I took a break from writing to really look at what could help CMOs, and marketers. Out of all the newsletters I have written I feel the below is the single most important I have ever written.
Show this article to a organised experienced campaign manager and you may get a hug..Its technical, and a great deal of research has gone into it. In fact its something thats under our noses as marketers and very little of us know about it!
Media is powerful, but we also waste a lot of money in media. Let’s stop pretending AI is magically transforming media. It’s not. What’s really happening is that a lot of smart marketers are still stuck trying to fix broken campaigns after they’ve already wasted the money.
And here’s the kicker: According to Claravine and AdExchanger, brands lose up to 30% of digital media spend due to inconsistent tracking, audience duplication, and broken metadata.
Structural failure
Meanwhile, organisations that implement structured campaign taxonomies see 2–3x return on ad spend, simply by enabling cleaner decision-making with unified data.
That’s not optimisation. That’s transformation.
Here’s what that looks like in real life:
- One team launches Spring23_Sale on Meta and Q2_Promo_Social on Google. Same campaign. Zero visibility across platforms.
- A paid search team tags a campaign as ‘Prospecting’ while CRM tags the same effort as ‘Retargeting’. You can’t optimise what you mislabel.
- The data team spends weeks reconciling reports because platform naming conventions don’t align.
This isn’t poor optimisation. It’s a structural failure. And it’s costing brands real money. And its everywhere, I bet your teams are doing the above right now!
Every media platform speaks its own language
Google wants a structured taxonomy, Meta wants brackets and shorthand, your DSP has its own set of rules and somehow, your marketing team is meant to make sense of it all. They can’t, they need help.
What makes it worse? No one’s incentivised to fix it. People move fast. They launch campaigns under pressure. And no one’s getting promoted for clean naming conventions… until the CFO asks why performance dropped and no one can explain it.
This is where tools like Claravine and Maaten.ai matter. They bring control back to the setup process. Campaigns get structured naming. Unique IDs are embedded into every asset. Automations check taxonomy before anything goes live. It’s not glamorous but it works.
Structure, then spend
And when it’s done right, you don’t need new creative or fresh budgets to see improvement. You just stop the leakage:
- Duplicate audiences disappear
- Conversions get attributed accurately
- Media buyers make faster, smarter decisions
- Trading teams reclaim hours of manual cleanup
Clean campaign structure is the difference between working media and wasted media. Without it, you’re not buying efficiently you’re buying blind.
So here’s your Monday morning to-do: Pull your last big campaign. How many versions of the name exist across your stack? If it’s more than one, you’re already losing money.
Put this on the wall: ‘Does our naming help the CFO trace revenue?’ If not, fix it.
The real win in AI-powered marketing isn’t in better dashboards. It’s in better discipline at the start. Structure first. Then spend.
Fix your data!
Because right now, you’re not just burning budget. You’re paying platforms to hide the fire.
As co-founder and investor in Maaten, Shaune Jordaan is helping lead a bold new chapter in marketing technology. Maaten is a global-first AI platform that fixes one of the industry’s most fundamental problems: broken, inconsistent, and siloed campaign data. Built between Edinburgh and Cape Town, Maaten unifies metadata at the source across all platforms including audience targeting and creative-level media data.
