Background
As the topic of operational excellence has been raving through the digital advertising industry recently, we are honored to have Edouard Lafaye, Director of Operations of Socialyse Paris (Havas Media Group) to be part of the discussion and to share his thoughts on the key to achieve operational excellence under his leadership.
Socialyse is the social media pure player of Havas Media Group, covering services from paid social to content marketing and influencers. Socialyse currently works with a list of renowned brands such as Carrefour, BNP Paribas, Michelin, etc.
See the full Q&A with Edouard below:
Q: As one of the world’s largest digital agencies, what are the 3 key elements that allow you to stand out from your competitors?
Our 3 key success elements are:
- One integrated offering across paid social + community management + influencers
- A team of experts
- Highly operational-excellence focused
Q: Could you explain a little more what you mean by “Operational Excellence”?
For Socialyse Paris, operational excellence is the foundation of our value proposition. To complete our expertise in strategy and consulting, we have been putting lots of efforts and investments to ensure that all campaigns managed by Socialyse Paris teams are executed with the highest standard and alignment with our strategy and business plan.
Q: What has Socialyse Paris put in place in order to ensure operational excellence in executing digital campaigns for your clients?
Since the foundation of Socialyse Paris, our objective has always been to be the center of excellence. We were the first agency division that started specializing in paid social in France. We have been working with only the most knowledgeable social experts not only in our strategy planning but also in execution.
We are among the very few that are recognized in the market for our success in combining business expertise of the teams and the use of technological platforms. In the domain of operational excellence, we have deployed Grasp as it distinguishes itself from other existing solutions by its unique and innovative approach.
Q: Why are you interested in Grasp?
Socialyse Paris has always been actively searching for technologies to automate our media buying processes. However, before Grasp, no solution in the market was fully addressing the topic of “Quality Control” to our standards and requirements.
With Grasp, we are now able to improve and complete what our teams have been doing manually, by automating our QA processes.
Furthermore, Grasp is directly integrated with all major digital media buying platforms – such a “native” approach allows us to onboard all our teams easily and quickly without impacting existing user behavior.
Q: What are the key changes for your teams since deploying Grasp?
The operational teams now spend less time on topics with low added value (set up of campaigns) and concentrate on subjects with higher added value such as analysis and support for our clients. This is possible only because the manual and “boring” part of quality control has been automated by Grasp.
Constantly training and improving our teams is key at Socialyse Paris. In this sense, Grasp also serves as a “roadmap” to guide our new recruits step by step in building a campaign.
There is also a significant impact on our sales team as more and more clients ask us about QA automation.
Q: Could you provide a few examples regarding what are your expectations in terms of “Quality Control”?
There are more and more media buying platforms and each one of them is getting more and more complex.
A campaign can require dozens of setup parameters: auction mode, objective, format, targeting, tracking, connection to business intelligence tools, etc.
It is important to make sure that the campaign is set up exactly as planned, and to anticipate and eliminate any human errors in the setup.
Q: Socialyse Paris and Grasp have developed and iterated several functionalities together. Can you tell us more?
Indeed, seeing how much Grasp has helped us with the setup of our campaigns, we wanted to go further and adapt it to the day-to-day needs of our operational teams.
In addition to the preventive QA solution during campaign set up, we have co-built with Grasp a budget control tool providing additional levels of security related to campaign investments (budget double check, support of the automatic “lifetime budget” guideline on other networks besides Facebook).
Grasp is directly integrated with our media buying tools, which makes the usage extremely smooth.
Q: What are the 3 things that you like the most about Grasp?
1) Efficiency. We have been waiting for a long time for a quality control solution, and Grasp is the 1st player in the market to offer this. Grasp’s solution precisely meets the needs of our agency.
2) Commercial value. Grasp obviously saves us a lot of time in terms of quality control, and in addition, it is also a solution that we can provide our clients with to build together a collaborative and transparent workflow.
3) The expertise of the Grasp team. The teams are experts in the field, and they know perfectly well the problems of digital advertisers. We have already worked in the past with their team to set up several automation solutions.
