As Camille Quiqueret, Head of Programmatic & Social at 79, puts it:
At a time when the importance and volume of campaign setup and data processing is increasing rapidly, we avoid human errors by ensuring the quality of campaign setup
Camille Quiqueret, Head of Programmatic & Social at 79
This is particularly true in the COVID-19 context. Since the pandemic, more and more advertisers are shifting advertising budgets from offline to online. With the huge digital campaign volume to manage, a small human error in the setup process can trigger a chain of consequential financial and HR problems.
Quality Control, or QA, is undoubtedly one of the hottest topics in the digital media buying industry. While other industry players mostly discuss from a process and team structure perspective, Camille and the leadership at 79 adopted a brand new “insurance” approach, to automate campaign quality control of the agency.
Watch full Q&A with Camille, with the full transcript in English below:
I am Camille and I have been working for Agency 79 for 8 years.
79 is part of Havas Media Group since 2017. 79 is not only a media buying agency, we also provide consulting service for our clients around adtech, data and other digital topics that touch both online and offline, across Search, Social and Programmatic. We offer a big range of scope around media and data.
Who are your clients?
At 79 we have all kinds of clients from very diverse sectors, for example, Orange, ClubMed, BMU, Caisse des Dépôts, and Cegid which is a client based in Lyon, as 79 has two major offices in France. One in Paris and one in Lyon.
What’s your role at 79?
At 79, I have a transversal role across our two teams in Paris and in Lyon. First and foremost, I am responsible for bringing our teams up to speed for their expertise in Social and Programmatic. I am in charge of training our teams, sharing best practices and defining guidelines so that our teams have all the necessary tools and automations in their daily work.
Furthermore, my role also brings innovation and strategy to different clients at 79. Innovation is critical as our industry involves constantly. We witnessed the digitalization of offline media is now playing a part in Programmatic media buying, and for Social we now have more and more platforms to know and to learn. And so I help our teams to provide the best possible answers to our clients who are looking to innovate.
What’s your approach for quality control?
Indeed, quality control is an important topic for us, as we always want to deliver the best possible service to our clients, and that our clients are satisfied with our work.
On a daily basis, campaign set up takes up an important part of what we do, and we must make sure that all the campaigns are set up properly. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, today we have more and more media buying platforms to learn and the teams are having more and more mental pressure at the time of campaign creation. During campaign set up, the teams need to configure budget, audiences, creatives, etc, and they need to make sure to deliver all that without any errors.
In order to do that, it’s actually not that simple, as we are not robots and we make human errors. Therefore, it is critical for us to minimize these errors and to reduce the mental pressure of our teams. We need to make sure the correct amount of budget is being delivered, to the right audiences as our clients may not want to target everyone, with the right creatives as a wrong message in front of a wrong audience can cause negative impact to the brand image of our clients. Therefore, with all of the above in mind, it is important to do whatever possible to make sure everything is set up correctly, but without adding additional weight to our teams on a daily basis.
Is quality control a common challenge across the entire industry?
I think this is definitely a common challenge as we are faced with the same problems and we perform media buys on the same platforms. I think we have the same type of difficulties. We all try to provide the best service to our clients, and the challenge today is to automate quality control to avoid adding more time to our teams for setup checks. Campaign set up itself already takes time, and we don’t want further add more time for quality control. That’s why we need to automate this process, so that we can offload the pressure and to ensure the best campaign delivery.
How does 79 address this challenge?
Previously we were using something basic. We were using checklists on Excel files and there was 0 automation, but it was the first step of the quality control process that we started to put in place 3 years ago. As our clients grew digitally, we were also dealing with more and more campaign volumes and our teams needed to deliver these campaigns in more and more limited timeframes. That was the moment we started to realize that there were also increasing human errors during this process and that these errors could have been avoided. Therefore we started to put in place this checklist, and we asked our teams to run double checks on campaign setup which required even more time.
Since the beginning of 2021, we started using Grasp which allows us to automate the quality control process that was manual previously. Moreover, Grasp is natively integrated with the major media buying platforms, while the checklists and Excel files we used to use were completely disconnected from the campaign set up process. Grasp is automated, and is natural to use for our teams.
What’s the feedback from your teams about using Grasp?
I’d say that the solution is automated and preventive. Quality checks for parameters like budget and dates are directly integrated in the campaign set up process. For example, Grasp asks users to double confirm their budget and once it is confirmed, there will be a green check, which gives our teams a little satisfaction and the confirmation to move onto the next campaign setups.
Is Grasp helpful for everyone on your team?
I believe that Grasp is helpful for all media buyers and it should be integrated in the process of training new hires and elevating the expertise of the senior media buyers, as Grasp is automated and it allows our teams to have the good reflex for campaign delivery.
What are the next steps?
Today we are mostly using Grasp for media buying on Facebook, as this is where we have the most needs and the biggest volume, in terms of campaign setup & delivery and the risk of errors. For next steps, our objective is to roll out Grasp across all the media buying platforms used by our teams, not only DSPs but also other Social networks.
Does Grasp help the agency or the client?
I think it is important to use Grasp to protect our clients first, then the agency, to ensure that there is no overspend, that we deliver the campaign to the right audiences with the right messaging. It is a guarantee for everyone, for the client as well as for us. That’s why we use Grasp at our agency, but at the same time we also recommend Grasp through our consulting services to our clients that internalize media buy, so that they can also use Grasp on a daily basis.
