If you work in marketing, you may have spent a good portion of your life in meetings and status phone calls for the projects you are working on. And I am not talking about your internal team meetings to keep your own piece progressing forward (you spend plenty of time doing that also), but the coordination check points that are set to help herds of different companies working on the project to progress in unison for the common goal.
The stakeholders involved may include multiple technology vendors, creative agencies, media planners, brand managers, program managers, legal, PR, exec sponsor, and the list goes on depending on the project. A key reason for this, is these calls often serve as one a few chances to attempt to cram learnings, confidence and collaboration quickly against the non-moving deadline for all involved. Looking past the veil of collaboration, sometimes its mainly to ensure all hit their target deliverables and dates (and sound/look good doing it).
On separate ends of the spectrum, we are seeing a specialization of agencies booming for particular market needs (social, mobile, local, digi-mobile-local) along with the continued growth of integrated agencies (who most often, acqui-hire from those niche agencies during their growth mode) and techology providers that provide a particular integration required (wearables, live streaming, tv, social dev). That being said, don’t expect the number of parties on the project check-in conference calls to drop in volume anytime in the near future.
While we have the chance to build extremely rewarding and successful engagements working in this manner, it can be a lot of brain-busting work for all involved when each new project comes through. A key problem is many brands, and marketing campaigns, are organized as silos within many companies with a rotation of partners and resources that may engage on a given project. At the same time, we are moving towards a real-time, collaborative, data-driven marketing environment. Which means things have to move faster, be more agile, work smarter and across a plethora of devices.
If you’ve ever seen the movie Groundhog Day, being an early adopter of this change while others are working in silos can feel a bit like being the main character, waking up each day, trying to apply your isolated learnings against the rest of the world on auto pilot (kind of like Ned Ryerson in the movie).
Nowadays, it’s a requirement for organizations to focus on how they can make this collaboration more effective, less time consuming and result in projects that show clear ROI.
With that, it’s time for all of us to move from a network of silos to a network of data-driven collaboration.
We have worked alongside organizations to become more connected when it comes to their vendor ecosystem and marketing activities to help expose weaknesses, augment strengths, and unlock desired marketing activity results. Below are a few examples of challenges we have faced over the years related to these silo’d approaches to marketing campaigns:
- Each campaign and/or brand (at the same company) may work with a different set of resources internally and externally. New people, new faces, new processes can lead to inefficiencies and confusion.
- Knowledge management and best practices exist for certain aspects of the business, but they are limited for key marketing activities (such as social campaigns, mobile apps, web campaigns, etc.). If they do exist, rarely is it easy to discover or make sense of the data to make actionable decisions for relevant upcoming projects.
- Consistent and repeatable learning loops do not exist at the organization, nor do they exist within the agency ecosystem. What went right? What went wrong? What would you do differently? Owning this feedback and relevant data across the project teams is critical to delivering efficiencies, future success, and to building out the right agency/vendor network for a company.
- Insightful and actionable data on historical relevant company activities is rarely available or accessible when working on a new program. Within the same company, a colleague may have worked on a very similar initiative months prior, with rich data sets and learnings – but you would never know, in most cases.
- Collaboration among campaign or project owners across organizations is currently limited in its support of real-time project demands. Who was that vendor you worked with? How can I get a quick exception for this new technology? There is much that can be learned from someone who may work in another department or brand within the organization, and who has already executed similar initiative(s) to the one you may be embarking on.
As you can easily assume, there are multiple ways to combat these challenges, from simple learning loops being instituted organizationally-wide, to enterprise portals to showcase vendors, projects, best practices, and results of company-wide marketing initiatives. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but key tenets around collaboration, platforms, and governance that can help get it off the ground.
With the evolution of social business tools, adoption, and the changing of the workforce, we are naturally heading from an enterprise of silos to an enterprise of connected data-driven collaboration.
Be sure to visit back for Part 2 of this series, where we take a look at strategies and ways to effectively combat this problem and create a more collaborative network (and most importantly, deliver better business results).