The campaign is live, but is it the one you approved?
Opinion
The CEO of adnomaly explains why automated advertising needs continuous governance.
The transparency debate in advertising tends to look outwards. We question, for example, the power of walled gardens and ask whether platforms give us enough data. Those are fair concerns, but I think media organisations have overlooked a more immediate one: can you clearly explain what’s happening inside your own live campaigns?
When the live setup drifts away from the plan
A campaign can be live and spending money while its team remains unsure who is in control. When the budget drifts from the plan, the first question is usually, “What changed?” The next is “Who made that change, and when?”
Without a systematic record, there’s no way of tracing changes, so finding the answer can take hours, and sometimes it never comes. Proper governance would make those changes visible, keep agreed standards clear, and give each campaign an identifiable owner.
It isn’t hard to see why control has become more difficult. Modern media operations rely on structures that barely existed a few years ago.
A campaign may run across several platforms and span several markets. Some people may be on internal teams, while others work for external partners. Any one of those factors can be managed effectively. Put them together, though, and the operation becomes much harder to oversee.
This is where operational visibility comes in. It means being able to identify every active setup at any time, revealing the latest change and who made it. Ultimately, it should confirm whether the campaign still matches the approved configuration – and budget.
Small changes can leave big holes in the data
Governance has to extend beyond approval processes and briefing documents. A launch sign-off can become outdated as the campaign evolves. So teams need ongoing proof that active setups still meet their standards, plus notifications when a platform makes an automatic change.
The problem is, deviations rarely announce themselves. For example, audience logic may alter in the background, duplicating a campaign can break the naming convention that supports a reporting integration, or URL parameters may stop matching between platforms.
Each deviation can look trivial, and none may be immediately obvious, but once they accumulate, teams have good reason to doubt the data guiding their decisions.
Now apply that risk across 20 markets. This is the reality for centralised media hubs and international organisations today. Experience and attention can’t preserve operational standards at that scale. As automation handles more work, the gap widens between the intended setup and the activity inside the platforms.
QA can’t go home when the campaign goes live
Many organisations still treat quality assurance (QA) as a gate before launch. But setups keep evolving after they go live, often without a conscious decision or a clear handover, so a single sign-off guarantees very little.
The information needed to check that setup is often fragmented.
The briefing may sit in one tool, while the media plan lives in another. Platform data can be separated from the review process, and a different team may own it.
Every handover makes the complete picture harder to see. As a campaign grows, that picture becomes less complete, and the consequences of a deviation grow.
Automation is essential for scaling digital advertising, but it also scales mistakes. One incorrect setup will probably attract attention eventually, but the same faulty rule can replicate across a hundred campaigns before anyone questions it.
Having managed campaigns myself, I know this isn’t about careless people – teams work quickly in systems that are too complex for reliable manual oversight. So controls must run at the same pace as campaigns, and review must be continuous rather than occasional. Rapid activation remains important, as does high scalability, but controls must be automated and work across platforms.
Organisations that take control seriously build governance into their operational infrastructure. They review active setups continuously and identify deviations before they become expensive problems.
Their teams can work with confidence because complexity doesn’t have to mean uncertainty. Automation can amplify one small deviation across an entire operation unless dependable guardrails are in place, so this approach is crucial for reliable scaling.
For me, transparency begins at home. Before a media organisation questions the platforms and walled gardens outside, it should be able to answer a plainer question about its own operations: the campaign is live, but is it the one you approved?
Continuous governance is what lets a team answer that at any moment, rather than trusting that a launch sign-off still holds weeks later. When those controls become part of the everyday infrastructure, teams can scale safely and spend more time on the work that genuinely improves performance.
Max von Weber is the co-founder and CEO of adnomaly