How can we re-invest unspent advertising budgets into better causes?

PRESENT

With my background in media planning and advertising, I had the opportunity to work with big clients and I often found some inefficiencies that questioned the way things have always been within the agency world.

This is where my questions started to arise. Scroll down to see the answers.

The problem of budget waste.

Budget waste is currently one of the most common problems in advertising and a frequently unaddressed one. Many factors can contribute to an underspend e.g. improper campaign setups, lack of optimisation, narrow audiences, ad fraud, or limited viewability.

I was only an Account Executive at the time and my client was a large social media and technology corporation so I was handling a considerable amount of media budget for their campaigns.

I often found that this media budget was not spent in full and at the end of the campaign, we were left with a significant underspent budget. Maybe this wasn't much for my client, but for some other realities I am sure it would have been an impactful amount.

This left me thinking.

POUCH
Taking the 'ouch' out of POs.

A project about monitoring media campaigns spends, reducing ad waste, and proposing sustainable solutions to re-invest contingency budgets.

This project has been shortlisted and presented in an internal competition at Publicis Media.

The Process.

I created a tool to manage and monitor client spending across each campaign in real time, as well as featuring a functionality to close campaign POs (Purchase Orders, effectively the document authorising the purchase of media for the campaign) and manage any potential underspends.

The tool was easy to use in few small steps:

1. Homepage