Stories Flashcards
Kendall’s Updating Report/Hot Take
S: For context, a big part of my job is managing the relationship with Google since they’re technically a client of mine. For all of our campaigns, my team is in charge of building and sending out a weekly performance report to Google detailing key metrics as well as any optimizations that we should make. Recently I received feedback from our client that she wanted to revamp the report as she felt like we needed to add some key information.
T: This report is a serious undertaking with many stakeholders involved and also approved by leadership at Google. So technically my team wasn’t scoped to change it and it would require quite a lot of resources (time and effort) to do this. Regardless I knew that pleasing my client and meeting her needs was most important.
A: I took the lead in working closely with her to understand her vision and make it reality, working with the data engineers in my company to update the report. On top of that I offered my client a weekly sync we called a Hot Take to briefly go through the commentary and optimization recommendations included in the report and talk in real time.
R: The result was a huge success, my client was beyond pleased, even emailing the Executives at my company and shouting me out for going above and beyond what was expected. On top of that, the efficiency that the report and the weekly meetings had led to our campaign being one the most successful in Pixel history in terms of meeting our KPIs, where 90% of our budget was spent against channels that met our KPI, a 20% increase YoY.
DV vs. Hulu Dilemma - Arming clients with information
P: Recently I was working on a campaign where I was planning what our OLV strategy would look like. We had tight budgets for this quarter and had narrowed the partners we would run with to two - DV360 and Hulu. My client was adamant about wanting to run with those two partners but after doing research and analyzing my options, I disagreed and thought that we should only be running with Hulu fort that quarter. The reasons were that we had a limited budget and I knew from past campaigns and best practices that we should fully fund one channel to best practice in order to set ourselves up to meet our KPIs, instead of putting money against two channels that were not funded to best practices because of lack of budget. On top of this, from previous quarters, we had run DV360 video against our target and saw that the channel kept falling short of our key metrics even after multiple iterations of audience and inventory changes.
A: I took the lead in compiling this information - laying out why I recommended funding Hulu only and set up time with clients to walk them through this data.
R: Once I walked them through, they saw that funding Hulu was likely the approach to set us up for most success. They approved that approach, we ran hulu and met our KPI of Consideration lift.
DCA - Building out to please clients
S: After the launch of the Pixel 3, my team was working on a wrap up report for Google with major learnings for the quarter. This wrap up report is a standardized template from Google, listing out the major learnings from that quarter as well as actionable next steps for future campaigns. Once I presented this report, a client of mine requested another report in addition to the standard one we had just presented. She wanted a report analyzing every marketing channel and tactic would go into an in depth report.
T: This was definitely a change of direction but nonetheless I had to deliver this to my clients. I had an extremely slim team at the time, a two week timeframe to pull this together (typically it would take around 4-6 weeks but Google executives needed it ASAP).
A: Knowing all of this urgency, I took the lead and told my manager that I would handle the new wrap up report. I collaborated with all different departments at Essence to compile all of the data needed for the report. There was also no template or instruction from Google on what they really wanted so I took liberties in creating what I think would be most helpful.
R: I finished the report in time, it was an extremely in depth view of everything that happened throughout the quarter including all major tests, an analysis of frequency by week, audience performance, YoY Sales analysis, etc and how all of these learnings could be implemented for future campaigns. When I presented to Google, they were beyond excited and pleased with the final outcome. My report was distributed globally and is now used as a template for all future wrap up reports - they call it the DCA. So while it was definitely a challenge to work under a lot of pressure, with a short timeframe, I really feel that this shows I can work well even in those challenging situations and can persevere with great results.
TRAFFICKING WITHOUT APPROVAL - AGAINST COMPANY POLICY
On a recent campaign, I was waiting on my clients to supply financial approval for the budget that my team would be spending. How it works is that Google provides a document with financial approval and my team is then able to start the trafficking process to get ready to launch. Its company policy to not start trafficking or launch before that approval is received since if we ran into a situation where Financial approval ended up being rejected, then my company could be liable for the millions of dollars that we spent on media.
For some reason financial approval was taking a while on Google’s end and it was jeopardizing the launch date that was scheduled. My clients asked me to expedite trafficking ahead of receiving that approval.
This was a very tricky situation because I understood why the company policy was there and clients knowingly were pushing to sweep this under the rug.
After speaking to my team lead, I let clients know that we could not start trafficking or launch before receiving financial approval. It was a tough conversation and I know they were not pleased but this was a situation where I had to stand my ground and make them understand why that wouldn’t be possible.
LEADING MULTICULTURAL
S: During a company meeting, leadership at my company expressed that there was a new initiative that came down from the CMO of Google, that Google needed to surround Multicultural audiences across their marketing campaigns. My company had never gone after this audience specifically so there weren’t many learnings that we had, nor points of contacts for Google that were going to lead the charge. At the same time, I had an upcoming Q4 campaign coming up, which is one of our largest quarters since we launch the premium phone each Fall.
T: Knowing Google wanted to implement Multicultural audiences, I connected with my Team Leads and raised my hand for taking on this new project as I also thought it could be a great learning opportunity.
A: I partnered with Google multicultural leads to ideate Pixel’s first multicultural campaign, doing research into who our prime target was and ways to target this audience.
R: I ended up running a fully Multicultural campaign, focusing on the LatinX audience across YouTube and Social. This campaign led to us surpassing sales goals by 35% for this audience and also surpassed our brand campaign goals by 2x. From there, I have taken a front seat in being one of Google’s leads in multicultural marketing.
Pulling Data for Analytics when they weren’t able to
S: My Q3 campaign had just finished. At the end of a campaign, I started working on wrap up analysis reports, analyzing and detailing next steps based on results.
T: I work with a few different teams for this, such as Analytics, who pulls the data. At the time they were missing a few people and already working on quite a few urgent deliverables so they were stressed about if they were going to be able to get the data pulled in time.
A: Seeing this situation, I jumped in and had an Analytics team lead quickly show me how to pull some of the data needed in different platforms. After showing me, I was able to download most of the data myself, train some members on my team how to do it too.
R: We were able to deliver the report in time and our Analytics team was able to deliver their projects as well, likely cutting around 4 days where my team wouldn’t have been able to work on the analysis. In getting involved in different aspects of my company and showing my direct reports this attitude as well, it set the standard for how we work across different departments - we take responsibility and all act as team players.
Creating a Decision Tree/Optimization Process
S: Throughout my campaigns, my team is always looking for ways to optimize based on real time data. Recently, we adopted a new reporting template which made analyzing metrics more accessible. This was great, though I noticed that oftentimes when we wanted to make optimizations, it often took weeks to get approval from our clients since multiple stakeholders were involved, it could take 1 to 2 weeks to finally make an optimization.
T: I realized that this was a pretty inefficient way of optimizing a campaign and was determined to find a more streamlined option that would allow us to optimize faster and therefore spend less budget on channels that were not meeting our KPI’s.
A: I worked to build a decision tree for my campaign that broke out all marketing channels and solutions based on the metrics we hit in flight. For example, if we saw that our programmatic video detected a cost per sale that was unreasonably high compared to our KPI, then the decision tree would say to either cut off spend or pivot to a different strategy based on what story the metrics told.
R: I built this document and presented it to Google who immediately loved it. We implemented it on our last campaign and it worked so well that by the end of the campaign, 90% of our budget was spent against tactics that met or exceeded our KPI. This document template that I created was implemented across all Google campaigns starting in 2021.
Creative Management - Building something new
S: A big part of my job is managing all things creative - this includes creative rotation, testing, and delivery. When I first stepped into managing creative, I noticed that there was no clear process on managing many crucial aspects of it - things would get lost in emails, there would be mistakes made on what would be running. This was clearly not an efficient way of working.
T: I saw this and knew that I had to make a process for this - it would help not only me but every other team at Essence that touched creative.
A: Having had experience in managing creative and knowing the needs of my team as well as others, I created a document that clearly organized many functions that teams would need to know. I presented this document internally as well as externally and it was very well received. My team tested it out for a quarter at first to work out the kinks and see if there was anything else to add.
R: Ultimately we got it to a final stage and rolled it out across all other teams at Essence and our Ad Ops team reported that there were huge improvements - particularly a 40% reduction in tickets to their system flagging error rates in the wrong creative running and being able to more easily optimize performance according to creative. This is really at the heart of what I love to do - simplify and find efficiencies wherever possible.
Figuring out Frequency on YouTube
Situation: I was working on the Pixel 4 campaign analysis report at the time and I noticed that quarter over quarter we were not seeing the results that we wanted to be on YouTube in meeting our benchmark goals of Consideration lift. I had looked into a lot of data and nothing was really telling a story into how we could improve YouTube - some key metrics like AVOC, reach, and frequency were normal. Although frequency was normal according to our best practice, I wondered if there were changes we could make to generate more efficiency and better results. For context, when planning campaigns, we usually implemented a Google best practice of a weekly frequency of 3.
Task: This obviously wasn’t working for us so I wanted to figure out if we had any data that could steer us in the right direction in terms of how moving our weekly frequency could impact results.
Action:I gathered data from the past 2 years of our campaign and plotted the correlation between weekly frequency and weekly brand lift, one of our main KPI’s. I found a direct correlation between a weekly frequency of 4 and Consideration lift to benchmark for those specific weeks. I thought this was an interesting learning so I shared it with clients who agreed and wanted to test it out. I set up a 4 week test the following quarter, with split audiences, one would have a weekly frequency of 3 and the other a weekly frequency of 4 and another a weekly frequency of 5.
Result: It turns out that the weekly frequency of 4 correlated with higher brand lift levels and more efficiency than frequencies of 3 or 5 which was a huge learning for us and for Google. This is likely because a smartphone is pretty expensive and has a harder barrier to entry than other hardware products. Once I implemented this strategy, I saw the following campaigns meet our KPI benchmarks and it’s a new best practice for Pixel campaigns to have a weekly frequency of 4.
Last Minute Latin Grammy’s Sponsorship
Situation: My team got a request from Google to set up a campaign for an upcoming Grammys event they received rights to sponsor last minute, this was around 3-4 weeks out from when the campaign needed to launch and made timelines extremely tight. Typically we would need 2 months to plan for an upcoming campaign.
Task: We had to get a plan to Google in a few days from when we were briefed and needed to work fast and efficiently.
Action: I took the lead in briefing my team, having to skip various steps in the briefing process, such as outlining a template document that provides all departments at my company explicit details on every aspect of the campaign. I set up an hour meeting with all teams that would be touching this campaign and walked through everything then. I then delegated work from there to meet the timeline.
Result: Due to limited resources, I took best practices
from previous campaigns and data we had collected to inform our strategy and plan for what the Grammys media would look like. It ultimately turned out to be a pretty robust plan but I did have to sacrifice processes that are in place to ensure accuracy and quality. but obviously in this situation, maintaining the sponsorship and getting the most of it was top priority. The Campaign did end up meeting the Awareness goal of 2pts lift which was a pleasant surprise just due to how quickly I put this campaign together.
Making a Decision with little Data - DV360 v. Hulu
P: While planning a recent campaign, I had to make the decision of what our online video channels and tactics would consist of in a very shortened timeline due to the clients not having a budget for us until two weeks out from the campaign. We knew that we had a few options that Google wanted to explore, the budget was tight and would allow us to run with two different options, DV360 video on open exchange or Hulu. We had the data for DV360 from last quarter and it was clear that this channel was not meeting our targets even after many iterations of changes but we didn’t have data for Hulu from the previous quarter where we had run it. Ideally, I would’ve had both sets of data to determine the best option.
A: Due to the constrained timeline, Google wanting to launch on time in order to not leave any money on the table in terms of potential sales, I made the decision to move ahead with funding Hulu. I caveated to my clients that this was the situation and that if we received data back from Hulu within the next few weeks, and it showed negative results, then we could pivot strategies.
R: They aligned with my methodology and we launched the campaign on time. We were able to get the results a few weeks later when we were already live and it confirmed that Hulu did meet our KPI’s and we were able to stay live on that channel.
TRPR
Situation: With TV costs continuing to be extremely expensive and a huge commitment, as well as Google being a huge digital advertisers, Google naturally has focused on trying to consolidate spend on Digital platforms, especially ones of their own. With this, came a challenge in proving that you can have similar scale and reach as TV, but with lower cost on digital.
T: In partnership with Google, we saw an opportunity to leverage YouTube to try to solve that problem - the intention being to prove that YouTube can have similar scale as TV, with lower cost and equal or better measurement results.
A: I worked to create a test to accomplish two things. To see if YouTube can scale to the same TRPs in one week as TV. To see if at this level of TRPs, we would see the same or higher brand lift than TV. we set up the test to be 5 weeks dispersed throughout a quarter, executing media in similar terms to TV, so A18-49 (not too targeted).
R: We saw huge success with this initiative, all weeks hit our goal TRPs, and 4/5 weeks showed higher or the same brand lift goal as TV. I led the analysis of this report and presented the learnings and next steps to Google leadership. This test was actually converted into a Google product offering that Google Sales teams offer. We continue to work on broadening different capabilities of the offering, such as using different creative lengths, targeting, localization efforts, etc. But it’s been really exciting to have led this project with Google and that it was converted to a new product offering.
HOW TO STAY LEARNING/RELEVANT
I learn new things in my industry by reading relevant articles and management books (How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie) and by speaking to friends and colleagues in the industry as well. In the advertising space, since change is happening daily - i make it a priority to research and meet with different ad tech companies at my current company. This allows me to get exposure to new things, whether its ad tech companies or media publishers. This really allows me to learn and keep myself in the know, which in turn I can apply it to future strategy and campaign work.
FORECAST FOR PERFORMANCE CHANNELS - Getting a co-worker to help me
P: When I joined Essence, I primarily had experience in brand marketing so performance marketing was quite new and different for me. When I became a Manager on Pixel, I was tasked to plan a performance campaign for our upcoming Q2 campaign. I really didn’t know exactly how to go about that as performance goals and KPI’s are much different than brand. and I knew one of my coworkers was an expert as his main responsibility was performance marketing.
A: I scheduled time with him and asked if he’d be willing to train me on how to forecast my performance channels which includes SEM (Google, Bing), Display (GDN), and Social (FB, IG, Reddit) tactics.He agreed and over the next two weeks, he was kind enough to give me a few hours of his time to train me. He showed me how to forecast by looking at past performance of each channel and applying multipliers on various variables such as seasonality, external market factors, and our CPS in previous quarters.
R: After having my coworker teach me about performance, I was able to forecast my own plan for Pixel. My campaign ended up hitting our Cost per Sale goal for the quarter.
MULTICULTURAL CREATIVE TESTING - GOING WITH JUDGEMENT
A bit of background, my team typically only runs creative that have been tested in-lab by a third party and that is passing against our audience. We run very few creatives that aren’t tested as it’s a proxy of how the creative will resonate with consumers once live. With that said, for a recent campaign, I had clients tell me that they had a new creative geared for our LatinX audience that came out of production and wanted to see if we could run it. This was supposed to surround a key Latin Grammy’s moment for us. There wasn’t enough time in the quarter to test the campaign as it typically takes around 3 weeks. Regardless, I saw the creative and thought it was very well done and really played to the psychographics that we had researched for that specific audience.
I made the call to run it, based on my best judgement. It ended up being one of the top performing creatives or that quarter, exceeding our brand lift by 2x.
