New Insights from leading ad operations platform XR Extreme Reach, which powers ad delivery and celebrity payments for 80% of the world’s top brands, are beginning to shed light on some of the biggest challenges facing marketers in the creative space: Budget approvals.
In fact, according to the study of 400+ marketers across full-service agencies, boutiques, and national brands, budget approvals stand out as a leading bottleneck and source of tension between CMOs and CFOs and that internal tete-a-tete often contributes to significant campaign delays.
The study also found that:
- Budget approvals: 46% of respondents cite this as the biggest campaign bottleneck.
- Creative alignment: 38% identified reaching consensus on concepts as a major hurdle.
- Asset management: 32% of all respondents, and a plurality of brand marketers, point to asset versioning as a top challenge.
- Legal reviews: 30% of all respondents say legal review and compliance often slow down or even kill great creative being seen by audiences.
“Budget friction between marketing and finance teams exists in every company in every industry,” says XR CMO Graham McKenna. “But in advertising, those tensions can have real consequences, delaying production, slowing campaign launches and limiting the impact of creative investments. When marketing and finance operate in sync, organizations can move faster, reduce costs and maximize the return on every advertising dollar. Despite what our industry believes, real ROI starts at production, not when you place media.”
The report also highlights the prevalence of creative scope reductions during campaign production, with 74% of marketers admitting to scaling back plans mid-production. Notably, 48% of full-service agencies report frequent scope cuts.
Since being founded in the 1990s as an advertising management and delivery company, XR has become irreplaceable as a critical creative advertising operations infrastructure, reconciling all aspects of commercial production (over $1.3 billion in annual celebrity payments in advertising), storing and managing more than 70M in creative assets, tracking more than 600K talent and artistic rights, and delivering more than 200B ad impressions to more than 45 countries annually!
This unique research comes on the heels of XR ONE™, a first-of-its-kind AI-powered advertising operations platform that gives brands and agencies a single place for marketers to manage every stage of the advertising lifecycle, reduce friction and drive ROI. At its core, XR ONE delivers marketers greater oversight into the ads they make, the money they spend, and how their creative investments are actually used across every media platform.
For the FULL report, click HERE.
About XR Extreme Reach
XR helps brands manage every aspect of their advertising creative, from production and payments to rights and delivery, so every ad lands exactly how and where it should. The XR platform powers millions of creative assets for the world’s leading brands, simplifying how marketers version, deliver, pay for and measure their campaigns while saving time and money. Headquartered in New York, XR also has offices in Europe, Asia and Australia. Learn more at www.xr.global.
