The Spec Sheet, a tool for media agencies and brands to help create, share, and revise ad spec sheets and avoid design problems, has launched its first ad campaign by highlighting a fail.
Founded by Sharon Gray and Jesse McLallen in 2022, The Spec Sheet is a platform that is designed to be a ‘one stop shop for ad specs’.
The platform’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.
“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,” Gray said.
McLallen explained: “Digging deeper, Sharon and I discovered there was poor communication across the board, between media owners, media agencies, and creative agencies.
“So we sought to create The Spec Sheet as a tool that would bring everyone on to the one page – literally the one webpage. With less errors in specs being shared, we could save millions of dollars in leakage across the industry.”
The platform works as a reference point for the industry, where 80,000+ unique ad specs from over 250+ media owners (along with Material Instructions) are stored and kept up-to-date. This is done is via APIs that 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,” McLallen said.
“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 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.
Gray added: “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.”