TrinityP3 Blog - Trends in Strategic Marketing Management

Top 10 reasons advertising production is the new cost focus for marketers

Posted on August 20, 2018 by Darren Woolley

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This post is by Darren Woolley, Founder of TrinityP3. With his background as analytical scientist and creative problem solver, Darren brings unique insights and learnings to the marketing process. He is considered a global thought leader on agency remuneration, search and selection and relationship optimisation.

Is it just me or is production the next hot topic after media transparency and data security when it comes to marketing? There is not a day goes by when there is not a new article, podcast or story on advertising production and the issues, innovations and ideas on the best way to implement and manage production in the ‘digital age’.

While I recognise the irony of me writing this, TrinityP3 has been observing, commentating and benchmarking advertising production for almost two decades and we have seen the trends come and go.

So what are the drivers that are behind the latest focus on advertising production and why is it now that the category appears to be getting disrupted? Well I can provide at least ten things that have come together at this point to make this happen.

Some have been evolving for more than a decade, while others have appeared as if by magic, but directly or indirectly they are due to the amazing technology innovations that are transforming marketing communications and advertising production in particular. So here they are in no particular order.

1. The DoJ investigation into agency production practices in the USA

When the Department of Justice announced it was investigating TV advertising production bid rigging by agencies and their holding companies in 2016 it placed the production on the industry agenda. There is nothing like a criminal investigation to get an industry to take notice.

But the practice of rigged bidding has been going on for years to a greater or lesser extent as agencies have tried to position their preferred director or production house on price.

But in this modern version the bidding process is allegedly being used to position the agency’s (or associated holding company’s) production company as being competitive on price and effectively squeezing out the independent production suppliers from the process, delivering a greater share of the client’s budget to the agency.

2. The rise of the production specialist companies

Production specialist companies have been around for years, but you know it is a money making proposition when the holding companies create their own production specialist companies such as Craft (McCann) and Hogarth (WPP). So why has this had such an impact on production?

Previously most of the production specialists were positioned as transcreation companies who would work with the creative agencies to take the outputs of their advertising process such as television masters, print artwork and the like and then not just translate but culturally align the work (often originated in English with a Western Cultural perspective) into a multitude of languages for a multitude of countries to maximise the effectiveness of a global campaign.

But the latest iterations see these production specialists taking the production responsibility from the agency and producing all aspects of the creative idea including the original masters and all of the variation at often a fraction of the price the agency could produce it. Continue reading “Top 10 reasons advertising production is the new cost focus for marketers”

Posted in agency solutions, industry news & trends, marketing process optimisation, marketing procurement, print production, television & electronic production | Comments Off

Managing Marketing: The importance of media agency contracts

Posted on August 17, 2018 by Darren Woolley

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Managing Marketing is a podcast hosted by TrinityP3 Founder and Global CEO, Darren Woolley. Each podcast is a conversation with a thought-leader, professional or practitioner of marketing and communications on the issues, insights and opportunities in the marketing management category. Ideal for marketers, advertisers, media and commercial communications professionals.

David Angell is Head of Media and General Manager at TrinityP3 and has just started his own podcast called Media Angle where he interviews media influencers on all the media angles. But here he talks with Darren about the role and importance of robust, relevant and rigorous media contracts to ensure transparency, value delivery and performance.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes

Transcription:

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing and today we’ve got David Angell, general manager of Australia New Zealand and head of media at TrinityP3 in the office in Sydney. Welcome David.

David:

Thank you Darren, nice to be here as always.

Darren:

What do they say, welcome to the emerald city? For those Melbourne folk who make the trek north.

David:

Yes, I don’t do it enough quite frankly, but it is good to be here for sure.

Darren:

One of the issues that has been talked about a lot in media is contracts, you know those huge documents, 100s of pages long with very small type that usually get slid across the desk from the client to the agency to read through and sign. Do you remember contracts, David?

David:

Yes, I do remember contracts and it’s funny you should describe them like that because in my experience many contracts in this particular industry are actually pushed the opposite way from the agency to the client and they contain very few pages and very few clauses in actual fact that make them truly effective or enforceable.

It’s one of the things that as the transparency debate rumbles on, this industry has really struggled with because a lot of things do begin at the contract.

Darren:

That’s an interesting perspective because I have mainly seen the big heavy ones and maybe that’s because I’m dealing with banks and telcos. They seem to have clauses after clauses.

I remember one particular bank; it was 146 pages long and there was a section called the SLA—service level agreement—just one small part of this and I started reading through it and it said things like the agency will return phone calls within two hours, and the KPI was 99.9%.

And I pointed that out to the procurement person; who is measuring and timing how quickly the agency calls and what happens if the client calls the agency at 10 o’clock at night? Do they have to call before midnight if that’s the particular case? Continue reading “Managing Marketing: The importance of media agency contracts”

Posted in agency remuneration / compensation, agency search & selection, industry news & trends, marketing procurement, media planning & buying, Podcasts, social media & digital marketing | Comments Off

Why marketers focus more on creative rather than media challenges

Posted on August 15, 2018 by Julian Barrans

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This post is by Julian Barrans, Business Director, Asia for TrinityP3. Julian has worked as a business, marketing and branding professional for over 30 years, with more than half of that time in the APAC region, working both client side and agency side. A creative business leader who truly understands the importance of team building, working with the right partners as well as making decisions based on sound business strategy and practices.

While some may disagree with this proposition ….let’s consider what’s going on.

Are there more brand challenges that need solving by finding that creative ‘big idea’ versus media planning/buying to target better with greater efficiency?

There’s no doubt that ideally the brand needs creative and media working hand in hand so it should be both that are focused on to get the strongest result for the business.

Though when you think about the campaign brief it usually focuses on developing the creative ‘big idea’ and considers media as a more executional consideration to reach the target audience rather than being integral to the brand campaign solution needed.

So already marketers are putting more time into the creative challenge.

This is exacerbated by the divide between the ‘lead’ creative agency and media buying agency often being different entities and often not always working together seamlessly. This issue can also be compounded where internal marketing structures reflect the agency roster structure and there’s a media director/manager between the brand manager and the media agency.

For that matter there may also be a marketing services or marketing communications manager in the mix too.

Roles, responsibilities, capabilities all need to be considered carefully, ensuring clarity across the agencies and marketing team to get things working effectively here for both creative and media to be working together to deliver the optimal brand solution.

Often the focus on media, beyond consumer audience targeting, is around lowest price to either stretch budgets or to deliver individual campaign ROI measurement/achievement. Continue reading “Why marketers focus more on creative rather than media challenges”

Posted in agency solutions, interesting observations, media planning & buying, return on investment, strategic management | Comments Off

What critical blunders are you making with Influencer Marketing?

Posted on August 13, 2018 by Natalie Giddings

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This post is by Natalie Giddings, Managing Director of The Remarkables Group. With over 12 years’ practical experience within the marketing industry, Natalie has created social media and influencer strategies across many of Australia’s largest retail, food and lifestyle brands.

When consulting with brands and through our yearly audience surveys, we see a vast chasm between the levels of sophistication that influencer marketing has been operationalised within businesses. Where some marketers are in the journey are absolutely worlds apart.

Influencer activity – when done well – requires time, energy and expertise. With more and more budget earmarked for influencer marketing by 2020, brands must re-think treating it like a bolt on tactic. The missed opportunities and consequences for brands who do not have a strategy in place are far-reaching.

Do you know the influencer marketing space has evolved at lightning speed in recent years, and the velocity has increased exponentially year-on-year. An insightful survey of client-side marketers recently completed by the ANA in the US highlighted a few trends.

A large majority of respondents (75 percent) stated their company is currently using influencer marketing. Of those who are currently using influencer marketing, 43 percent stated they planned to increase influencer marketing budgets over the next 12 months. Of those respondents not currently using influencer marketing, 27 percent plan to begin in the next 12 months.

Coupled with the increasing diversity of services and platforms geared at helping brands to manage their influencer marketing, it’s not a straightforward space.

We’ve had the benefit of operating in this space for six years, running continuous programs since we started in May 2012, first as a talent agency and now as strategy and implementation specialists. Now our primary focus is creating strategies and managing influencer and brand collaborations.

There are a number of cowboys on both the brand and influencer side. This is usually the type of activity critics cling to. But any marketing method can be fraught with potholes without a strategy in place. So what clangers could you be making?

Jumping in Without a Strategy

Thorough planning and thought must go into understanding how to focus your efforts. A strategy is absolutely essential. There are different influencers, channels, and tactics to consider according to your marketing objectives or for each phase of the customer journey.

Influencer marketing is not a one-off initiative to create temporary lift, but rather something that must be woven into a broader marketing strategy. Continue reading “What critical blunders are you making with Influencer Marketing?”

Posted in industry news & trends, marketing process optimisation, social media & digital marketing, strategic management, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Managing Marketing: The profession of advertising compared to management consultants

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Darren Woolley

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John Oldfield is the Ambassador for Worldwide Partners, a global network of independent agencies. He was also the Membership Director for the IPA in the UK. Here he discusses with Darren the difference between a trade and a profession and how as a Chartered Profession the IPA is providing a professional accreditation program for advertising professionals globally. They also compare advertising and management consulting identifying some key differences.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes

Transcription:

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing and today I’m sitting down with John Oldfield, who for twenty years was the membership director of the IPA and is now ambassador of World Wide Partners, an independent network of agencies, and you are joining us here in Sydney, welcome John.

John:

Thank you very much, pleased to be here.

Darren:

John, twenty years with the IPA, you must have seen some phenomenal changes, based in London there, because really London is one of the two main focuses of advertising in the world, isn’t it? After Madison Avenue.

John:

Twenty years in the IPA was a fantastic opportunity and experience but I ran my own agency for thirty years before that.

Darren:

Wow. Okay.

John:

Which I sold and then I was invited to come and help the IPA address some of the problems they were facing at the time and I, together with Hamish Pringle who was the Director General at the time, drafted a plan to move the institute from a very trade association laid-back kind of culture to a driving force in advertising and marketing communications globally.

Darren:

It really is quite dominant, because you’ve got the effectiveness awards and huge amounts of research, that they’ve done work on the quality and the financial or economic impact that advertising has with the economy in the United Kingdom. There really is an agenda there that is focused on building the recognition of advertising isn’t there?

John:

The thing with the IPA is that it is properly resourced. If you try to do that and it is not properly resourced, you end up with chaos and no one having any regard for the value of the outcomes/outputs it creates.

We are fortunate in the IPA that the members were prepared to pay significant subscriptions, but they could see terrific value. Although the subscriptions were considered by some to be high, in my view they were absolutely right because no one ever left.

The only people that ever left the IPA were those in financial difficulty. And we tried to help those in financial difficulty if we possibly could. So, the IPA’s whole culture was based on one simple premise that we wished to convert the industry from a trade to a profession.

We felt that would impact on talent recruitment and retention. We felt that would impact on the level of fees that clients were prepared to pay. We felt that would impact on the government’s willingness to listen to that which we had to say on behalf of the profession. And all that turned out to be absolutely true. Continue reading “Managing Marketing: The profession of advertising compared to management consultants”

Posted in agency remuneration / compensation, agency search & selection, interesting observations, marketing procurement, Podcasts | Comments Off

Why business needs to radically rethink marketing structures

Posted on August 8, 2018 by Zena Churchill

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This post is by Zena Churchill, a Senior Consultant at TrinityP3. Over the past 20 years, Zena has worked for some of the biggest international and national brands. Having worked both agency and client side, Zena has strong insight and experience across most facets of marketing, specialising in media, strategy and BTL.

In 2015, retired US Army General, Stanley McChrystal published a book about the operational challenges he faced when, in 2003, he took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq.

Called Team of Teams. New rules of engagement for a complex world, McChrystal draws on the US Army’s challenge of fighting terrorist groups in the Middle East. In it, he reflects on the traditional structures of the US Armed Forces and how the ingrained characteristics of these structures were causing it to fail when it was faced with unfamiliar enemy behaviour.

It’s a fascinating book for many reasons and you can read Darren Woolley’s review of it here for more detail.

From my perspective, one of the most interesting points woven throughout the book was what McChrystal saw as the biggest issue the US Army was facing back in 2004. According to him, the US Army did not have ‘an efficiency problem’ when it came to be fighting the emerging terrorist cells; what they had was ‘an adaptability problem’.

This resonated with me on a few levels, primarily because it mirrors what we at TrinityP3 have discussed as a key inhibitor for many marketing teams and their ability to successfully navigate the changes currently happening across the industry.

We need to stop focussing on efficiency alone.

At TrinityP3 we hear a lot about efficiency. Without doubt, efficiency is the most common inclusion in any brief TrinityP3 take from a C-Suite looking to undertake a strategic alignment across their marketing function.

And whilst we will often assess multiple efficiency measures across duplication, procedures and technology, the ultimate measure of efficiency success comes down to the dollar savings.

The CEO’s, CMO’s and CFO’s we deal with are looking to grow their marketing return through resources streamlining (internally and externally) and deliver a more favourable bottom line back to the company via savings gained through (cost) efficiency. And this is where I see the issue facing marketing teams today. Continue reading “Why business needs to radically rethink marketing structures”

Posted in interesting observations, marketing process optimisation, return on investment, strategic management | Comments Off

Better collaboration does not mean collaboration meetings

Posted on August 6, 2018 by Darren Woolley

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This is the next in a series of one-minute videos that address one of the many complex challenges facing marketing, media and advertising today. The Golden Minute series is an attempt to prove Albert Einstein right when he said “The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple”.

But he also said “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. So we will leave it for you to judge. Please let us know here if there is a topic you would like us to cover in a Golden Minute.

In a complex world we all know it is important to collaborate. But why do so many people think that to collaborate means organising more meetings? There are already too many meetings. And there is more to collaboration than sitting in meetings.

Back to back meetings

It is almost a daily occurrence that when meeting with a senior marketer they rush into the meeting apologising for being late because the previous meeting was running over. Even if it is mid-morning they are already running late and there is a meeting they need to rush off to because they have back-to-back meetings all day, everyday.

When you ask when they get their ‘work’ done most answer at night or the weekends.

Continue reading “Better collaboration does not mean collaboration meetings”

Posted in agency solutions, Evalu8ing - Relationship Performance Monitoring, interesting observations, marketing process optimisation, strategic management | Comments Off

Managing Marketing: Public Relations and its role in marketing

Posted on August 3, 2018 by Darren Woolley

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Elizabeth Heusler is a media maverick, communications warrior and strategy zealot. Here she talks with Darren on the changing role and face of public relations and the opportunities marketers may overlook or misuse in the way they engage public relations into the communications mix.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes

Transcription:

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing and today I’ve got the opportunity of sitting down and having a chat with the most interesting public relations person I know, Elizabeth Heusler, from Heusler Public Relations. Welcome, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth:

Thanks, Darren. It’s very kind and very good PR, thank you.

Darren:

I say interesting because I really enjoy reading your emails; there are just great little anecdotes and observations and things which are really, really interesting. It must be a very successful way of promoting what you do.

Elizabeth:

They are always about words and public relations is fundamentally all about the words you use, and the choice of words you use.

Darren:

I love words as well and I love the power of words and selecting the right words. I find it so interesting when that email pops up in my inbox; it’s one of those ones that I love to read so thank you for that.

But today I’m really interested in talking to you about the fact that I find marketers have quite a limited view in many cases about the role of public relations. And I’m not sure exactly why that is.

But they only recently seem to have been thinking about PR because there are PR companies that are saying things like we can do you social media management, organise your events, and they’re the things they can relate to whereas they don’t seem to be able to relate to public relations.

Do you ever come across that with marketing? Continue reading “Managing Marketing: Public Relations and its role in marketing”

Posted in agency solutions, interesting observations, Podcasts, strategic management | Comments Off

Book Review: Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal

Posted on August 1, 2018 by Darren Woolley

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Okay, so the full title is actually Team of Teams – New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal U.S. Army Retired with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell. But do not let this put you off as this is not some war story from a retired warrior.

Although marketers and advertisers are used to co-opting military terms such as campaigns and targets. And yes McChrystal does illustrate his points and support his argument using military examples from today and from history. But this is an inspiring book for those who know they cannot meet the challenges of a complex world shackled with the legacy system, structures and processes of the past.

But this book, published in 2015, is an insightful business tome on what is required by organisations, especially large organisations to be able to win in the increasingly complex world we operate in.

The example of leading the Joint Task Force in Iraq and Afghanistan against Al Qaeda from 2003 is an extreme one but the examples are really a stress test of what is happening in organisations every where. It is likely because of the extreme nature of the circumstances that the issues presented themselves with more clarity and the solutions were stress tested in the literal heat of battle.

Increasing Complexity. Decreasing predictability.

The problem McChrystal faced was that the ‘enemy’ was not a traditional army fighting traditional battle strategies. He realised that their ability to flex and change and operate in autonomous units made predicting their next move near impossible.

The Joint Task Force was fighting on multiple fronts without being able to identify or predict what or where those fronts were. Of course he was not the first army to face this. He uses Greek Mythology defined in the story of Menelaus, king of Sparta, facing the shape-shifting polymorph Proteus in battle. Their traditional method of battle was futile and they needed to adapt to win.

Likewise it was clear to McChrystal and his leadership team that while he commanded the most powerful and effective military force on earth, they needed to adapt if they were to have success. Why?

Because their hierarchical structure, precision processes and chains of command were designed for delivering maximum impact with great efficiency, but no matter how much technology they had it was impossible to predict where that impact needed to be delivered and when. Therefore they needed to adapt and change to solve their own Proteus problem.

Continue reading “Book Review: Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal”

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The truth about Agile Marketing is it is not simply faster

Posted on July 30, 2018 by Darren Woolley

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Everyone is talking about Agile Marketing when they really mean agile ways to market. What’s the difference? One is a methodology and manifesto based on test and learn and the other is how to become more nimble and faster to market.

When we discuss Agile Marketing with our clients we are very clear on distinguishing the pronoun of Agile Marketing from the noun agile marketing. Agile Marketing is a process grown out of software development and adapted from the principles to a manifesto for Agile Marketing.

It is important to distinguish also the difference between agile software development and Agile Marketing.

Agile Marketing Values

Validated learning over opinions and conventions
Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
The process of customer discovery over static prediction
Flexible vs rigid planning
Responding to change over following a plan
Many small experiments over a few large bets

Agile Marketing Principles (proposed)

Continue reading “The truth about Agile Marketing is it is not simply faster”

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Managing Marketing: How data is making media planning and buying more accountable

Posted on July 27, 2018 by Darren Woolley

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Martin Cass, CEO of MDC Media Partners and Assembly, has a long history of running media agencies. Here he discusses with Darren how after leaving Carat, a year at the Wharton Business School and a meeting with the number crunchers behind ‘Money Ball’ transformed the way they do media at MDC Media Partners today.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes

Transcription:

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing and today I get a chance to sit down and have a chat with someone who is disrupting the media planning and buying industry and that’s Martin Cass, CEO of MDC of Media Partners and Assembly all the way from New York. Welcome, Martin.

Martin:

Yeah, my thick Brooklyn accent.

Darren:

You’ve got to work on that accent, Martin.

Martin:

Yeah, 14 years. My kids all speak with a brilliant American accent and my wife and I still sound like this.

Darren:

They say ‘water.’

Martin:

Trash. I can speak American though. I have the language perfected now and my spelling is a little bit odd.

Darren:

It’s an interesting time to be in media and you’ve been in media for a number of years.

Martin:

1988; my first job in London.

Darren:

Wow.

Martin:

I was 12.

Darren:

That’s about the time I entered advertising in Melbourne as a copywriter. It’s challenging times isn’t it because relationships between advertisers and media agencies especially are at an all-time low? I think that’s what you were quoted as saying at Adweek last year.

Martin:

I’d have to look up exactly what I said but I’m neither going to confirm nor deny but the paraphrase will do just fine. It is the most bizarre time. There has never been a better time to be in the fulcrum of media in the Mar/Comms world because the way that people live their lives now is through media whether it be social media, commentating.

Media is connecting people with the things they love, the people they want. It entertains, it informs; it does all of those things in ways that five years ago we could never have believed. And that interconnected, interdependent, always on social, searchable, and transactional world—I mean buying shoes off Facebook, could you have imagined that even two years ago?

Buy a shirt off Facebook and have it all made and delivered in the post. That is a world that is amazing, but the problem is that the world that people have inhabited and come from, that change has been really hard for people to manage.

And the way that clients and agencies would interact in terms of financial relationships between them are fundamentally changing.

Darren:

We started seeing in 2007/2008 this absolute obsession from a procurement and advertiser perspective on driving costs down. It was the response to the global recession, to get costs down, and so people were chasing deals and pushing the remuneration with their agencies down.

Then a few years later it turns around and suddenly everyone is talking about the fact that agencies are making more money often from the media owners in the form of rebates, kickbacks, and commissions but, in fact, media has always been based on commissions hasn’t it? Continue reading “Managing Marketing: How data is making media planning and buying more accountable”

Posted in agency remuneration / compensation, data & direct marketing, industry news & trends, media planning & buying, Podcasts, return on investment, social media & digital marketing | Comments Off

Book Review: Powerful. Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, by Patty McCord

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Zena Churchill

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Once, during a performance review I asked my boss, who happened to be the CEO, for negotiation training. He raised his eyebrow quizzically and asked, ‘which supplier do you need this for?’, my response was, ‘oh, I don’t need it for a supplier, I need it so I can better deal with a number of internal teams.’

He told me a while after this (and after I had done the training) that he was upset that I felt internal relations were so bad I needed to learn better negotiation skills to do my job. This made me chuckle a bit because the reality was, not only was this an environment he himself had created and nurtured, but one he seemed to enjoy. And the saddest thing is, this type of corporate environment is still extremely common.

In Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, Patty McCord tears down the old way of managing teams and corporate culture and presents the reader with an alternate way to recruit, motivate and create great teams that better suit this new, fast paced, agile obsessed landscape we now find ourselves in. The result is a company with the culture of ‘Freedom & Responsibility’. Continue reading “Book Review: Powerful. Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, by Patty McCord”

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Important questions before taking media in-house

Posted on July 23, 2018 by Darren Woolley

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In the face of ad fraud, brand safety and viewability issues, many marketers are considering taking some or all of their media in-house. Are you? Technology and media innovation is making this more feasible. But is it right for you?

Depending on the market, the size of the media spend and and the media mix, there appears to be four options for advertisers when it comes to media, either in-house or outsourced.

Leave it as it is, with the agency

Be it because it’s all too hard, or that they simply do not have the scale of spend or they believe that their agency contracts and their media agency will protect them from the perils of the ‘murky’ media ecosystem, many advertisers are not taking any part of their media in-house.

That does not mean they are not doing anything at all. In fact many of them are going to market to negotiate a better deal (on the basis that if I am getting ripped off at least I am minimising risk?) or one that is more transparent and tries to address many of the issues they face around brand safety and viewability and the like.

Some are unbundling their media and moving their digital and programmatic investment to independent media agencies with a disclosed and transparent remuneration and a closer direct working relationship with the team at the Trading Desk.

And yes there are some who are doing nothing at all for fear that it will flag that there is a problem and so if they just carry on as usual hopefully nobody will ask.

Take media strategy and planning in-house

There are those who either because they have a terrific customer data insights team in-house to inform them or who have a fairly straight forward media strategy and requirements, are building media strategy and planning skills and resources in-house.

The buying is still outsourced to the agency but by putting the media strategy and planning in-house they can be assured that the plan and therefore the buy is strategically aligned and not influenced by the buying. Continue reading “Important questions before taking media in-house”

Posted in agency remuneration / compensation, agency search & selection, data & direct marketing, industry news & trends, marketing process optimisation, marketing procurement, media planning & buying, social media & digital marketing | Comments Off

Does your marketing structure support your marketing strategy anymore?

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Zena Churchill

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Strategy is a fundamental driver of business success, yet it is one of the most misunderstood terms thrown around the halls of business. Often mistaken for a goal or tactic, a strategy is how a company chooses to reach its goals, or to paraphrase Michael Porter it’s ‘doing things differently or doing different things’ to gain market advantage.

And, at its core, a strategy addresses shifting priorities that can come from any new business opportunities, technologies, market evolution or increased challenges.

Traditionally the strategic planning process, and with it the development of a shiny new five-year strategy from which to drive the company forward, was a 3-4-month process involving many senior people across the business.

Once it was cemented, managers at the functional levels across finance, marketing, IT and sales etc, would develop their own supporting strategies. This is still the practice in many organisations we work with, however, as fast-paced disruption becomes the norm for many industries, it is becoming more evident that strategic development needs to become more adaptive, flexible and emergent; for example, a big goal with parameters around it.

And to support this, the thinking around structures needs to evolve to allow companies, and teams within those companies, to quickly adapt and resource to better suit and deliver on any new strategic focus.

Strategy must define the structure

It was the business historian Alfred Chandler who introduced us to the theory of firm, which was based on his extensive study of large corporations. His theory stated, ‘structure must follow strategy’ and, any changes at a strategic level could only be successful if structure was redesigned to suit.

The rationale behind this was to ensure organisations were structured in such a way as to allow for them to administer any new strategy and minimise any inability to support strategies because of its existing structure. This is not a new theory. Chandler floated it back in the early ‘60s and since then, except for some detractors, it has been widely embraced as solid business thinking. Continue reading “Does your marketing structure support your marketing strategy anymore?”

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Managing Marketing: The benefits and complications of production decoupling

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Darren Woolley

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Justin Ricketts is the CEO of Hogarth Australia and recently shared his thoughts on the media and creative agencies recombining, while still recommending that the resultant production should be decoupled. While decoupling production has been common in the UK for decades it is still a hot topic in many markets and he discusses the benefits and the challenges of getting it right.

You can listen to the podcast here:

Follow Managing Marketing on Soundcloud or iTunes

Transcription:

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing and today I’m sitting down for a chat with Justin Ricketts who is the CEO of Hogarth Australia. Welcome, Justin.

Justin:

Thanks, Darren, good to be here.

Darren:

Mate, the reason I asked you to come in is that you wrote something on LinkedIn where you’re supporting this idea that creative and media should come together again but you think production should be outsourced. Why?

Justin:

The article you’re referring to, I think, having worked in both creative and media agencies, that when it comes to creative and strategy it makes a huge amount of sense for that to be integrated and come together.

But when it comes to production; production is something that increasingly needs to operate at scale and it’s a sort of horizontal offering that if you try to integrate into a single or combined agency you end up with a side offering that doesn’t have the scale and the technology and the ability to compete and deliver what clients are looking for in today’s marketplace.

Darren:

I agree with you. De-coupling or outsourcing has been around for 2 or 3 decades. I can remember back in the 90s they were talking about this in the U.K. so why is it such a hot topic here in Australia? What is it about Australian agencies or marketers that everyone has resisted this?

Justin:

I think you’re showing your age if you’re going back to the 90s.

Darren:

Well I’m a lot older than you and therefore wiser and you should respect me.

Justin:

Ultimately, the important thing to recognise is that de-coupling production has been driven by clients. It’s not something that was created by agencies or specialist de-coupling production companies. I think clients have typically driven a demand for a different way of producing things.

My understanding is that the key wave of de-coupling came in 2008, in the GFC, and a large amount of global clients were looking for more efficient ways to create their global campaigns and deliver them locally and the core service was then around trans-creation and local adaptations.

So, Hogarth, where I now work, that’s where they got their first wave of demand from clients. I think the second wave that we’re experiencing, not just in Australia but globally, is being driven by the fact that most clients are now having to create more content to fill more channels with much greater agility. And funnily enough their budgets aren’t getting bigger; they’re getting smaller.

Darren:

They’re doing more with less.

Justin:

So, if you’re having to create more with less and you don’t want to affect the quality of your advertising content then the reality is something has to change, and the model has to change.

And what we put to the market is that the old way of doing things through relatively small, siloed production offerings inside agencies, which worked in the old world when we were just looking to make a TV and a print ad, are no longer sustainable.

Darren:

A year for each brand not just a week for each channel of social media. Continue reading “Managing Marketing: The benefits and complications of production decoupling”