The final months of the year have long been recognised as the busiest retail period in Europe – becoming even more important in the past decade, with the adoption of sales events from elsewhere in the world. Black Friday, in particular, found a way to make it out of North America to become one of the most important sales events globally.
In 2023, UK consumers alone spent an estimated £13.3 billion, up 7.3% year-on-year, according to Mintel.
In the lead up to Black Friday, and across the subsequent weekend into Cyber Monday, marketers are tasked with pushing large sums of money into their advertising efforts to capitalise on this ever-increasing amount being spent by consumers. This puts a lot of pressure on agencies and brands to limit media wastage and avoid making costly errors in their media buying – or they could be faced with a rather hefty blackhole in their finances.
Each year, overspending is estimated to cost the industry $23 billion, or 4.5% of digital ad spend. Around a period like Black Friday, when media planners and buyers are often having to act quickly to get campaigns live, there is huge potential for a large amount of that overspending to occur. It could be as simple as adding an extra zero on to the campaign budget, or accidentally launching a campaign in Ukraine instead of the UK.
But how big of an issue is human error in digital advertising? And what can be done to prevent it from happening?
NDA partnered with MiQ-owned adtech company Grasp to produce a report around the human error problem and share solutions for how these mistakes can be avoided. We spoke to media buying experts to find out first-hand just how big of a problem this is across the industry, and explore the measures that should be in place to prevent it from ever happening.
