AdTech start-up The Spec Sheet has highlighted the pitfalls often involved in creating, sharing, and revising ad spec sheets in its first-ever ad campaign.
Launched in 2022, The Spec Sheet is a digital platform co-founded in Australia by Sharon Gray and Jesse McLallen, designed as your ‘one stop shop for ad specs’. “As a digital producer, I found myself being constantly delivered incorrect specs from media agencies, and being lost in drip-fed revisions to spec sheets. It was incredibly frustrating, and the process had a lot of room for error,” said Gray.
The Spec Sheet’s first ad campaign demonstrates one of these errors on the big screen – DOOH ads dispatched to the wrong size – to make a point of the problem The Spec Sheet was set up to solve.
“Digging deeper, Sharon and I discovered there was poor communication across the board, between media owners, media agencies, and creative agencies,” said McLallen.
“So we sought to create The Spec Sheet as a tool that would bring everyone on to the one page – literally the one webpage. For brands, this process results in far fewer errors in the specs being shared, which saves millions of dollars in leakage across the industry.”
The platform works as the industry’s ultimate reference point, where 80,000+ unique ad specs from over 250+ media owners (along with Material Instructions) are stored and kept up-to-date. One way this is done is via APIs that cleverly integrate with media owners’ booking systems.
“The end result is a much simpler process – media agencies simply select and add the placements they want in their campaign, then share that live sheet with agency partners to produce against,” said McLallen.
The incorrectly dispatched ad campaign has been very correctly dispatched to DOOH units in the vicinity of key media agencies around Sydney and Melbourne to coincide with a month-free offer.
“We want to tell brands and media agencies that, as the people in the process who can affect change, there’s now a much easier way to make spec sheets than the fail-prone Excel files and endless email chains of yesteryear,” said Gray.
