Delivering beyond expectations – The Xerago’s way.

We hope you found our yesterday’s post about the booming Digital Out-of-Home advertising market useful. In-branch Marketing Walls is a form of Digital OOH. This post is about one of our real-life experiences with Marketing Walls.

If a client wants their digital presence managed, we strongly urge them to give the entire mandate to Xerago as the sole partner. Is it because we are greedy and want to hog all the business? No. While we love the opportunity to solve a problem and get paid for it, it is not primarily why we push for a single vendor partnership.

The real reason is that we will do everything we can to produce the best results we are capable of. And if the obvious synergies and efficiencies of just Xerago managing digital presence end to end will help us do that, we will push the client in that direction.

Let’s recount a real incident to make the point.

Xerago manages some of the digital presence of a leading foreign bank in the Middle East. Mohammad manages Xerago’s relationship. Recently, we developed creatives for display on “Marketing Walls” of each branch.

Our mandate was simply to generate and publish creative assets. Our creative team generated them, the digital enablement team published the creatives to production, and Mohammad got the client sign-off. Just another assignment of quick turnaround. No big deal, right?

Technically, our responsibility ends here.

But, unlike typical digital deliveries where we can see our work reflected on the clients’ websites, mobile apps, emails, social media or other digital channels, this isn’t something that we could load up and see on our laptops or mobiles.

So, our Account Director, who was in Dubai at that time, dropped in at the bank’s Downtown Dubai branch to see our work in action. He was alarmed to see no Xerago creative adorning the walls. At this point, despite having the client’s sign-off, he knew someone screwed-up–Is it Xerago? The client? Or the other partner handling downstream integration?

He calls Mohammad. Mohammad calls the client. Turns out the IPs of the “marketing walls” had changed, and the partner failed to update. The bank got the partner to update the IPs and our Account Director saw the “Marketing Wall” come to life.

Going beyond the brief sometimes has happy consequences

Will we go out of the way to ensure a job is well done, even if it's not our responsibility? Absolutely. Do we want to? Sure, but we’d rather the client just gave us the entire mandate and pay us for what we would do, anyway. And not depend on a happy coincidence.

The bank marketing head appreciated that we went beyond our brief. That we were proactive. They accepted that If Xerago had been assigned end-to-end responsibility, such a situation would not have surfaced in the first place.

Did we get single-vendor status? No. Did we use this incident to say, “we told you so?” Of course not. But we did tweak the sign-off checklist to say that client personnel are to physically check at branches before providing sign-off. We can't have people fly to Dubai each time, right? :)