Late one afternoon, an alert came through showing ad delivery had dropped day over day. Not a small dip, enough to pull people in immediately.

Our support and network teams got on it right away and started digging. Within a few hours, we had it traced: a change on the retailer's side, a security setting update, was blocking our devices from delivering ads and radio. The path in had been closed.

We got on the phone with the retailer's team the same day, walked through what we'd found, and worked through the fix together. The setting was corrected, delivery came back, and the whole thing was resolved before it had any material impact on the campaign.

We'd rather be the ones catching that than explaining it after the fact. That's not a nice-to-have for us. It's the actual job. Anyone can send a report once the numbers are in. The harder part is looking closely enough, often enough, that you're the one bringing the bad news, and the fix, before it becomes a bigger problem.

Alignment isn't a kickoff formality. It's the job.

Most retail media relationships treat KPI alignment like a box to tick before the real work starts. Get the sign-off, move on to optimization. I'd argue that's backward. The alignment conversation is the real work, because everything downstream depends on it.

You cannot optimize toward a goal nobody agreed on. You cannot have an honest conversation about performance halfway through a campaign if the retailer thinks you're chasing dwell time and the brand thinks you're chasing basket size. And you definitely cannot walk into a renewal conversation with confidence if the last three months were spent quietly managing three different definitions of success at once.

This is where it actually matters that the measurement behind the campaign is tied to something concrete. At QSIC, that means connecting what played in-store to actual point-of-sale transaction data, not a proxy metric dressed up as proof. When the KPI conversation happens against that kind of measurement, it stops being a negotiation and starts being a shared target. Everyone can see the same number. That's what makes early alignment possible in the first place, not a nicer slide deck, a metric that means the same thing to everyone in the room.

Being an extension of the team, not a vendor checking in

Here's the part that doesn't show up in a case study: retention doesn't come from the quarterly business review. It comes from the fifty small check-ins before it.

My team's job isn't to check in on a campaign. It's to be embedded in it, the way an internal team member would be. That means being in the client's Slack channel, not just the shared inbox. It means noticing a dip in performance before the client has to ask why. It means showing up to a working session with an answer already half-drafted, not a request for more time.

That only works if you're actually looking at the data continuously, not compiling it once a month for a report. Proof of Play reporting gives my team visibility into what's happening on the floor day to day, which means we catch drift while there's still time to do something about it, instead of explaining it after the fact. The difference between a vendor and a partner is almost entirely a difference in when you notice the problem.

Optimization is the whole campaign, not the ending

Back to that story above. Once we'd locked in a single KPI everyone believed in, the actual work of running it got a lot more useful. We could look at scheduling data, when the store was busiest, when it wasn't, and make real adjustments instead of guessing. We could tell the client what was working two weeks in in specific terms, not "engagement is trending positively," but a plain answer to the question they actually cared about.

By the time we got to the QBR, there was nothing left to defend. The number everyone had agreed on at the start was the number we were reporting on at the end. That's not a coincidence. That's what happens when alignment comes first and optimization runs the whole way through, instead of being something you do at the end when the report is due.

Client success isn't a title

I think a lot of people hear "client success" and picture someone smoothing things over after they've gone wrong. I'd rather define it the other way. Client success is showing up early enough, and consistently enough, that there's rarely anything to smooth over.

That's the job. Not the big meeting. The quick check in on a random Tuesday.