About the Agency
Focus: Performance Marketing (Search, Social, Programmatic, Marketplaces)
Platforms: Meta, Google, Snapchat, Bing, TTD, Criteo, Amazon
Recognition: Ad News - Digital Agency of the Year
Geography: Operations in NAM, EMEA, and APAC
Team Size: 80+
Background
The founder had been closely following the AI advancements and noticed that most of his team members had already become power users of ChatGPT to generate creatives, ad copy and analyze data. What used to take hours was taking minutes, and he knew he had to make the most out of this.
He found out about Crux and reached out to schedule a demo.
Problem Discovery
They came to us with a simple ask:
Can you work with us to identify all parts of our operations where there is room to bring automation and improve efficiency?
As we dived deeper over the next several weeks, here is what we found:-
1. Repetitive tasks take up over 70% of media buyers’ time.
Here is how their media buyers are spending their 40-hour work week:
40% - Campaign setup, technical issues, budget pacing, creative ops
30% - Reporting, internal sync-ups, answering ad-hoc client questions
30% - Ad optimizations, analytics, planning & strategy
At this rate, every media buyer is spending 650+ hours on reporting every year. For a team of 20 media buyers, the agency is spending over 13,000 hours!
We’ll leave it up to you to estimate the $ value wasted.
There is hardly any time left to make complete sense of what’s working, what’s not working, and think creatively about strategy.
2. Clients are no longer satisfied with at-par performance since switching costs are low.
On one hand, ad platforms are reducing the amount of control given to advertisers with auto-targeting campaigns. On the other hand, competition among agencies is higher than ever with every CMO getting over a hundred pitches every month.
CMOs are now considering moving their performance-marketing efforts in-house taking help from AI tools for content generation. Although this may seem too drastic to happen, it has certainly pushed the CMOs to ask for more.
3. People dependence is hurting the speed of growth.
Most accounts function on the expertise of a senior strategist or account manager. Their absence or transition creates a huge void. Clients don’t want to work with junior media buyers and the only option is to keep hiring senior talent - which is really really expensive!
Despite several steps of approval and verification, errors are bound to happen which leads to escalations from the client. Cases of escalation have been a lot more frequent than when the team size was < 50.
Solutioning
Although we had a long list of suggestions of what they should be doing, it was important to start small, prove value, and then move on to harder problems.
Every week a media buyer creates the client report as per the decided template and sends it to the account manager, who reviews it and shares it with the client.
Each media buyer takes an average of 4-6 hours per report and manages 3 clients - which gives a total time invested to ~15 hours per week.
We solved this in 3 steps:
- Feed previously sent client reports to fine-tune GetCrux’s Reporting Engine
- Connected to all ad platforms to fetch the right data for the report
- Feed both into GetCrux’s Insight Engine to find opportunities, troubleshoot KPI drops, and recommend changes in the report
This report now serves as a great first version for the media buyer and account manager. With continual feedback and fine-tuning, each week lesser and lesser edits are required.
Impact
Time saved in reporting by each media buyer: 10 hours per week
Total weekly hours saved by a team of 18-20 buyers: 180+ hours
$ value of time saved: $4500 per week or $18,000 every month
Onboarding time: < 1 week
Are these the type of results that you would like to achieve in you agency too?
Schedule a call and tell us how can we help you!
