Why quality control keeps your campaign ticking
Cain&abelDDB's Stuart Moore, sings the praises of the creative world's unsung heroes, the quality control department. Here's how they give the work a competitive edge.
With the ad industry often so focused on the ‘idea’ or delivery of a brand campaign, the in-depth detail that goes into fine-tuning and checking the multitude of assets that are released into the world is often overlooked. Quality control (QC) can often be discarded as an afterthought; a tick-box to check before you send off to the client. But as soon as someone spots something wrong with your creative campaign – a missing frame here, a mistranslation there – it’s nearly always your QC team who will have saved your bacon.
So if the devil is so often in the detail, and with more and more bespoke content now being expected by brands to be delivered at speed and scale, it’s fair to say quality control has never been so important. But just what exactly is quality control, and what can we learn from diligent QC operators who spend their time finessing the finer details of an ad campaign?
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When thinking about a wider creative brand campaign, a useful analogy to think of is a giant clock: detailed, ornately designed and constantly moving. Having been crafted by industry experts working across multiple disciplines and teams, clients should trust QC to act as horologists – taking apart the final product and checking the detail; examining, polishing, and burnishing all the little wheels and cogs, ensuring everything is correctly set in place to allow the wider campaign to tick.
Like a horologist, for a QC operative, an eye for detail is essential. At creative production agency cain&abelDDB, our QC Team leads the way in setting an industry gold standard for quality control checks – nothing leaves the agency without first being checked by the team.
Those who think quality control may just involve a quick spellcheck, think again. QC operators can handle literally hundreds of files, while having to check (to name just a few): picture quality, text positioning, animation frame by frame, brand guidelines on fonts, logos and color, general audio quality, audio levels for intended platform, audio splits, suitability for adaptation, adherence to broadcast/delivery specs, and much, much more.
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This level of detail not only ensures campaigns meet the highest standards of accuracy and compliance but provides reassurance to clients that their creative messaging is delivered to the highest quality.
Having set up our QC department in August 2020, our team has helped deliver hundreds of campaigns and checked literally tens of thousands of files. In recent years, working closely with our partners at adam&eveDDB, our QC team has also helped ensure the success of numerous global travel, gaming, and technology brand campaigns, providing consistency for creatives that are showcased across the globe.
And with a standard English TV ad running 25 frames per second - with each individual frame needing to be checked - the QC role brings with it a level of skill most people can’t imagine.
Keeping close attention to every detail across every file version and frame, a role in QC requires intense concentration and stamina. Like a professional athlete, performing to the highest standard every day requires commitment and perseverance. Keeping on top of sleep, rest patterns, and whether you’re out the evening before, this commitment to high performance even extends to life outside of work – trust us, this is not a job you can do hungover, tired, or distracted.
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And, like all great sports teams, QC operators need backing and support. At cain&abelDDB we’re proud to have championed our team from the very start. Recognizing QC as an essential team has allowed us to establish a gold standard across the industry and we’re vocal about championing quality control as an invaluable agency skillset needed to deliver effective creative campaigns to clients.
Without QC assurance, your expertly planned campaign runs the risk of falling at the first hurdle. A missed mistake in delivery is not just expensive to fix, it can lead to delays, ridicule, and, at worst, a breakdown in trust with target audiences. A QC team is not just your parachute to ensure a campaign lands safely, it’s your backup chute for those inevitable last-minute changes and mistakes.
So, as more and more agencies compete to deliver that hard-working brand content at scale, it’s this in-house quality assurance that more and more clients should be demanding, not just to avoid the cost of outsourcing but to help build that trust with their agencies, as well as the audiences they target.
Brands should be searching for creative agencies they can rely on to consistently deliver game-changing ideas, as well as trusted quality assurance they can set their watch to, delivered by a QC team with the skillset to match.
PS. Yes, we got our QC team to proofread this article before it went out…