CMO's latest roundtable brings marketing and media leaders together to talk about the state of marketing campaign management and how the pandemic, personalisation and channel proliferation are driving change
With all these demands, marketers inevitably have to compromise. A common compromise is brand consistency, positioning and messaging.
“In an organisation like ours, with large-scale digital advertising, CRM and social content channels, our internal design team deals with 200 active briefs with 20 new ones coming in daily,” McDermott pointed out. “There will never be enough time in day to get though the backlog. We are constantly looking for ways to improve. Truthfully, we need content faster than we can physically make it, to be truly optimised and ahead of the pack.”
The result is work too often undertaken in a tactical, responsive way. This, in turn, makes it harder to ensure creative and campaign work ladders up to an overarching brand value proposition. This has only been exacerbated by pandemic conditions.
“Every high-performing team wants to be able to smash through campaigns with messaging and creative that cuts through the clutter, fast
“It’s fair to say the team feel like this has come at the cost of longer-term strategic alignment,” Tucker said. “Our messaging has been clear and brand consistent, but it's been short-term focused. The team is looking forward to returning to 'normal' so they can continue to focus on delivering to our purpose and supporting the needs of our customers in the long term.”
Some attendees also perceived gaps in marketing automation and technology systems supporting processes and team ways of working. Remote working conditions only compounded challenges around connecting teams to achieve alignment and rapidly adapt and pivot marketing efforts.
“The hipages Covid response required tight coordination and a fresh approach to go-to-market practices. While we were able to move fast, it probably exposed the limitations in our martech stack to orchestrate and collaborate our efforts,” Tucker said. “Better access to shared assets, tighter approval practices and transparent campaign planning could all be improved. We got there in the end, but perhaps there may have been less blood, sweat and tears with the support of better systems.”
In some cases, disconnects prevented teams from orchestrating significant changes in the name of growth and innovation, or to bed down sustainable operating flows. As one attendee put it, the sacrifice became precision.
It’s equally clear less-than-optimal management of assets, from access to approvals, adds complexity and manual labour. With highly regulated industries such as financial services, there’s a high onus on compliance, which again factors into creative and content velocity and can create bottlenecks.
In response, several attendees are centralising assets and brand guidelines through digital asset management (DAM) platforms, as well as overhauling marketing resource management solutions and automation. Tyro, for example, is onboarding a new DAM in an attempt to free up hours of creative studio team’s time and ensure easier assets maintenance.
Vitaris said the ambition is to set up team members and its 300+ partners up for self-service. “This will be a great step forward and will free up our creative studio for more strategic and important things,” she said.
Of course, every cloud has a silver lining, and positive campaign orchestration outcomes have come out of Covid-19 necessities. For one, many marketers gained permission to remove red tape.
At one gym chain, the need for quick action enabled the marketing team to test dynamic creative in an out-of-home campaign that would usually take months to get approval for due to the potential for error. The personalised, geographic-based messaging proved overwhelmingly positive.
“That’s been one of the upsides of the crisis: We have been able to remove a lot of stakeholder approvals in the name of speed and agility, and by showing the board if they want a campaign in market quickly, they are going to have to let go a bit of the controls,” said the gym chain’s marketing leader.
For Greencross, innovating delivery options, ensuring product availability, launching telehealth services and shifting vet teams to contact-less service models proved critical decisions during the pandemic.
“We’re glad we pivoted so quickly because these propositions are becoming even more relevant for customers moving forward, and are now a source of competitive advantage,” McDermott said.
Other attendees also pointed to more responsive and personalised campaign mechanisms in play. And with this precedent achieved, all agree it’s important to keep it that way. This paves the way for further advancements to campaign orchestration.
“It seems the campaign planning critical path has been shortened quite a bit with many more quick turn arounds and same day pivots than ever before. There’s a muscle memory for this kind of work that didn’t exist previously,” McDermott said.
Having worked with thousands of brands from Toyota, Audi and Volkswagen to Scenic Tours, Elders and Quest Apartments, brand management platform provider, Sesimi, has had a front row seat on how different marketers have worked to adapt to modern marketing needs. Marketing budgets continue to be squeezed and businesses are looking to do more with less, Sesimi CEO, Andrew Baker, said. The result is both winners and losers looking for ways to campaign differently.
“For example, the travel sector will look to come back strong, but their teams will look very different with less resource than before,” Baker predicted. “The retail sector looks to secure protect online audience that was their lifeline during lockdowns. This will require different solutions to those needed in the bricks and mortar game.
“Remote and hybrid working has forced new ways of working and this alone has pushed tech and martech investment forward five or more years. Those not applying these trends to their campaigning will be left behind.”
This is where creative automation could provide potential to solve many issues hindering campaign workflows today. At its core, a creative automation platform is a toolkit for managing and orchestrating a high velocity of campaign work while still retaining brand consistency, integrity and compliance.
“With every increasing demand content across exploding channels, it doesn’t make sense to fulfil these demands in with a manual process. Creative automation gives a brand speed to market at scale with reduced error and significant product cost savings,” Baker explained.
Key elements of a creative automation platform include digital asset management and a place to store, share and organise all brand and marketing assets; smart, templated design systems allowing teams to roll campaigns across all channels and formats without the need for designers and developers; workflow management including sharing profile and approval processes; and integrations such as single sign-on and through to social media channels.
With compliance and oversight of approval key parts of the process for marketing teams, Baker said Sesimi has worked to build appropriate compliance, regulatory and creative checks and balances into its platform.
“Designers and developers don’t have error checking built in,” Baker said. “With any new technology there does have to be some optimisation of process. With creative automation, compliance, brand rules and error checking can all be built in.
“For example, you can lock a price point to a car image or specific terms and conditions to a rate offer. On top of that, there are approval workflows that allow brand to build their legal and compliance teams into the process.”
Sesimi’s offering has been of clear benefit to Quest Apartments. The apartment hotel group has 170 locations regionally, with more than 90 per cent operated under a franchise model.
Quest’s approach provides franchise owners with the strategic framework, tools and resources they need, including development of national marketing campaigns that can be brought to life at a local level. The commitment to developing the brand is led by a dedicated marketing team that has invested in systems and technology such as Sesimi.
The big benefit from creative automation has been managing the brand and rolling out marketing campaigns seamlessly at scale. “It provides a vast number of asset templates that franchisees can access instantly, wherever they are, to build content within guidelines,” Baker said.
As Quest chief marketing and digital officer, Jess Barrs, put it, partnering with Sesimi ensures his team manages the brand while rolling out campaigns seamlessly and in a cost-efficient way. A vast number of asset templates can be accessed instantly by franchisees to build content within brand guidelines for TV and social through to digital and outdoor media.
“If each of our business owners activate a particular campaign, our reach is going to be far greater and more impactful than we can create at a national level,” Barrs added.
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