Case Study: How I Trained A team of 5 Creatives In CM360

?I've been receiving a few private messages asking about Ad trafficking best practices and it made me think of sharing a success story from one of my agency client. They are a multi-six figure agency offering full marketing and advertising services to their national and global brands. My goal was to provide programmatic media support to the team as the agency client was experiencing a rapid and steady growth from current and new clients.

With Growth comes power and with power comes great responsibility.

Similarly to most agency clients I've worked with post -pandemic, they experienced the following challenges during their growth:

1. Understaffed in several positions
2. Lack of expertise in programmatic media (why they contracted my services)
3. Human errors lead by overworked team members and unrealistic deadline
4. Operating under a “get this in and active as soon as possible” mindset

?With my experience working and building programmatic media department for startup agencies, I was able to offer several recommendation to address and help implement tools that made the team efficient.

Let me set the stage:

The programmatic media team of 2 was submerged by the request and demands to get things “live and spending” within a fair timeline. They used Campaign Manager 360 (CM360) as an ad server and Display and Video 360 (DV360) as the demand side platform (DSP).

This is absolutely normal but my agency client was scaling and growing, and struggling to hire additional help. (Aren’t we all?)

The team's struggle was apparent.

There were some unfortunate human errors. If you know anything about Ad operation and trafficking in CM360, you can agree that things are especially complex, and repetitive.

Running the incorrect ads, omitting to turn ON ads or placements, tags sent to the wrong vendor, etc.

These are all mistakes that are avoidable with the right systems and tools in place and this is what and how we addressed it.

How to empower teamwork and encourage cross-departmental support?

I took an assessment of the internal workflow and realized we could "outsource" the tasks that took the longest:

? Uploading and assigning creatives to their respective Ads and placements within CM360

We kept it straight-forward and simple.

This may come across as so simple but it is important and extremely time consuming. It requires patience and consistency (and can often lead to wine before 5 P.M.). It is easy to assign incorrectly, and let’s be real, most of our agency friends do not have 3-4 weeks to spare in the launch process. We got to get it in and live A.S.A.P, right?

They suggested taping into their creative team considering they were project based and sometimes in between projects allowing flexibility.

Yes, I trained a team of 4 individuals with no programmatic media background on how to traffic ads in CM360 successfully and swiftly in less than a month. The training took a couple hourly sessions and of course, reinforcement training sessions as they completed the first couple request.

Here’s the secret sauce:

I spent just enough time outlining and steamlining the process in a way that the team could execute task by task using training documents and referring to any training videos completed in addition to having access to my expertise.

In order to implement this you will need the following:

• Walk-through of CM360 (or the adserver you use) of the task only: during this time, we simply walk through the platform and record steps by steps of the one task.
• Written documentation (think of this like an SOP) of the walk-through: This is the wrriten version of the visual walk-through mentioned above.
• Utilization of trafficking sheet or Tsheet: if you are not familiar, a Tsheet is an excel doc where important details about the campaigns and creatives are included. I’ve created a high level one here but I'm happy to offer recommendation on how to implement Tsheets.
• Time to implement this process internally: it took us about a month to implement and for the team to become self-sufficient. It could’ve taken less but we had to be mindful of the creative teams prioirities. We also allowed testing in the platform for each team ninjas to get them comfortable with the engine. ?
• Post set-up and pre-launch QA checklist: these checklists were truly life saving for the team and even additional team member, not creative, volunteered to help with this final process before the campaigns were activated.
• Courage and Patience to follow through the winning steps above: Change is hard and scary. We framed this as an exciting opportunity to learn a new skill and encourage servant leadership. The programmatic lead was beyond grateful. It is a win win for the team!

?In conclusion:

The old process was the programmatic ninja completing all the trafficking, QAing, and setting up of campaigns in DSP taking them a lot of time to launch. The new process was reduced to 5-7 business days by encouraging team work and implementing clear detailed training process. ?All of it was recorded in a way that the agency client could continue to replicate this process with new hires.

The creative team is now able to upload creatives to the correct advertiser and campaign in CM360, assign creatives to the correct ads and create new ones if necessary. They are also able to assign the correct CTL (Click-Through Links) to each respective creatives.?

Here’s something the agency leaders did that makes it even more amazing: They rewarded and incentivized the team that volunteered. They allowed that said-team to try and learn new skills while respecting their responsibility and always showing appreciation. A temporary solution turned into well-received promotions while more help was hired and trained.

This was one of many ways I helped past agency and brand clients. It is part of the programmatic media solution service I offer. How can we look at your internal operation and complement each team players in a non-toxic environment?

You are one email or phone call away from being another success story!

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