Transparency means more than just talking about it – you have to demonstrate it. It was one of our founding principles when we set up Anything is Possible. And continues to be embedded through every project we work on.
Transparency – a founding principle
One of our key intentions when we set up Anything is Possible in 2018 (and still is to this day) is transparency. Yes, all agencies talk about it, but a lot of it is just that; talk.
We were tired of the lack of transparency, control and visibility in media agencies. Hidden margins, opaque buying methods, trading deals and practices that benefited the agencies themselves and not their clients. These were a huge source of frustration for us – so much so, we decided to go it alone with a whole new approach.
Programmatically bought display advertising is a perfect example of a lack of transparency for the advertiser. Often with a complex and opaque supply chain, the true amount of an advertiser’s budget that can actually end up showing real ads to real people is scary. The great Bob Hoffman sums this up well in his ‘The Programmatic Poop Funnel’ article, so I’ll let you enjoy reading this yourselves! The headline is that a dollar of advertising spend going in the top can come out the bottom as only 3 cents.
We wanted to build a better way of working with our clients. One where they’re empowered with full visibility where it matters most.
Owning your own data
Transparency is woven into the fabric of how we work with clients – it covers everything, including media buying, commercial models, sustainability, data and reporting. We believe it is imperative that our clients are in full control of their own data. This sounds obvious, but in two of our key sectors, Education and Culture, this isn’t always the case when it comes to ownership of ad accounts.
If an agency owns them this restricts future opportunities and progression. It means the client can’t transition accounts to other agencies and results in losses of historic performance and equity. They are forced to build from the bottom up again. What do these agencies have to hide? We ask ourselves the same question. Without this visibility, agencies can add hidden margins to media spend, allowing them to keep their headline fees low.
At Anything is Possible we do this the right way. The client creates and owns the account and provides us with access to manage advertising on their behalf. They have full visibility and control and when they move to a new agency in the future, they retain the history.
Practising what we preach – tools and platforms we’ve built to enable full transparency
We have created and continually iterated a number of our own tools and platforms to give our clients full transparency and control. Let me tell you more about two of them.
Firstly, we developed Anything is Possible Insights (aipinsights) – our insights portal to deploy beautiful, meaningful, real-time performance dashboards that drive growth for our clients organisations. aipinsights connects via APIs into our clients web analytics and ad accounts (and a whole lot more), providing 24/7 access to campaign performance and insights data.
Aip Insights Dashboard (please note data is not real)
You see everything we see – as I said above, our clients should always have full ownership and control over their ad accounts. If you don’t, how can you trust the ad account data shown in your dashboard is exactly as it is in ad accounts themselves and hasn’t been manipulated in any way? This is crucial when it comes to advertising spend – you should know how every penny of your hard fought budget is being spent.
Secondly, on the 29th February this year we officially launched Leap (well timed!), our new software platform, which helps our clients brief, plan and execute campaign activity in the most streamlined way possible.
Leap is a single platform that vaults the gaps between the initial spark of a campaign, the translation of that idea into a brief, and all the potential pitfalls that stop a good plan from turning into effective, engaging and compelling advertising.
Leap Dashboard (please note data is not real)
One of the biggest problems in marketing is creating good briefs. As the first element of any campaign, it should build the foundations for success and translate the ideas in your head into something tangible and practical. Drawing people into your brand’s world and encouraging curiosity to find solutions. But if the brief can be streamlined and optimised, then everything else can be improved. And we get to the idea that made us excited in the first place – that much quicker.
So, this is where we’ve started with Leap – by bringing together AI, automation and agency expertise to solve the problem creating great briefs.
Leap stores all clients’ briefs in one place, shows the status of each campaign brief at any time (being reviewed, in planning, live, ended etc.), allows multiple stakeholders to collaborate and connects to the media plan and our clients’ aipinsights dashboards. It also timestamps every step, giving our clients visibility and transparency of our adherence to the SLAs we have in place.
Transparency drives better decision making
We believe transparency builds trusting relationships and ultimately, drives better decision making. Without it, decisions are made without having the full picture (good or bad), impacting the effectiveness of your marketing investment.
“Companies should prioritize metrics that are 100% trackable and directly linked to business success, even if it means sacrificing short-term revenues. We believe that when things are reported truthfully, regardless of whether the news is bad or good, the introduced transparency would ultimately outweigh the potential frustration of a customer (if things are not going right) and would build a much stronger relationship, helping the business in achieving desired growth at a much faster pace.” Forbes
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
Transparency is woven into the fabric of how we partner with our clients. We believe they should retain full control and ownership of their data and transparency drives better decision making. Ask questions of agencies who don’t work in this way. You should be able to see how every penny of your marketing budget is being spent.
Want more transparency and control of your data? Work with the right kind of agency. Get in touch with us!
