Marketing Triumph in The Age of Agility
April 29, 2021
Agility means to move quickly and easily. It’s the “and easily” part that the industry must confront. The keys to creative and media success today bear no resemblance to the past. But the “messy middle” of execution is stuck in it and holding brands back.
Turning a blind eye to the mundane, myriad steps of campaign activation has hardly been intentional but it will bring down the most brilliant brand creative and most well-architected media strategy. The good news is that, like tackling a hard puzzle, this last piece is the easiest.
This sounds simplistic and obvious but all teams across all regions should run this executional relay race inside one global, cloud-based end-to-end workflow platform.
To be clear, this refers to all the methodical steps related to creative asset management, asset preparation, talent and rights management, traffic, clearance, delivery, and ad serving. Treat these as point solutions at your own peril. All these functions are interrelated and only unified technology can knit everything together to enable flawless execution and mitigate risk.
Marketers want creative agencies focused on their consumer, their brand and great creative. They want their media agencies focused on the crazy quilt of channels that can deliver the video content to the best prospects at scale. Nobody wants complexity and logistics to be a bottleneck, a big line item for expenses, or a reason for unexpected talent and rights penalties.
The incredibly complicated, interrelated workflow should be overseen by experts in one unified platform that does nothing else but also does all of it.
It gets better. When the people responsible for operational logistics come together in one coordinated and integrated workflow, the end-benefit for brands does not stop with increased speed, productivity and control of assets. The seamless workflow itself reveals data and insights for optimizing campaigns.
Agility is perhaps the most powerful attribute of successful marketers today and into the future. Moving quickly must be paired with moving easily. Only then can teams shepherd amazing brand stories through the intricate supply chain all the way downstream to all screens everywhere according to plan.
Melinda McLaughlin is CMO at Extreme Reach.
The views and opinions expressed in Marketing Maestros are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.