Hi Workfront Community, Heads up that this is a lengthy post, but I'm hoping to reach people at Workfront and in the community about a process and job responsibility that is seemingly impossible to implement into Workfront. So, here's the situation:
My teammate is struggling to find a solution and process improvement for one of her job responsibilities that we call "ad coordination." She works with two of our sales teams to collect digital advertising materials from the companies they sell ad space to, and she deploys the ads to their designated locations including websites and digital newsletters - The team also produces three publications each year that include print ads that she collects as well. On the surface, the role and process sound simple, but I covered for her while she was on maternity leave and I can tell you it's not simple at all. The sales team is currently using an excel spreadsheet to track their advertising inventory (monthly) and the spreadsheet is inconsistently formatted, ugly to look at, such a time suck to update and not intuitive for someone who may need to cover for her!! By the time she organizes all the email chains from sales and marketing, pulls out the information that concerns her or is a priority, and updates the spreadsheet, she has to rush to deploy, inventory has likely changed in one way or another, new artwork keeps coming in and so on. Not to mention the time she has left for her other job responsibilities is slim to none. Responsibilities of the Ad Coordinator
Collect advertising contracts from sales and any materials sent with signed contracts.
Review the contracts
add the details of each contract to the spreadsheet: Advertiser, locations they are running which include: website & newsletters: there's a daily newsletter and 2 weekly newsletters, plus special edition newsletters leading up to events throughout the year
Determine dates & duration per location, position, include a screenshot of the ad once received by the advertiser, the URL it points to, campaign notes and status updates:
Did I contact the advertiser to collect their materials?
Did they respond? Have they sent their materials?
Did I set up the ad in OAS for deployment?
Is the contact person MIA?
Where it gets tricky is that no contract is created equal when it comes to the details and there are a lot of details that are left to the ad coordinator to figure out.
Where does the advertiser run? (location - there are multiple)
How long do they run? (duration - could be different per location)
How many ads do they run? (could run a different creative in each location)
How many times do they change their ad? (per location - i.e. sometimes, they want to change their ad daily in the newsletter, or they want to rotate 4 ads on our website and split the impressions based on a percentage / weight)
So, staying organized and not letting anything slip through the cracks is a huge challenge. Recently, she found the tool Monday and it's exactly what we've been looking for, at least for this particular job responsibility and process since I got my hand in it back in 2014. (she took it over toward the end of 2017)
As much as I LOVE Workfront, it falls short of what we need for the ad coordination process. Monday provides the perfect combination of the at-a-glance visual for the sales teams, the detailed status updates and notes for the ad coordinator, the communication means for the two sides to talk to each other quickly and the navigation is intuitive and easy. (screenshots attached) All that said, we just found out that Monday wasn't approved for us to use. So, I'm curious...
Has anyone in the community had a similar process that they have successfully brought into the Workfront fold? We've tried, but it hasn't worked because it's too manual, poor visibility, too many workarounds - just as much work as the spreadsheet.
Is there anyone at Workfront who would be willing to talk through some of this with us? My preference will always be to use Workfront, but it's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole with this process, at least as far as I can tell. If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, or time to talk with us, we would really appreciate it!
Thanks for reading! Syd and Kathleen Sydney Peterson Diversified Communications, Inc.
