For the past few years, I was at Facebook building partnerships with large Financial Services companies - mainly to drive product adoption and revenue through Facebook advertising. In a distinctly frustrating experience, we were working with Bankor Bank (changed actually brand name) to launch a second version of their "Pocketbook Stories2" campaign, focused on improving customer loyalty while also drive net new acquisition.

We received an initial campaign brief from Bankor, and set up a meeting to understand their goals in more depth. During the meeting, two red flags jumped out at me:

The image above outlines the relationships between the three parties involved. Both Facebook and the creative agency were working in service of the client, and each other as a necessity. Furthermore, the holy grail for creative agencies is to be published in AdWeek or any national publication…meaning their incentives are to create big beautiful campaigns - whether or not they "work". Facebook is incentivized to run campaigns that work, thus driving follow on revenue, and not necessarily focused on getting published.

Independently, Facebook and the agent in this case actually do quite a bit of ‘agile-like’ development. Testing materials & deliverables by reviewing with clients & talking with customers happened quickly, but in parallel. By the time the full-party meeting came around, which was about a week before launch, I (FB) had developed a cohesive delivery and measurement, and the agency had their fully developed creative approach ready. Yet these two pieces were not aligned - there had only been one learning & feedback cycle with no time left for serious iteration…a true waterfall-like failure trap. Since delivery depends on the type of creative built, and the measurement structures the client wanted depend on the message in the creative, our parallel path was doomed from the start.

Ultimately, when the three teams finally sat in the room together, all our concerns were realized:

We had about a week to go at this point, and the client decided to say ‘lets change the delivery structure a little bit, and launch despite all the issues.’ We were unable to measure the campaign to prove success, which is ultimately a failure to clients’ management. At the end of the day, we didn’t deliver provable success metrics, and as the media delivery medium - Facebook was the one to suffer.

As I alluded to earlier, there were red-flags early on in this specific campaign that I should have treated more seriously.

Segregated Creative development: This should never happen. Developing creative blind of what a deliver or measurement structure is will very rarely result in a positive outcome. Knowing the politics involved, I refrained from pushed too hard in order to avoid a much longer process involving approvals and potentially pushing of the campaign, or an awkward scenario with the creative agency. There were a couple of strategies that could have worked to help curb some of the issues that arise in these political / incentive defined scenarios, however.

Parallel learning paths: I had not appreciated the simplicity of this issue until I drew the above diagrams. While we each learned in quick cycles, the resulting structure was essentially a water-fall learning process. Instituting required quick full party check-ins multiple times throughout the development process would have allowed all parties to work in parallel while also being well informed through shorter (and multiple) learning cycles. If, for example, we had had three full-team meetings instead of one, the quality of the creative and the level of alignment could have tripled. I could have even attempted to implement this without the client’s strict approval: risk pissing the client off and send calendar invites to my own full team meetings in order to facilitate shorter & more learning cycles.

Incentives & other forces: Just like the creative agency was incentivized to create gorgeous creative for the cover of ad-week, I was incentivized to deliver a campaign that worked in favor of the partnership. I was, however, also incentivized to hit my sales quote. Without this campaign, I would have had to wave goodbye to a significant portion of my paycheck. I cannot offer a solution to decisions based on financial-incentives, but implementing more lean-like approaches, and increasing the volume of learning cycles in this type of situation would likely lower the probability that I would have to make such a decision in the first place.

Combatting traditional processes: A majority of the reasons I, or others, wouldn’t push too hard on clients to change their process here is due to: fear of losing $$, fear of pissing off a client, and fear of missing personal goals. Facebook, being a progressive tech giant, could learn from these issues prevent their employees from pushing client to a better process. Management support via acceptance of short term failure would positively impact peoples desire to attempt a change.

Such process & incentive driven failures have significant revenue implications. The example above resulted in a large campaign being implemented at a sub-par level, lessening further follow-on revenue. Other scenarios result in a lost campaign or months of delays, amounting to multiple 7-figure of revenue loss. If you have any advice, stories, or reflections on how best to manage relationships with slow moving traditional media organizations, please reach out with your thoughts!