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A blueprint for productised marketing operations

Kieron McCann

Updated: Jan 15

The future of marketing operations is about to change.
The future of marketing operations is about to change.

2025 will be a year we will begin to see a transformation in how marketing teams operate and how they expect to work with their advertising agencies. Three quarters of brands want to change their agency remuneration models because they don’t feel they’re getting full value and transparency out of FTE based billing models. After years of hand wringing and warnings in the advertising industry about how agencies might change there has been remarkably little movement on the part of agencies to drive a change in their remuneration models. It seems more likely now that change will be done to agencies by clients demanding change, rather than any agency or industry-driven initiative.


At the same time, there has been an explosion in the amount of work required to simply execute on day-to-day marketing activity. Factors such as the growth in the number of channels, the increasing amount of personalisation and the sheer frequency of activity has meant that marketing has become increasingly consumed by just cranking through operational activity.  Much of this operational activity has become highly incrementalist in nature. So called ‘performance marketing’, where continual iteration of tasks is used to optimise every step of marketing execution, has become the default mode of operation. Marketing teams, and the agencies that support them, have become centred around the treadmill of a marketing machine that focuses on volume and showing the linkage between each activity to immediate revenue.


As a result, marketing has become heavily operational in its focus, and agencies have steadily been in a race to the bottom on low-cost operational delivery. Many clients have struggled to see value and have brought large parts of marketing operations in-house to try and maximise value.

 

Things are about to change


We’ve heard a lot of talk about AI over the last few years. With it has come fears that marketing functions will be replaced in their entirety. Others have pointed to the fact that marketers have adopted AI enthusiastically, and rather than being a replacement for marketing, AI has now become an effective enabler of various marketing tasks. That's an important thing to remember about AI, it doesn't automate jobs, it automates tasks.


It’s true that many technology vendors have incorporated AI into their tooling to boost productivity and reduce workload. Marketing teams are now working more efficiently, and agencies are using AI tooling extensively, albeit while still charging day rates for the people operating it. The real change will come when these processes and tools are joined up. This is often referred to as ‘orchestration’. This is the next key area of focus for vendors, particularly those like Adobe, which now have a product at just about every phase of the marketing production process. At that point, entire marketing processes, rather than individual tasks begin to become automated. This becomes an issue for both agencies and marketing teams that have spent the last decade becoming highly task orientated. If you have created jobs that are highly task orientated, then the threat from AI is much greater.

 

Marketing needs to wean itself off the “How?” and focus on “What?”


With intelligent automation, the importance of the tasks and their scalability becomes less of a challenge. With the tasks becoming automated, the purpose of marketing changes. The pendulum swings back towards the activities that are more difficult to automate – the creative, the conceptual, and the less quantitative. This will represent an about face for marketing organisations that have built up task oriented in-house operations and represents a challenge for agencies that have built their models on operations.

This change in context will require a rethink on the part of marketing teams as emphasis shifts from “how to get things done” towards “what’s the right thing to do?”. It may also shift the balance between marketing effort committed to performance marketing v’s brand. Marketing teams will need to free themselves from thinking about the execution and create breathing space for the more strategic.  To achieve this will require changes in marketing operations and mindset.

 

Standardise the things you do all the time


Our solution is through the productisation and standardisation of marketing activity. By moving to a standardised definition of different marketing workloads, we can begin to pick and mix activities that we want to apply to different marketing initiatives. It also means we can make informed decisions about where that workload is fulfilled – be that in-house, or with an agency, had crafted, or automated by machine. To an extent this standardisation has already been put in place with many of the standard practices of performance marketing. Yet, every time a campaign is created, we see the continual re-invention of the wheel. This needs to change. Effective marketing teams need to begin to think about activity being assembled from standard components that have either been fully optimised, or which are in the process of doing so.


For this to work we need a different marketing operating model, supported by a new commercial model with our agencies. If we are to focus our energies on the more strategic and experiment with the more creative and conceptual, then we need to wean ourselves off committing so much time and money to the reinvention of day-to-day marketing activity. Marketing needs to become productised, so that day-to-day operations can become more modular, more repeatable, and more automated.

 


What does a 'productised marketing function' mean?


A productised marketing function recognises that most campaigns or activities are really comprised of standard repeatable elements. Yes the creative element is typically unique, but the execution is largely the same. Rather than designing a campaign from the ground up each time, it is an assembly of common items that are determined by the brief.

Central to this is the marketing catalogue, which documents all the available campaign or activity elements that can be drawn on to deliver that activity. These standard elements should reside in a catalogue, and that catalogue needs to be owned by the brand, not the agency. You should not be selecting services from a list the agency makes available to you. The agency, and your in-house teams work to your catalogue.


Own your own catalogue


Why is it important that you own the catalogue? Because this is the means of standardisation. You own the definition of each element in the catalogue. This specifies what the element is, what it costs, the delivery time frame and the agreed quality standard. With these definitions in place, you are now able to do a lot of things:


  1. Design and assemble campaigns and activities with an exact understanding of what is in, and what is out, how long it should take to deliver, and exactly what it will cost.


  2. Measure exactly what is going through your pipeline – tools like Workfront are good, but without a clear definition of what’s in your pipeline they are only ever going to be a convenient tracker, rather than an accurate forecasting tool.


  3. Measure the outcomes of the work you have delivered, with an exact frame of reference to the items that made it up – making it easier to understand which elements work, and which don’t – which bakes learning into the process.


  4. Make informed decisions about who does the work – is one agency better than others? Is your in-house team more efficient?


  5. Coordinate activities between internal teams and third party agencies, with clear definitions of who is doing what.


  6. Move work around dynamically. Has one agency gone off the boil? Is your in-house team at full capacity? By having agreed definitions for each element, you can move your workload around to those who are most efficient, are doing the best job, or who have available capacity while retaining a clear definition of what the work is, how long it should take and what it will cost.


  7. Retain the learning about what activity works and what doesn’t for a given product, market or audience.


  8. Focused on outputs, not inputs, meaning you stop paying for agency employees’ time, and start paying for their outputs.

 

Shift your agency model from inputs to outputs


If you are one of the 75% of brands that feel they don’t have a clear picture of the value their agency is delivering, or you are trying to decide whether to in-house or outsource, a catalogue-based structure makes life much easier. It finally enables a change in commercial model that is more aligned to the value of outputs and outcomes than inputs.


In this new model your agency agrees to deliver the elements in your catalogue to an agreed standard, in an agreed timeframe, and to an agreed cost. How that happens and how many people in the agency it takes to deliver it is none of your concern. They may use AI tools, the whole thing could be done by machine for that matter, what matters is the result. This becomes a task for the agency to manage. But because you are measuring the delivery, you can make decisions about which agency works best, or whether in-house is better.

 

Focus more on the strategic


By shifting your focus from “how” things are done, attention will shift from the middle delivery part of the process and more to the beginning and the end of the process


The beginning of the process: What are we trying to sell? What is the right audience or market? What activity, channel and content is the most effective at reaching that audience? Have we done this before?


The end of the process: What did we deliver? How long did it take? What did it cost? Which things worked? Which things didn’t? Who worked best? What are our learnings for next time?

These are the questions marketers should be focusing on, rather than spending all their time wrangling campaigns through the activity pipeline.

  


This is not a race to the bottom for agencies


It’s important to note that this is not a race to the bottom for agencies, where they become forced into a production or delivery role. Good agencies deliver real value when they are entrusted with strategy and given ownership over the right mix of delivery to achieve results. In the productised approach, you can choose to retain ownership of brand strategy, or campaign design, or you can entrust it to your agency. But you do this with a clear definition of roles and responsibilities.


If you have a brilliant agency that comes to you with new ideas, then let them own the strategy and creative elements in the catalogue and pay them for it. You can even include a kicker for outcomes as well as the outputs produced. But at all times they’re working from your catalogue, and you retain clarity about what was delivered, what you paid for, what was achieved, and what you learned.


This will represent a change for agencies, who have built their businesses on charging for people. Some may not like the change, but eventually they will realise that having the freedom to control their delivery is liberating. By shifting the repetitive delivery to automated tools, they will be able to deliver real value from their people with creative and strategy that can’t be replicated by machine.

 

Where to start?


Building your own marketing catalogue takes work. It requires a detailed look into your current processes and activities to break them down and identify the repeatable elements that can be standardised. Depending on the size of your organisation, you can begin to build your catalogue in something simple like Excel, or into more automated workflow tools like Service Now or other service management tools. It may also then lead on to integration with tools like Workfront or other marketing workflow management and analytics tooling like Dynamics. Once these tools and structures are in place, it becomes easier to apply machine learning and automation tools to automate the process.


If you are interested in exploring how you can implement a productised approach to marketing operations, we can have a more detailed conversation about where to start and help you build a vision for the future.

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