The client
A beauty and personal care company with 7 brands, sold through retailers, Amazon, and its own sites in 24 markets. It spends about $380M a year on paid media, with creative from 5 agencies, a creator agency, and an in-house studio. Reviews and approvals run in Adobe Workfront.
The engagement
Four workflows were in scope:
- Campaign launches: about 1,150 a year, about 31,000 placements in all.
- Creative and claims review: 18,400 ads a year, 7,600 of them with a product claim that regulatory and legal also review.
- Agency invoices: about 2,900 a year from 7 agencies, $476M billed.
- Reporting: a weekly report for each of the 7 brands, from 11 ad platforms and retailer sales data.
What the pilot found
Two forward-deployed engineers ran a 4-week pilot with marketing operations, brand, regulatory, and marketing finance. They studied a year of reviews, ad placements, and invoices, and read the review rules, the approved claims list, and the agency contracts. They also interviewed brand managers, reviewers, and agency producers. Creative review ran 14 steps with 6 rework loops. The written process described 8 steps and 2 loops.
- Reviews ran one after another. The rules say brand, regulatory, and legal review at the same time. In practice each waited for the one before, so an ad spent 5.1 of its 8 days waiting.
- Claims were checked from memory. 38% of the claims struck in review were already approved, and 52 ads went live with a claim proven only for a sister product.
- Usage rights were tracked on a spreadsheet. On one day in the pilot, 214 live ads used a model or a song past its license, and overrun fees cost $340K in the year.
Brand and legal costed a review at $105. Counting extra rounds, agency revisions, re-edits, and overrun fees, it cost $269 an ad. 1 in 4 campaigns went live late, most of them held in review.
The redesign
Creative and claims review was the focus. It now runs on 2 agents and keeps 3 human approvals: brand, regulatory, and legal. Before any reviewer sees an ad, an agent checks it against the brand rules, the approved product claims, the usage rights, the creator disclosure rules, and each retailer's rules. The three reviewers then work at the same time from one marked-up version. A second agent turns their comments into one change list for the agency.
Before14 steps, 6 loops
8 days
After6 steps, 3 human decisions, 2 loops
2.5 days
- Manual step
- Agent step
- Person decides
- Rework loop
Process steps
- Before
- 14
- After
- 6
- Change
- 57% fewer
Submission to final approval
- Before
- 8 days
- After
- 2.5 days
- Change
- 69% shorter
Review rounds per asset
- Before
- 3.4
- After
- 1.6
- Change
- 53% fewer
Approved in the first round
- Before
- 22%
- After
- 71%
- Change
- +49 pts
Exception loops
- Before
- 6
- After
- 2
- Change
- 67% fewer
Assets pulled after launch
- Before
- 61 a year
- After
- 8 a year
- Change
- 87% fewer
Cost per asset
- Before
- $269
- After
- $92
- Change
- 66% lower
| Before | After | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Process steps | 14 | 6 | 57% fewer |
| Submission to final approval | 8 days | 2.5 days | 69% shorter |
| Review rounds per asset | 3.4 | 1.6 | 53% fewer |
| Approved in the first round | 22% | 71% | +49 pts |
| Exception loops | 6 | 2 | 67% fewer |
| Assets pulled after launch | 61 a year | 8 a year | 87% fewer |
| Cost per asset | $269 | $92 | 66% lower |
4 weeks of discovery, then 4 weeks of deployment
- Weeks 1 to 4, discovery: the pilot above maps the process, interviews the team, and sets the baseline for every figure on this page.
- Week 5, build: the agents are built on the redesigned review, the approved claims, the brand rules, and the usage rights.
- Week 6, shadow: the agents check every new ad with read-only access, and their flags are compared with the reviewers' findings.
- Week 7, validate: the agents are tested on 600 past ads with known problems, and the heads of brand creative, regulatory, and marketing legal sign off.
- Week 8, deploy: live across all 7 brands ahead of the holiday campaigns, with every action logged.
- From week 8, train: the engineers stay with the brand managers, reviewers, and agency producers, and add each newly approved claim to the checks.
What the agent does
- When the agency uploads new ads, the agent checks every frame and caption against the approved product claims.
- It flags any claim without evidence, any retailer rule the copy breaks, and any creator license that ends too soon.
- It sends the marked-up files to brand, regulatory, and legal at once, with the evidence attached.
- Each reviewer decides. Once all approve, the files are released for the campaign with every decision on record.
Results
Agency invoices are now matched to what was ordered and delivered before finance approves them. The first check of the media agency's bills returned $7.4M for ads that under-delivered or were canceled. That one-time return is not counted below. Each morning, an agent also checks that every live ad lands on a working, in-stock product page, and a media buyer approves each pause it proposes.
| Source | Annual value | How |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity released | $3.1M | 39,700 hours at $78 fully loaded, 23,900 of them in creative review |
| Agency overbilling caught | $2.2M | Overbilled lines caught before payment rose from $0.5M to $2.7M a year on $476M billed: media above delivery, publisher credits not passed through, and commission on production |
| Revisions and late rework avoided | $1.4M | 3,800 fewer agency revision hours at $165, $460K less in re-edits and reshoots, and $300K less in usage overrun fees |
| Media kept off dead product pages | $1.4M | Spend on ads landing on broken or out-of-stock product pages down from 1.1% to 0.35% of $190M in paid social, search, and retail media |
| Total | $8.1M | Against the $107M a year it costs to run the workflows in scope: about 70 brand, review, and marketing operations staff at $78, plus $96M of agency fees and production, the $476M billed less $380M of paid media |
What stays with people
Agents never approve a claim, an ad, a launch, or a payment. Regulatory and legal approve every claim. Brand managers approve every launch and usage extension, and the creative director keeps the final word on brand. Marketing finance approves every agency invoice. Only people negotiate with agencies, creators, talent, and retailers.
