Many sports like cricket and rugby have a playbook. In such professional sports, stakes are very high and as a result demand a huge amount of strategy. So it’s natural to find that the coaches in charge have a set of tried and trusted guides called playbooks. They contain plans and tactics to counter different scenarios that arise within a game. Players can execute these pre-planned tactics during crunch moments rather than rely solely on their own decision-making.
In the media industry, situations are quite similar. We need to decide on a course of action in order to meet business objectives. Similar to professional sport, MediaOps should be developed beforehand and shared with major stakeholders so that the team is aware of the overarching strategies to deploy at different situations.
Key Takeaways
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A MediaOps playbook is like a compass. It points the right direction for managing your media activities. It defines processes, standards, responsibilities and controls that sit on the driver seat for campaign execution.
Here are some reasons why every enterprise advertising team needs a MediaOps playbook:
There are 5 key elements you can find inside every successful MediaOps playbook. We have covered them below by drawing parallels to cricket.
Hypothetical situation. You are the captain of a county cricket club. It’s your responsibility from day one to make sure that every player is on the same page before the first ball is bowled. For instance, your team cannot function if every player has a different understanding of the field.
It’s the same with a MediaOps playbook. You should have one naming convention for your campaigns, placements, creatives and line items.
A wicket has been taken. You, as the captain, need to send the next batter to the crease. It's the first session, day one. Now, will you send a proper test batsman or a pinch hitter? Obviously the former. Because you perfectly know the match situation. Clearly you have based your decision around it.
You need to have the same understanding of the operations before you launch a campaign. Everyone in your team needs to know what they are working with before they can be expected to execute their responsibility. At a minimum, you should clearly define:
Over the years, we keep highlighting to our clients that many or their trafficking errors are due to an incomplete brief that was filled in by assumption.
The match is underway now. Apart from the openers, nobody from your team knows their batting positions. Unlikely, right?. The batting order is usually finalised much before the match begins. That’s what pre-match meetings are for.
Your campaigns need similar discipline before they go live. Execute a set of checks against every campaign build and validate the following:
The value of etching these down is that they can then be automated. This is the difference between a check that happens and a check that happens when someone is not busy.
New situation. A pinch-hitter has arrived at the crease. It’s the tenth over. Now do you immediately change the field placements or do you wait for 5-6 overs till they thrash your bowlers left and right? The answer is quite obvious.
You need the same clarity and agility in MediaOps. You need to know when to intervene. When you monitor without thresholds, you end up with dashboards that collect dust. The playbook should set the tolerances like:
Exception-based operations only work if the exceptions are defined in advance.
The match has ended. Now is the time to read the scorecard and other analytics dashboards. It provides a record of what actually happened. You learn how the runs were scored or how the overs were bowled. Campaign operations need an equivalent record. You should not rely on someone’s memory when the client asks what was delivered.
You need to capture:
For out-of-home and retail media in particular, proof of play and delivery verification are contractual and not administrative. And the teams that treat them as paperwork discover their real status during a credit negotiation.
Nobody can pause live digital advertising to redesign its operations. The sequence below is designed to run alongside delivery.
Pick one live campaign. Ideally a complicated one. Document every touch it took from approved plan to final invoice. Every system, every spreadsheet, every re-keying, every approval that happened over a message rather than in a system. Teams are routinely surprised by the count. This is your baseline, and it is also the business case.
Nothing downstream works until records can be joined. Agree the naming standard. Apply it to new campaigns immediately. Map historic campaigns well enough to compare periods. This is the least interesting task in the programme and the one with the highest dependency count.
Convert the validation list into automated checks in the platforms where builds happen. Start with the three errors that have cost you the most in the last year, which the week-one trace will have identified. Blocking a launch on a failed check is uncomfortable for about a fortnight and then becomes invisible.
The remaining risk sits between teams. Plan to build, build to launch, launch to reporting, delivery to billing. Give each handover a system-recorded owner, a timestamp and a status, so that a stalled campaign is visible while it can still be recovered rather than at the point of reconciliation.
With deep expertise in MediaOps and the Salesforce ecosystem, we help your advertising teams turn a playbook into infrastructure. We:
Put simply, we don’t just write the playbook; we make your systems run it. If your operational layer is being held together by the diligence of a few people, that is a risk worth removing before the next peak season tests it. Contact our team now to see what a MediaOps playbook would look like in your business.