One pacing system for every client campaign
A mid-size media and marketing agency orchestrates client advertising campaigns in Airtable: tactic-level spend across channels, monthly budgets with rollover logic, vendor fee charts, and automated pacing reminders. Media strategists and account teams share a single source of truth that eliminates duplicate spreadsheet updates and keeps spend accuracy consistent across more than 100 users.
The problem
Media strategists and account teams tracked tactic-level spend, monthly budgets, and vendor fees across multiple spreadsheets that never quite matched. Every pacing check meant reconciling numbers by hand across channels like Amazon DSP and PPC before anyone could tell a client where a campaign actually stood.
Budget change logs lived in separate files from the numbers they explained, and month-over-month reconciliation with agency reports was a manual exercise repeated for every client account. There was no single place to see spend accuracy across the full client roster.
What they built
Marketing, Media Planning, Media Buying, and Finance teams built a shared Airtable base that tracks tactic-level spend, monthly budgets with rollover logic, vendor and fee charts, and a running budget change log, all linked to the campaigns they belong to.
Automations fire pacing reminders on a schedule, and month-over-month reconciliation against agency reports happens against the same linked records rather than a fresh export. Contract generation flows out to DocuSign, and client-facing detail exports to Google Sheets when needed.
The outcome
Spend accuracy improved because every team enters numbers once and everyone downstream reads from the same record. Duplicate spreadsheet updates across clients stopped being part of the weekly routine.
Media strategists get real-time pacing visibility for optimization instead of a lagging snapshot, and the account teams have one place to point to when a client asks how a campaign is tracking.
Inside the solution
Media Campaign Budget Management and Pacing
Marketing & Campaign Operations
- Campaign pacing and optimization tracking
- Monthly budget planning and rollover logic
- Vendor and fee management
- Budget change logs and reconciliation
- Automated pacing reminders
- Duplicate updates across multiple spreadsheets
- Manual pacing and reconciliation workflows
- Lack of consolidated spend visibility
- Time-consuming budget tracking across clients
- Consolidated reporting and spend accuracy
- Reduced manual effort via automations
- Real-time pacing visibility for optimization
- Consolidated client budget truth across accounts
- Marketing
- Media Planning
- Strategy
- Media Buying
- Finance
- Google Sheets
- DocuSign
Media campaign budget management and pacing
Track every client campaign's tactic-level spend, monthly budgets with rollover, vendor fee charts, and a running change log in one linked base with real-time pacing rollups. Automations flag reconciliation discrepancies, route vendor contracts, and email a weekly pacing digest, while AI fields draft pacing summaries, reconciliation briefs, and client-ready change notes.
From scattered spreadsheets to one pacing system
Copy the templates
Link spend to campaigns
Automate the reminders
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Each tactic is a linked record with its own spend, budget, and channel type, so the campaign record rolls up totals across channels without anyone reconciling exports by hand.
A single linked base. Media strategists and account teams read and write from the same records, so a number entered once by media buying is the same number finance sees in reconciliation.
Automations run on a schedule and flag campaigns approaching budget thresholds, so pacing checks happen proactively instead of during a manual monthly review.
Yes. Contract workflows route through DocuSign from the same base, and client-facing exports go to Google Sheets when a client needs a file rather than a live view.
Not for the pacing workflow itself. The account is separately evaluating AI fields for related work like sentiment analysis on campaign feedback, and this structured spend data is the kind of foundation that AI work would build on.