operational assessment

Effective management assessment brings all the strategic and creative thinking to fruition.

This is an essential part of the creative process; a good idea that is poorly executed will have diminished effectiveness.

TrinityP3: More brains, less brawn. Most organisations want lots of thinking and lean execution, but actually end up with management-heavy, musclebound model that is low on thought and slow to act. Why? They won’t pay for the thinking because it isn’t immediately quantifiable, but will pay at the management level because it is (however upsetting the outcomes may be). Then they consider they’re being ripped off somewhere in the management stage and forget all about how little they paid for the thinking (strategic) stage. TrinityP3 inverts this approach by boosting spend on the brains (strategic thinking) to ensure process and management are fully aligned with the organisational strategy and, consequently, outcomes. The TrinityP3 approach means your initiatives get the optimum mix of brains and brawn.

TrinityP3’s Operational Assessment services include:

  1. Cost Benchmarking
  2. Media Strategy & Planning Assessment
  3. Media Buying Benchmarking
  4. Process Reviews
  5. Evalu8ing: Collaboration & Relationship Evaluation
  6. Green Assessments
  7. Production Assessment Reports

1. Cost Benchmarking

Monitor the costs of your marketing activity against industry benchmarks to ensure maximum value.

What level of media discount do you achieve? What level of added value? And is this what you should expect? What about your finished art costs? Or your packaging design? What should you be paying your PR company?

There are many costs associated with marketing communications, from research to advertising and packaging to PR. Yet developing a view of what is fair and reasonable is difficult with most marketers only having experience with their current roster and perhaps any previous companies they may have worked. Being able to take a broad industry view and apply this to specific situations allows you to compare like for like to see if you are getting maximum value.

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2. Media Strategy & Planning Assessment

Good Buying is no longer enough. For many large clients it is now a table stake. With media market fragmentation and tremendous growth in the options available, the capacity to get things wrong in the planning area has increased enormously. The wrong environment will never be the right price. So do you have a system of performance measurement that allows planning performance to be refined and improved?

This assessment is designed to provide advertisers and marketers with a transparent mechanism to measure planning performance that is versatile enough to accommodate the individual needs and vagaries of each campaign yet provide consistency of measurement across time. Recieve numeric scores for each campaign that can be collated and tracked across time to determine overall media agency planning performance versus targets. And recognise the constraints of the framework within which the media agency is required to operate and analyse the effect of these constraints on performance achieved.

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3. Media Buying Benchmarking

As a major media advertiser, do you constantly monitor and manage the relative efficacy or the current media negotiating and buying process? Do you know enough about best practice benchmarks for negotiating strategy and buying rates. And how do you measure and monitor agency performance?

This process will produce a definitive analysis of the media negotiating strategies and relative rate base provided to you by your media buying agency, including comparison to confidential industry benchmark figures. The review provides you with a clear understanding of the level of benefit currently being enjoyed and the appropriateness of negotiating strategies relative to market benchmarks and in the context of your ongoing requirements.

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4. Process Reviews

Review your current processes to identify opportunities for improvement to speed to market and cost

Is your marketing communications slow to respond? Or are there seemingly excessive and unexplained costs? Are there many changes made throughout the process, with the supplier never seeming to get it right the first time?

These are all classic symptoms of poor process. Slow response, high costs, multiple changes and mistakes. In a world where online and real time response is the norm and expected by consumers, organisations need developed and robust process to be able to consistently deliver to these standards. A health check of the current process will identify relatively quickly any areas that need addressing in media, advertising, production, digital and marketing services.

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5. Evalu8ing: Collaboration. Relationships. Performance

Measure and monitor how well your current relationships are working

How effectively do your teams work together internally? How collaborative are you in working with other parts of your business? How collaborative are you with your external suppliers? How collaborative are they with each other in delivering your needs?

Collaboration between disciplines is the access to innovation and competitive advantage. This is why organisations around the world are introducing programs to develop and foster collaboration within. Yet the first step is to measure how collaboratively you are currently working together across the organisation and across all stakeholders. And more importantly, identify where collaboration is not working so that you can focus your efforts on addressing these areas.

The new Evalu8ing On-line Survey System, allowing you to evaluate and identify the collaboration and quality of the relationships with people working internally or externally across a number of organisations.

Evalu8ing is a self managed, low cost online system set to revolutionise the evaluation of relationships:
• intuitive, flexible interface
• coloured graphical reports show relationship status
• accommodates up to eight defined parties
• flexible to accommodate your own questions
• or use any one of the standardised panels

Click here for more information on Evalu8ing.

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6. Green Assessments

Assess the current environmental impact of your marketing activities across media and production

What is the environmental impact of that TV campaign you are about to run? The media? The production? Is the internet more environmentally friendly than print? What is the environmental cost of your next campaign?

While the focus is often on maximising the budget, the environmental cost is becoming a real cost for marketers to consider, especially with many organisations declaring a commitment to offset their carbon emissions. This starts with measuring the impact of your current activities both in media selection and production and then identifying ways you can reduce the environmental impact by reducing waste and maintaining the marketing effectiveness.

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7. Production Assessments

Evaluating and benchmarking your production costs to ensure best practice and maximum value

How much does a 30 second TV ad cost to produce? What about a 60 second radio ad? How much does it cost to produce a 6-page microsite and host it? Or what is the cost to produce a double page print ad?

Ask any production manager and they will quite rightly say it depends on the concept, the time and the budget? But if you want to know if the cost is reasonable, the timeline is achievable and that the method of producing the concept is ideal, then you need independent production advice. It should not simply be a price check, because the truth is it can usually always be made for less, but at what impact on the quality? Instead, you need to know that the process, cost, time and proposed quality are all reasonable, and if not, what should be done about it.

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For more information on any of these services, email people@trinityp3.com

Download the TrinityP3 range of Services