Adtech startup, The Spec Sheet, has launched its inaugural ad campaign, debuting across out-of-home channels.

The Spec Sheet, a tool designed to assist media agencies and brands in avoiding the common pitfalls of creating, sharing, and revising ad spec sheets, was co-founded by Sharon Gray and Jesse McLallen in Australia in 2022. The startup's first campaign highlights a common industry problem that The Spec Sheet aims to solve - incorrectly dispatched DOOH ads due to wrong size specifications.

"As a digital producer, I found myself being constantly delivered incorrect specs from media agencies, and being lost in drip-fed revisions to spec sheets. It was incredibly frustrating and the process had a lot of room for error," says Gray.

McLallen adds, "Digging deeper, Sharon and I discovered there was poor communication across the board, between media owners, media agencies, and creative agencies. So we sought to create The Spec Sheet as a tool that would bring everyone on to the one page – literally the one webpage. With less errors in specs being shared, we could save millions of dollars in leakage across the industry."

The Spec Sheet platform serves as a reference point for the industry, storing over 80,000 unique ad specs from more than 250 media owners, along with Material Instructions. It integrates with media owners’ booking systems via APIs.

"The end result is a much simpler process – media agencies simply select and add the placements they want in their campaign, then share that live sheet with agency partners to produce against," McLallen explains.“For brands, this process results in far fewer errors in the specs being shared, which saves millions of dollars in leakage across the industry.”

The incorrectly dispatched ad campaign has been sent to DOOH units in the vicinity of key media agencies around Sydney and Melbourne, coinciding with a month's free offer. Media agencies interested can sign up for a free month’s trial at thespecsheet.com.

“We want to tell brands and media agencies that, as the people in the process who can affect change, there’s now a much easier way to make spec sheets than the fail-prone Excel files and endless email chains of yesteryear,” Gray concludes.