Digital Marketers Are Losing Control - Here’s How They Can Take It Back

For marketers, there’s an undeniable truth that the future is video. For 2020, revenues from video ads are forecast to hit an eye-watering $64bn. Investment is abundant as according to On Device Research, a video ad almost doubles customer purchase intent than a standard banner does. 

With that in mind, oversight and control over every aspect of the video process should be a priority for marketers. The best, most effective video campaigns don’t happen by accident; they come around because the marketers involved were in control of every pixel of every asset. However, the road to campaign activation is riddled with potholes and inefficiencies that are causing a multitude of issues. Despite marketers minesweeping over every potential problem and detail, sales opportunities are lost, products go unsold and campaigns start late: a staggering 41% of all video ads failed in a variety of ways in Q1 2020.

Why is that? That’s what Peach wanted to find out. Together with consultancy specialists CoLab Consulting, we’ve put together a report entitled ‘Get Control Of Your Video Asset Workflow’. The report has uncovered that because the process is laden with manual interaction and lethargic systems, it causes unnecessary tension and, inevitably, mistakes slip through the cracks.

And, of course, the great advantage of making mistakes is you get the opportunity to learn from them. It’s vitally important that marketers do so - these errors lead directly to campaign delays, quality issues, security risks and a whole lot of frustration and money. In short - it's a bit of a mess. 

In total, our report has identified seven key issues. Here, we’ve highlighted two of them, with the rest free to read in our full report.

Communication between stakeholders is chaotic

Email is a great system of communication. But it wasn’t built for a secure workflow which involves complex tech specifications, large file formats, and ever-shifting digital media plans, and it shows. 78% of agencies spend valuable time consuming updates issued back and forth via email, time which they’d win back if they used a more optimal system. 

Email systems generally have no versioning history, and constantly fall foul of the trap that sees multiple stakeholders cc'd on an email thread with no clear action being assigned to each. Beyond the clear and present danger of vital details slipping through the cracks, this also leads to considerable levels of anxiety and stress for all involved. As our industry moves into a new decade, email seems more and more antiquated.

A negative impact on staff retention and professional development

When you add all of the points in our report together, it’s perhaps not surprising that media agency staff turnover currently sits at 28%, significantly above the UK average of 15%. So much work that graduate employees undertake could be described as repetitive administrative tasks which could (and in 2020, perhaps should) be automated. As we see an increase in flexible working patterns, there’s an even greater incentive for our industry to modernise and invest in automated workflows in order to retain its best talent. 

As our industry begins to focus on rebuilding following the Covid pandemic, it’s inevitable that change is coming. Before we jump headlong into that change, however, it’s important to identify what’s not working in the first place. I hope our report represents a step forward in doing that. 

To understand the full picture, you can read the report for yourself here.