Media Agencies: How to Get the Most from Data Standards
The ad ops team’s job at a media agency isn’t an easy one. They are usually managing a complex set of work for their customers – juggling multiple campaigns, creative assets that may arrive at the last minute, click-through URLs that need to be placed just right, unique naming conventions, and platforms that each have their own nuance. And all of this happens in the context of shifting budgets, creative optimization, and a transforming digital advertising landscape that is upending measurement and attribution as we know it.
To manage this complex machine, most agencies have some of their own processes and technologies, in addition to leveraging solutions that their customers may mandate. This is why we understand when the agencies our brands work with are hesitant to add – what seems to them – just another solution to their workflow.
However, after several years working closely with brands and their agency partners, we’ve found that even some of our most skeptical new users become evangelists if they follow a few recommendations. So whether you’re an agency whose greatest fear is making a costly mistake within your complicated, manual workflow, or you’re a brand who wants to help your agency ensure the data you collect from campaigns is rich and accurate…read on!
1. Don’t throw out your work to-date – build on it.
Your teams have probably spent a lot of time creating workarounds for the many processes you have to track and execute. The beauty of our platform is it doesn’t throw this work out, it just brings it into a centralized, controlled space. Work with our team to translate your existing workflows into familiar – but trusted and updated – spreadsheet formats, and shead the unwieldy attachments and endless copy-paste. Additionally, benefit from intuitive guardrails, automation and connections into the other systems you use.
2. Spend time on set-up, not the day-to-day.
We’ll be honest, any new technology requires implementation. But if you spend the time working with your customer to set-up the right templates and selections for your needs, the time spent on the front end will free up time on the back end. By having a voice in set-up, you can ensure your teams extract maximum benefit from the tools you will use daily so you can instead focus on surpassing KPIs and providing value-adds.
3. Ease into change.
Still love spreadsheets? You don’t have to completely give them up. At the end of the day, many brands don’t care if every member of the agency is creating data directly in The Data Standards Cloud – they just want their data standardized. So, if you want to take the transition step-by-step you can start by importing your data. This way, even with a few spreadsheets in play, you’ll still benefit from gut-checks on data quality, and the brand gets richer, standardized data downstream.
4. Embrace the win-win.
Often, agencies have processes and technologies dictated to them by their clients. This can feel particularly frustrating when you aren’t fully bought-in to the strategy. However, this is a solution where everyone benefits. Your agency teams can infuse adops expertise into the platform to maximize workflow efficiency, ad performance and data readability for optimization, measurement and attribution. And by improving the quality and richness of campaign metadata upstream, brand clients have more to work with downstream across all areas of their business – and will love their agency for it!
5. Test it!
Still not convinced? Put your processes to a head-to-head test. When one agency using Claravine was hesitant to uproot their long-standing strategy of engineered spreadsheets, their team decided to give them a choice – keep doing what you’ve done or test out Claravine. After a week with one group in Excel and the other working in The Data Standards Cloud, the cleaner, enriched and more reliable data and processes made things clear and the Excel group volunteered to switch over. So if telling isn’t working, let your teams try out the benefits for themselves.
For decades, agency teams have been at the center of the processes and strategies that enable digital marketers to succeed. By helping them to automate and QA some of their most complicated steps, everyone benefits. Discover how The Data Standards Cloud™ can elevate your media and advertising operations.