How to track multiple creative flights with historical data

In some cases, an online media campaign can have multiple creatives running on the same flight. A typical example would be a standard teaser + revealer campaign which would have different creatives for each stage but not necessarily two distinct flights within the same campaign. It is in this context tracking historical timelines and performance of each individual creative becomes critical and this article explains how such a campaign can be setup on the system.

Brand Central has a module called ‘Flight Bundling’ which caters for combining multiple creative flights to one or more bundles and it is this module which we will be using to achieve our goal.

The basic idea here is to split flights within the media plan according to the necessary weightage of the creative executions and then to bundle these flights up so that eventually only a single launch code is provided to the publisher with complete control over creative rotation lying within Brand Central

How to setup the flight bundles?

Agency media planners and traffickers should follow this process:

• Login to Brand Central
• Select agency module “Media Planning”
• Highlight campaign and click on button to open Quick Flighting module where all media planning is being done
  • Create the required number of flights corresponding to the number of creative executions within the same publisher and assure that the creative size and language e.g. English 468×60 is the same. Make sure that the flight status is set to ‘online’
  • Mark the flights that you would like to combine to a new bundle by clicking the checkboxes at the beginning of the flight row
  • Use the ‘Add to flight bundle button’ . Please note that you need to have at least one flight selected, and you cannot add flights from multiple publishers or different creative to a new bundle.
  • Once all the required flights have been bundled, select the ones which are scheduled to go live at a later date and set their flight status as paused
  • If you would like to add more flights to the same bundle at a later stage, mark at least one flight from the existing bundle and others and then follow the same procedure. New flights in the bundle are marked with a color automatically.
  • At some point during the media planning stage, use the creative module and upload and link multiple (different) creative to each flights in the bundle

The following screenshot taken at the start of the campaign shows the Quick Flighting module with the ad bundle option for a sample campaign with different creatives for each month.

Once the campaign is live and running, change the status of flights at the appropriate timelines to pause a certain creative and to put the next one live through the Media Planning module. This way we can make any number of creative changes without having to send a separate launch code to the publisher every time this is done.

The following screenshot taken at the beginning of the next month shows the reporting module with the flight statistics for the campaign so far.