How Last Week in AWS Saved $100,000 Per Year

The ads and publications go hand in hand.

Without the ads, we can’t do the publications and without the publications, we can’t do the ads.

It was being done by various people who either shouldn’t be doing it, didn’t have time to do it or didn’t have the expertise to understand what they were doing.

Newsletters and ads went out, but it was complex and included a lot of overhead.

The opportunities for human error were high.

The responsibilities needed to be transferred from a manager as quickly as possible because a manager’s time is not best spent handling administrative tasks.

We now have Sponsy. It’s all structured data that can’t just change its format willy nilly… it has helped us to enforce a number of our ad policies: ad length, format and things of that nature.

It gives us a home for our ad copy.

We pull that data into our custom publication tool inside of Retool which puts the ad copy in the correct place and assembles the publication and sends it out to the correct publication tool (usually ConvertKit).

Without these APIs, our ad copy publishing took four to six times as long!

At an ad copy level, we’re able to slice and dice these things and see into the data much more so than we could with Excel before.

I would have had to go through a Google sheet and do a bunch of dancing to find all those ads. And then I’d need to make sure that it was accurate.

In Sponsy, I can click three buttons and I can view every ad that the sponsor has ever had - including the copy.

It’s so fast. It’s so much simpler!

She said ‘What? That doesn’t make any sense. I’ve never seen that before. That’s certainly not the way it worked at my last place.’

And I said ‘Nope, that’s how it works here. You own the calendar, so you don’t need to ask me if any slots are available. You don’t have to be burdened by anyone else to make a sale. You can just go into Sponsy and see what’s available.

There’s no dependency on ops in order to make a sale.

Sales doesn’t have to ask me questions, they’re just looking in Sponsy because that’s their inventory. That’s where they go to ask, ‘all right, what can I sell you’? And that is incredibly powerful…

It’s not a CRM. It’s not an order management tool. But it’s a sales inventory management tool for us.

I call it playing detective when I try to understand the breadcrumb trail of what happened.

Before he began working with Sponsy, piecing together an understanding of what was promised and what was delivered could take between five to ten hours per case. It was a very manual effort, searching through emails, asking questions from sales and the sponsor to attempt to get to the bottom of the issue.

Now I have activity tracking. I know when an ad was made. I know when the copy was added. I know if it was moved. I understand the history of every single individual slot which is giving me tremendous insight.

Working with Sponsy has allowed us to shift our focus from managing operations tasks and all this unstructured data to a more standard approach that allows us to focus on maximizing revenue.

For the Director of Media, Sponsy enables him to concentrate his attention on growing the brand and its publications - rather than spending up to 15 hours a week on administrative tasks.

Prior to Sponsy, I could not delegate these responsibilities to someone else. There was too much tribal knowledge. Too many opportunities for human error. And there were no systems to support these processes.

Now, with Sponsy as it is, we have an assistant who I have delegated all ad copy and publication responsibilities to…

As a manager, I now have the time to do my actual job.