear through into an Alternate Data Dimension!
The room disappears all around you as you float through a 3D space-like gridded landscape. Figures and numbers speed by you—localization and demographic data void of meaning!—as scenes of alternate future outcomes appear before your eyes: clients spending unnecessarily on misguided targeting and mismatched media platforms! Oh, the horror!
The Nightmare Recedes
Chapter four
“SMASH!” You’re startled awake by the sound of your coffee cup crashing to the floor. Picking your head up off your desk, your cheek imprinted by the indentation of your keyboard, you realize it’s morning.
The office is buzzing all around you as the day begins. “Morning,” sings an all-too chipper voice from your office door. It’s Phil, your project manager. Gee he can be irritating sometimes.
“Soooo…how did the campaign turn out? That one was a beast!” he asks.
With creeping dread you look back at your computer screen. The only unread message in your inbox is a reply from your client. You brace yourself. Can things get any worse?
You gasp again, for maybe the hundredth time. The email reads, “Great work! We’d like to increase our budget throughout the next quarter!”
Was it all just a nightmare? It sure seemed like it. But the new ad tech platform you onboarded last month seems to have ruled out any possibility of disaster.
CLOSE
Agencies using Flight Control report up to 90% faster time to market, with a 45% faster campaign setup than manual. With a self-QA’ing system and near-instant trafficking, plus delay-free delivery and activation at the push of a button, campaign nightmares can stay in the crypt where they belong. Learn more about Flight Control here.
Yeah, it becomes clear to you now. It removed the barriers to collaboration. It automated and simplified workflows. It enabled quick turnarounds.
You actually were able to deliver all those last-minute changes early—as well as creative authoring and rendering at scale.
Gosh, you think, did I actually provide early insights in real time? Yes!
“You clearly still need a few minutes to wake up,” says Phil. “Oh, and Happy Halloween!”
Yeah, Phil can be irritating at times. But we both glance at the note from the happy client. And we break out into big smiles.
PRESENT
92% of households in the U.S. can now be tapped into via connected TV ads. Layering CTV coverage into an existing campaign may seem like a daunting task, but with the right platform to support it, it can be just a few clicks away.
CLOSE
"More segmentation please!!” reads one. “Let’s add a retargeting strategy!” says another. “This doesn’t feel on-brand. More options please!” quips the next. “Why is CTV not part of our media channel coverage? This is a must.”
You take a mental inventory of all the hours of work that lie ahead of you and all the additional expertise required. More creative variations, new channels, endless trafficking and tagging. Your heart beats faster and your skin crawls as the edits grow, and grow, and grow, until all you can see is red. Will I ever tame the beast or be eaten alive?!
Clinch leads the industry in developing platforms that help brands and agencies advertise better. Our AI-driven Personalization/DCO technology delivers custom-tailored ad experiences across all channels, driving best-in-class performance and consumer intelligence. Our Omnichannel Campaign Activation Platform, Flight Control, enables advertisers to manage the entire campaign life cycle, from strategy through activation and measurement on a single platform that makes them massively more productive, efficient and profitable with automated workflows that save time and money. In everything we do, we leverage data to automate, personalize and optimize display and video ad experiences at scale, across programmatic, CTV, social media, in-app, Digital Out of Home (DOOH) and native.
ABOUT
ABOUT
Ad Age Studio 30 is the creative content arm of Ad Age. Built on the same bedrock of journalistic integrity, Ad Age Studio 30 specializes in multichannel membership content for Ad Age subscribers, as well as custom and sponsored content that resonates with our audience. To partner with Ad Age Studio 30, email James Palma at jpalma@adage.com.
