Last Months Ignition Room Huddle – What makes a good client/agency partnership?

In the last Ignition Room Huddle, we heard from Barclays and OMD UK about the power of partnerships and that when they are set out properly from the beginning they:

– Build a strong effectiveness culture

– Create trust

– Enable great (and sometimes hard) conversations about the performance of marketing activity

But what happens if your ways of working aren’t supported by a healthy and strong effectiveness culture?

– Silos appear and teams become introspective focusing only on their own activity and its impact

– It becomes harder to secure funding for the right tools and capabilities to better predict and measure the outcomes of marketing activities

– It becomes harder to prove the value of marketing (and Marketing) and the broader organisation sees Marketing as a cost rather than a value creator

Gloomy picture, right? Purposefully so, as it can more often than not be the reality in large and complex organisations where communications can be poor and politics be rife.

One of the things that can be done is to have a really clear and articulated planning process. A process that might look like this:

When created properly, it should be clear at what stage of the activity each piece of planned activity is at, who owns that stage, and what the criteria are for moving on to the next stage. For example, setting the criteria for which:

– Content gets tested and at what stage of the creative process that happens.

– Pass marks for creative testing to ensure that there is confidence that it will work once live in the market.

– Activity gets the ‘gold’ standard of evaluation and results are shared with C-Suite and which gets the silver or bronze level evaluations which are shared within Marketing

– Brands get a quarterly strategic review to understand what is working well, and what isn’t, to act as a timely input into planning processes.

Just a few examples of what clearly articulated planning processes can include.

One of the key inputs we see in Step 1 of the planning process is the econometric understanding of marketing performance and what that means for future activity. One of the big concerns at the moment is the macroeconomic pressures which have been building over the last couple of years and how they will impact marketing performance.

We are fortunate to have Analytic Partners join our next Ignition Room Huddle on the 30th of March to talk about:

· Measuring the impact of macroeconomic factors on marketing performance

· Does successful econometrics and Marketing Mix Modelling need to be high effort, expensive and risky?

· What are the ingredients to making an econometric/Marketing Mix Modelling program successful?

Come and join the Huddle and be part of the conversation click here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/using-econometrics-to-stay-on-course-through-the-economic-storm-tickets-567971828027