We lost 6-digit revenue because someone accidentally entered the campaign budget with 2 extra ZEROs…
A traumatized advertiser
Coming from a professional background that is always involved with AdTech, I have seen all kinds of technology solutions that aim to take advertising to the next level.
There are technologies that focus on streamlining campaign management processes, there are those that provide the most cutting-edge measurement solutions, there are those that help advertisers find the most niche & the most valuable audiences, and there are those that specialize in crafting the most eye-catching, the most “CTR-friendly” creatives. These are just a few examples, and they are just the tip of the iceberg.
We now live in a world where everyone is frequently exposed to online ad content (even more so since COVID-19), and every impression and every attention of the target audience is more precious than ever. So every advertiser is looking for a stack of tech solutions to better track, to better target and retarget, and to better perform.
But as this stack is getting higher and higher, plus the advertising budget is increasing exponentially every year, advertisers have also realized that this structure is starting to wobble, and that there are “loopholes” in between and especially at the foundation – operational excellence and quality assurance in the media buying processes are not being addressed enough, and these human errors are costing advertisers a fortune.
Surely there are internal discussions in regards to the QA topic for every advertiser, but surprisingly this problem is so little discussed out in the open. When we search “media buying QA problem” on Google, less than 10 relevant results show up (not to mention 1 of them is one of our own blog posts). There are so few discussions that one may think that media buying QA is the least of advertisers’ problems.
And yet, it’s a completely different scene when we speak to advertisers on a 1-to-1 basis about whether or not they have suffered from QA issues in media buying. On top of many, many confirmative nods, here are some most frequently-heard responses:
“It literally just happened to us again last week / yesterday”
“We lost 6-digit revenue because someone accidentally entered the campaign budget with 2 extra ZEROs…”
“We had to sink 60h to deal with a QA issue, and it involved insurance companies and lawyers”
“I caught a Labor Day creative mis-used for Veterans Day only when the ad was delivered on my Facebook News Feed”
“We lost a lot of data simply because of misconfigurations in naming & tracking”
And almost everyone is already looking for a solution to address these problems. There have been more emails and excel sheets to communicate on the brand codes and guidelines, and to track and follow up if they have been truly respected. There have been more recruits to be tasked with QA, to check and double check if everything is set up correctly when executing the media buy. While these efforts are absolutely necessary, they start to become inefficient, time-consuming, and very expensive very quickly.
Technologies have done wonders for advertising performances, we believe it’s also time to turn to technology for the core and infrastructure of advertising: proper execution and operational excellence. It is time to step up the QA game, from good old emails, excels and manual cross checks.
This is the reason why Grasp was born.
Built on actual pain points across advertisers, Grasp offers a unique, automated QA solution for media buying processes. In just a couple of months’ time, Grasp already helped prevent errors that could have cost advertisers millions of dollars. Hundreds of advertisers already use Grasp to automate their media buying QA process, why not you?
It’s time.
