Unifying media, audience, and creative has long been an aspirational goal in marketing. But at POSSIBLE 2025, Oz Etzioni (Clinch) and Maeve Reddicliffe (The Trade Desk) made a sharper case: it’s no longer a future state: it’s a performance imperative.

Their joint session, “Revolutionizing the Campaign Lifecycle,” explored how data silos, disconnected workflows, and channel-based planning still hold many brands back and what can happen when creative, audience, and media finally operate from the same playbook.

Despite advances in AI, measurement, and omnichannel tooling, Etzioni and Reddicliffe noted that most organizations still run what they call a "multi-channel illusion", different teams optimizing in parallel, without any true integration across platforms or messaging.

Media teams chase CPMs. Creative teams build for specs. Audience targeting lives in a separate tool altogether. The result is fragmentation: duplicated effort, inefficiency, and campaigns that miss the chance to learn and evolve mid-flight.

To move forward, they argued, brands need a connected system, one where data flows freely across the lifecycle, creative is informed by media strategy, and every channel learns from the others.

One of the session’s central insights was the difference between running multi-channel vs omnichannel campaigns. In multi-channel models, teams manage silos. In omnichannel environments, insights are shared, creative is modular, and optimization happens continuously.

By integrating workflows from planning through trafficking to measurement, teams can reduce the "bottleneck ping-pong" effect where improvements in one area create delays or manual work in another. A change to the creative shouldn’t break the media plan. A new audience segment shouldn’t mean weeks of new asset creation.

The Clinch team showcased how modern campaign frameworks can shift from fixed workstreams to dynamic systems, ones that ingest media plans, generate corresponding creative strategies, and automate deployment without losing control.

Automation was a recurring theme, but not in the abstract. The speakers focused on workflow automation across the full lifecycle, not just optimizing media or scaling creative, but eliminating the friction between the two.

They highlighted a real-world case involving a Fortune 500 CPG brand. By automating video versioning, trafficking, media syncing, and real-time creative optimization, the team drove both time savings and performance improvements, reducing production drag while lifting conversions.

The takeaway was clear: automating one piece of the lifecycle isn't enough. True efficiency only emerges when the entire campaign stack is connected, from media spreadsheets to creative build logic.

Reddicliffe also highlighted how The Trade Desk is working to better connect creative outcomes to sales, especially in complex environments like CPG or retail, where the customer journey often ends offline.

Through its retail marketplace and closed-loop integrations, the company is enabling advertisers to see which creatives actually drive in-store purchases. That data then informs future creative briefs, spend allocation, and channel planning, creating a virtuous cycle of learning and reinvestment.

The session wrapped with a clear framework for marketers looking to modernize their campaign lifecycle:

Campaigns, they argued, aren’t just execution engines. They’re intelligence systems and only work when the pieces talk to each other.

Independently Created. Not affiliated with POSSIBLE.

ClickZ is a ClickZ Media publication in the Events division