December 28th, 2022

Media strategists are the proverbial quarterbacks of the agency paradigm. They have an innate understanding of the broader advertising ‘field’, which ‘plays’ work best depending on complex combinations of different variables – audience, geo, seasonality – and orchestrate the timely and effective execution of said plays in real time. They understand the importance of historical data to performance and ground their moves in insight wherever possible. 

It’s a pivotal role but one fraught with challenge. For one, teams often comprise a complex cross-section of different players – from media buying to ad operations to data science – and aligning on a core strategy can be problematic. By nature, campaign activation is riddled with unknowns – be they budget reallocations, flight rescheduling or last minute creative revisions – and, as when a star player goes off with an unexpected injury, strategists need to be able to adapt at speed to extreme changes in circumstance. 

Moreover, the proof is ultimately in the pudding. To quote Winston Churchill, ‘However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results’, and, in the midst of an increasingly nebulous advertising ecosystem, a fundamental challenge facing strategists is making sense of the numbers, which are often disparate, misaligned and sit across a swath of different platforms and data sets. 

What strategists need, then, in light of these challenges, is a ‘playbook’ of sorts – something that can better enable complex decision-making mid-flight, allow for fast, strategic pivots when the chips are down, and consolidate data in an omnichannel context – and a system that oils communication channels across agency specialist teams. Flight Control by Clinch solves for all of these and more: