How Claravine Supports Agency Success

This process described below should be familiar to people who have worked in either adops or analytics at a media agency. 

A creative agency produces the digital assets for a media campaign and delivers them to the adops team at the media agency, usually 3-7 days late and about 12 hours before the campaign is scheduled to launch. 

The programmatic creative is delivered to the programmatic agency, the social to the social agency, and the search copy and clicks trackers to the search team. Each set of creative assets have click-through URLs that have been set up by the client’s web analytics team so the creative have the right click-through URLs that are formatted so the brand’s website analytics appropriately capture the correct channel and campaign data. 

Each agency uses a naming conventions template and spreadsheet macros to populate hundreds to thousands of line items with the goal to make sense of reporting by the time the data comes out the other side of the data platforms. Add in complications like search marketing to the process that wants to track every keyword individually with a unique URL then you end up with tens of thousands of line items under management for a media campaign. 

The adops team QA’s the process to make sure the right creative assets are uploaded to the right line item and assigns creative in each platform. 

Everything is set up and on the day of the campaign each agency manager takes a deep breath and hits go on the time items and they start spending the client money. 

Then the campaign goes live. 

Two weeks in, an agency analyst notices that a campaign might be over or under pacing and looks into it. They discover that a few of the line items and their respective naming conventions have the wrong creative and wrong click-through URLs assigned to them. They may or may not go in and fix the issue. 

Claravine estimates that at least 30% of adops and analytics time is spent chasing down and correcting mistakes that are the result of error-prone and manual data governance approaches. 

In many cases even if a mis-trafficking mistake is noticed it is too much work and the campaign is too short so they just let the mistake persist because it causes too much trouble to unwind. This obviously corrupts the data that is used to optimize campaign output but if nobody is looking closely it is easily ignored. 

The downstream effects caused by the errors multiply in significance and cost to the agency and to the brand. 

• Creatives assets are uploaded to the wrong line items with incorrect landing page URLs or incorrect flight dates. 
  • $.21 of every media $1.00 is wasted to poor quality data 
• Retroactively attempting to fix the known errors after the campaign takes weeks to produce basic campaign reporting. 
  • Marketers spend 32% of their time managing data quality
• The analytics team does not trust the output because they intuitively know the data “buggy” or corrupted. 
  • On average 30% of traffic is undocumented according to the web analytics tool. Claravine brings that number to 0%.
• Campaign payment is a burden for junior analytics and finance staff that handle reporting and reconciliation
  • 25% of agency junior account and finance staff time is spent on billing and reconciliation

The list goes on. Almost every downstream operation is affected and the entire agency-client experience turns into finger-pointing across departments and then every three years the client decides to see if the grass is greener at the digital media agency across the street. 

This is the underbelly of agency digital media operations.

The industry’s emphasis on campaign insights and optimization focuses too much on campaign outputs in reporting/business intelligence while overlooking the inputs. As a result, the outputs are contaminated and unreliable due to a lack of data governance at the input stage. Even if this is done well by every agency in the mix in their own area of responsibility like search or social the process is not consistent between the search and social groups especially if they are in different agencies. 

The lack of governance of the input process adds operational drag to the digital media management process to the degree that all downstream use cases of reporting, AI, automated Optimization are unrealizable pipe dream on the agency exec’s wish list with an operational team that may have the technical capability but is not armed with the data assets to get there. 

Software from Claravine that focuses on the data governance and taxonomy management of the inputs brings enterprise-grade, production level QA and management to the marketing data process. The solution guarantees that campaigns run through Claravine templates are 100% reliable and omnichannel consistent and by focusing on the inputs the team can eliminate almost all of the downstream negative effects. 

With Claravine the agency receives the following benefits:

• Scale new lines of business to service clients by reducing operational drag across digital channels. 
  • Win back in-housed search and web analytics budgets through superior ops
• Avoid financially and reputationally costly and embarrassing trafficking errors through Claravine’s cloud-based dynamic controls. 
• Unlock the full potential of services and tech by operating cleanly from the beginning and liberating the teams that are dependent on downstream data. 

Bottom line: add operational confidence to the organization, deliver more for existing clients, win new clients, increase profit margins, make more money.

Claravine helps the agency increase revenue by enabling the agency to deliver client love and to expand its business. Claravine does this by minimizing the operational friction that permeates the agency culture like a bad Social Media challenge.  Claravine is the angel on your shoulder telling you it’s probably not a good idea to stack milk crates and walk over them, dance outside your car while it’s rolling down the street into traffic or worse.  The standardization of process and governance across Digital Marketing disciplines brings back the agency swagger of Mad Men days when they are in front of their clients. It re-grounds the agency’s culture in the inherent confidence that comes from quality work delivered with purpose.