Scaling local advertising with automation in the new media landscape

Today’s advertisers face a daunting operational challenge: scaling customized, local advertising campaigns across a growing number of channels. Overall digital ad spend continues to grow, and new channels, financial media and retail media networks are emerging. 

As the space gets more complex, both in-house and agency ad teams are stretched thin, trying to do more with the same — or less — people and budget. We call this operational pinch point “the crisis of capacity” for ad ops teams.  

These problems compound exponentially for localized advertising campaigns. Unique custom data points, like colloquial phrases or nested geographies, increase the number of campaign variables. If you’re managing these with manual tasks, you’re also increasing your likelihood of branding and compliance errors.  

These challenges have made automation an essential operational solution. Automation has changed the paradigm for local advertising execution and management. The question is, how best can automation be applied? Which processes should we automate to scale up localized campaigns profitably? The following strategies offer a helpful starting place.

The new media mix

The marketing funnel now requires a locally targeted, multichannel and data-powered media mix. More brands are shifting their budgets towards programmatic and emerging media types (CTV, audio ads, etc.) to engage hyperlocal audiences more effectively.

At Fluency, we’re forecasting a 350% increase in spending on Amazon and other demand-side platforms (DSPs) by 2027. This significant shift highlights advertisers’ desire to get in front of key local audiences on media channels where people spend the majority of their time.

The challenge for ad teams lies in managing this complexity. Traditionally, advertisers have taken two paths when trying to scale their efforts. 

One approach is to hire more staff. If each team member maxes out at handling 20-30 different accounts, the only way to add capacity is by hiring more employees. This approach doesn’t improve your margins, though: even the most tenured and experienced employees have a workload threshold that they can’t overcome by sheer force alone. And when you push people over that threshold? You’ll combat high employee turnover and burnout. 

The other path that advertisers have taken to scale is what we like to refer to as “Frankentech.” Building custom tech to address siloed problems is resource-draining. Plus, in-house solutions rarely add the capacity you truly need, particularly if you look at your workflows comprehensively. Piling on non-interoperable third-party solutions makes your tech stack look like a house of cards instead of a strong foundation for workflow efficiency. 

Overcoming the ‘crisis of capacity’

If advertisers want to succeed, they must think about ad ops holistically. While automation has existed in the advertising space for years, many organizations deploy it in a limited fashion–such as using automation tools within each individual publisher. 

However, to achieve true scalability in advertising, a more comprehensive automation approach is necessary. This means systematically automating the most resource-intensive workstreams, including budgeting, launching campaigns, campaign management and reporting. 

Let’s take a closer look at how automation can alleviate the pains of these workflows.  

Automating budgeting and pacing for improved margins

Budgeting is a critical component of digital advertising — and shockingly labor-intensive. Automating budget allocation, pacing and adjustments can significantly reduce the manual effort required and ensure optimal spend. 

For example, teams can establish rules and workflows to dynamically (and automatically!) adjust bids and reallocate budgets based on real-time performance data. We’ve seen customers improve their spend from 95% to 98%, all while avoiding overspend. 

Expediting campaign launches for scale

Launching campaigns at scale is a daunting task, especially for multi-location advertisers. Ensuring you have the right local data funnel to the right ad sets using manual workflows is draining. 

Automation can expedite localized campaign building and launching through pre-set configurations. Manual adjustments and tweaks give way to scalable, automated workflows to launch large-scale campaigns.  

For example, when a real estate marketing agency started launching campaigns with automation, they decreased the time to build and launch campaigns from a couple of hours to 10 minutes or less. 

Efficient campaign management for optimal performance

Managing campaigns across multiple channels requires constant monitoring and optimization. If there’s one thing that tanks efficiency, it’s having to babysit every campaign.  

Automated management systems can provide real-time alerts and proactive notifications. This gives strategists the ability to actually strategize. You can stay on top of zero spend or serving alerts, budget reallocation recommendations, and disapproved ad extensions without constantly keeping a pulse on operations. 

Best of all, both you and your clients are confident that every campaign is on track and performing optimally.

Comprehensive, stress-free reporting

Generating insightful reports is essential for evaluating campaign performance, providing feedback to clients, and making data-informed decisions. But the work that goes into building reports (which is more like updating a multiple-page deck every month with new data) drains your time and energy. 

Reporting is one of the most fruitful places for automation. Automatically generate unified, customizable dashboards that provide a holistic view of performance across all channels. You can keep clients informed about the effectiveness of their campaigns and use data to make informed decisions.

Automate labor-intensive workstreams to activate data at scale

The four workflows mentioned above are excellent jumping-off points for automation. These processes are all data-heavy and labor-intensive. They also have a lot of repeatable steps that are practically begging to be rule-ified. 

A Digital Advertising Operating System (DAOS), like Fluency, can help you solve the challenges of both scale and performance while safely incorporating emerging technologies like automation and AI. With a DAOS, you can:

• Optimize multichannel efforts: Efficiently manage complex marketing campaigns across channels for faster insights and better decision-making.
• Activate real-time, dynamic updates: Automate changes across your portfolio to ensure your messaging is always informed and dynamically responsive.
• Strategize proactively: Leverage AI-driven suggestions to optimize ad performance and boost conversions.

These benefits trickle up to the ultimate goal: you save tremendous amounts of time across a variety of workflows. This frees up your capacity to deliver outstanding performance results across the board.  

Both in-house ad teams and agencies have used a DAOS to holistically transform manual workflows into a well-oiled automation machine.  As just one example, Dealer.com, part of Cox Automotive and the largest advertising agency in the automotive sector, wanted to expand its successful multi-channel strategy to a new advertising unit: Amazon Sponsored Display. With Amazon’s audience data, there was potential to enhance their data-driven localized advertising services for thousands of individual automotive manufacturers, regional groups, and local franchise dealers. 

However, the company’s existing solutions lacked the flexibility and efficiency required to scale to Amazon Sponsored Display. Launching and optimizing every account required significant overhead that would be difficult to recoup under their manual-task-heavy workflows. Dealer.com wanted their teams to focus on strategy and client relationships, not task work.

The teams at Dealer.com leveraged Fluency’s direct API integration with Amazon Amazon Sponsored Display to automate the creation and management of over 1,100 locally targeted campaigns. This enables Dealer.com to make real-time, automated campaign adjustments and large-scale deployment directly from one central hub. 

These new automated workflows reduced Dealer.com’s campaign setup time from 60-90 minutes per account to just 5 minutes in total. The team saved 1,300 hours simply by automating campaign setup!  

Once launched, their Amazon Sponsored Display campaign delivered fantastic results. Dealer.com achieved a CPM (cost-per-thousand) impression on Amazon that was 65% cheaper than other channels.

Most importantly, utilizing a DAOS (like Fluency) enabled Dealer.com teams to seamlessly integrate localized Amazon campaigns into their broader media mix (including paid search, display channels, and YouTube) without compounding effort.

Fueling the hyperlocal future

The anticipated growth of new media channels offers forward-thinking advertisers a strategic edge. But if you’re going to ride these growing trends, you’ll need automation to scale effectively without burning out your valuable team members or your margins.  

Automating key ad ops workstreams will enable you to deliver highly targeted and relevant ads at pivotal moments in the customer journey. It’s the fastest, easiest, and most comprehensive way to achieve profitable scale.