Case study: what happens when a campaign comes up short

Why this case study exists

Most agency case studies describe campaigns that went perfectly. This one describes a campaign that did not, because that is where you actually learn what a supplier is like.

Every offline campaign of any size has shortfall in it somewhere — a location missed, a vendor who over-reports, images that turn out to be unusable. The question is not whether it happens. It is whether anybody notices, and whether the client is told.

The numbers

On one hospital-group campaign, 500 units were ordered. The vendor returned 499 photographs — which, on the face of it, looks like a campaign delivered in full.

It was not. When the images were checked one by one:

• 66 were duplicates — the same unit photographed twice
• 26 were too blurred to identify the unit
• 3 carried no location number and could not be tied to a site

That left 404 usable, verifiable units against an order of 500. A shortfall of nearly a hundred, inside a submission that arrived looking complete.

What happened next

The gap was recorded against the named vendor and chased. On a separate campaign for a multi-city eye-care group, thirteen outstanding auto tops in one city were carried forward and followed up across fifteen working days until they closed.

Neither shortfall was written off, and neither was hidden inside a total.

What this means for a client

If your proof is a folder of photographs, you have no idea what you received. Counting is what turns photographs into evidence:

• Counted against the order, not against what the vendor chose to send
• Duplicates removed — the single most common way a count is inflated
• Unusable images rejected, not padded into the total
• Shortfall named, owned by a vendor, and chased until it closes

We would rather tell you 404 and mean it than tell you 499 and be wrong. A number you can defend to your own management is worth more than a flattering one.

The honest version of our promise

We do not claim every campaign lands at a hundred per cent — nobody’s does. What we do is photograph every unit we install, count those photographs against your order, reconcile them with the vendor, and give you the result including anything that came up short.

Client names withheld. Figures are drawn from our own operational records.

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