Campaigns break most often at the handover between suppliers

When a campaign underperforms, people look for the fault in the idea or the budget. In practice it is usually elsewhere: in the gap between two suppliers, where nobody is accountable for anything, because everybody is accountable for their own part.

This is not an argument for handing everything to a single supplier. It is a list of four places where the handover breaks — and those places can be watched even when you keep five suppliers.

1. Formats are not settled before the shoot

The most expensive mistake in production costs nothing and takes two minutes to make: nobody wrote into the brief which formats the campaign would need. One landscape spot gets shot, and at launch it turns out square and vertical versions and three durations are required.

Cropping cannot rescue it. A frame composed for landscape simply has nothing at the top and bottom — the actor has two inches of air above their head and the edge of frame under their chin. A reshoot then costs more than the original shoot day, because the people, the kit and the location all have to come back together.

What to do: the list of formats and durations belongs in the shoot brief, not the post-production brief. When someone other than the shooter plans the media, that list has to exist before the shoot day is booked.

2. Whoever makes the materials does not know the deadline

A media plan carries hard material deadlines — commonly ten working days before transmission for television, earlier still for print. The designer adapting the spot often hears that date from the client only when three days remain.

The consequence is not just a scramble. An undelivered asset means a forfeited placement that has already been paid for, and the campaign shifting to a worse slot.

What to do: the deadlines from the media plan have to reach every supplier the moment the plan is approved — not as they approach. It is one email, and it saves an entire round of panic.

3. Measurement is set up by someone other than whoever runs the campaign

The classic situation: one company builds the website, another runs the campaigns. Tracking was set up by whoever built the site, according to what seemed sensible to them. The campaigns are then steered by numbers measuring something other than the client’s revenue.

Conversions get counted twice, attributed to the wrong channel, or a click on a phone number is treated as a conversion. The report then describes a world that does not exist — and it is internally consistent, so nobody notices for six months.

What to do: before the first koruna is spent, verify that conversions are counted once, attributed to the right channel, and match what the accounts show. That check belongs to whoever will steer the campaign by those numbers, not to whoever installed the tracking.

4. Nobody owns the engagement as a whole

The three preceding points share one cause. Every supplier did their own part correctly and nobody did the part in between — because it was in nobody’s brief.

Clients usually take the connector role themselves without calling it that. It works while the engagement is small. On a campaign running media, production and design at once it is a half-time job, and the client is doing it alongside their own.

What to do: decide who owns the engagement as a whole, and write it down. It can be one of the suppliers; it can be someone on the client side. It cannot be nobody.

When more suppliers is the right answer

Consolidating suppliers is not a cure in itself. A specialist firm is usually better and cheaper in a narrow discipline than a generalist, and on a long engagement it holds knowledge a new supplier spends months catching up on.

What decides the outcome is the number of seams, not the number of suppliers. A campaign with three suppliers and one person holding it together will land better than a campaign with one supplier where the work still gets passed between three departments with nobody in between.