If you’re an alumni from years past, or just got back from your first Bureau event, you make this community possible. It’s an inspiration to see how you help one another every day. From suggesting a new approach to sharing a lead, your generosity is the energy that keeps us going. And if you haven’t attended a Bureau event yet, well, keep reading. Because you just found your people.
Research firm Forrester announced today that it will buy B2B research and advisory firm SiriusDecisions. The deal, which is expected to close in January, will cost the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester $245 million in cash.
Account manager vs project manager - which one should you hire? This article will break down the divide between account management and project management, and help you choose the right role for your agency.
The importance of requirements gathering is often underestimated on multiple levels. When budgets are thin, timelines are tight, and scope is creeping, requirements documentation tends to be the first deliverable to go and the last deliverable to be considered.
Access the Freedman Global Marketing 2018 Survey results. A good read.
Project management software helps project managers and teams complete client requirements and manage time, budget, and scope constraints. However, with so many available options, choosing the right tool can be confusing, and people may not know just where to begin.
In the past several years, digital asset management (DAM) software has dramatically increased in popularity. Much of this rise is thanks to efforts by tech juggernauts such as Google and Amazon, which are encouraging Internet users to consume content in as many ways, and via as many channels, as possible. To keep running with the big dogs, marketers need to meet users’ new expectations that content will be instantaneous, relevant, and delivered right to their phones.
Delegation is one of the most important skills. Technical professionals, team and business leaders, managers, and executives all need to develop good delegation skills. There are many rules and techniques that help people to delegate. Good delegation saves money, time, builds people and team skills, grooms successors and motivates people. Poor delegation sucks!
“All I wanted to do was jump into a major earth-moving project, but my grandpa’s quiet thoughtfulness taught me the basics of proper change management.”
How do you work with creatives? This episode brings back Paige Sargent, who lent us her experience forming relationships with creative folks in the episode: Take a Look Inside the Creative Mind.
John Wannamaker’s more than 100-year-old outcry: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half” was true for a long time, but not anymore. Thanks to data-driven marketing and data-analytics tools, we are now in a much better position to determine our marketing ROI.
Over the last few months Freedman International has been talking to senior global marketers around the world, including at their CMO breakfasts in San Francisco and London, and through our global marketing survey. One of the key challenges that everyone has mentioned is the speed and volume of change brought about by new technology. Being agile, customer-centric and highly collaborative is fundamental to being effective.
Gone are the Mad Men days of high-margin retainers, scotch and sodas at lunch, and leaving at 5 p.m. We’ve all heard it before: Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will eventually replace us. There is no denying that artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly prevalent in almost every industry, including advertising and marketing.
With Christmas ad season well and truly under way, the Marketing Week team picks their Christmas crackers and turkeys among this year’s feast.
MightyHive has quietly become the preferred agency for brands, including Bayer, Sprint and Nationwide, to hire as they start taking capabilities in-house and away from advertising agencies. The company thinks of what it does as helping “brands and agencies take control of their digital futures,” but what it really does is work with big brands to give them the expertise and training needed to ultimately become self-sufficient with their own digital media buying and planning. MightyHive acts as a coach to train clients across programmatic display, video, audio, social, search and, in the future, connected TV with the strategy and training to back it up.
When VICE launched “VICE News Tonight” on HBO, they were already a decade into cutting hundreds of videos per month for their internal brands and marketing clients. But producing a nightly news show presented a new challenge: warp-speed video production leading all the way up to air time — every single day.
Henry Stewart is delighted that their first announced session will be run by BBC Creative's Head of Project Management, Metzti Bryan. The Session’s title is: Personalities & Process - Why Mastering Emotional Intelligence is the Key to Managing Successful Projects.
Don’t forget you can save £150 with the super early bird discount before December 14th.
In Creative Reviews upcoming webinar, they will discuss how the best in-house creative teams operate. How do you go from being a service provider to a strategic partner to a business? How do in-house teams prove their value to their organisation, manage workflows, measure success, and attract and retain talent? And how do they create great work?
Welcome to Laurens weekly round-up of the latest happenings on social platforms. Currently, Lauren is the head of Global Social Business Enablement at Adobe. She's a social marketing authority, with extensive experience working with brands such as Safeway, Levi’s, Hyatt and Disney, to create their social personas, nurture their Facebook and Twitter communities and curate their social conversations. She is currently working across Adobe functions to enable all employees to be successful using social for marketing and community building.
In this episode of Inside Jobs, Clifford Stevens (www.linkedin.com/in/clifford-stevens-b9115112), Director of Creative Operations at Liberty Mutual Insurance, talks about his shift from external agency life (JWT, McCann Worldgroup, Hills Holliday, McGarryBowen) to the in-house team at the fourth-largest property and casualty insurer in the U.S. Cliff talks about catering to changing business needs and the importance of prioritizing thinking and planning over execution. He also touches on collaboration with vendor partners and reveals a question/thinking exercise that keeps his team energized and engaged.
“Martech” isn’t just shorthand for “marketing technology.” It’s a community of forward-thinkers working at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management. Possibilities fire their imagination. Silos disappear. Agility increases. And customer satisfaction soars.
Last year, we wrote the Martech Manifesto as a rallying cry for this community: Senior-level marketers who are passionate about exploring the daily challenges and opportunities presented by marketing technology. Are you a member of this community?
Planning for 2019 is upon us, and for some creative teams, that can be a big source of stress. It’s one of the most taxing times of the year for creative management. Have you spent all of the money allocated? Are you going over budget? Or worse, under? (worse because that can mean your budget is cut for the new year.) And it doesn’t help that this falls during the busiest production time of year for many teams.
It’s almost a cliche to say that we are in an age of unprecedented technological change. Concepts like Moore’s Law, which states that overall processing power for computers doubles every two years, attempt to bring this rate of evolution into perspective. At the same time, there is more attention than ever being paid to the role that product and user experience design plays in successful innovation and company success. A recent McKinsey report that studied more than 300 businesses found that companies that embrace design created 32 percent more revenue and 56 percent more shareholder returns than competitors, over a five-year period.
The definition of artificial intelligence is constantly evolving, and the term often gets mangled, so we are here to help.
What is AI, exactly? The question may seem basic, but the answer is kind of complicated. In the broadest sense, AI refers to machines that can learn, reason, and act for themselves. They can make their own decisions when faced with new situations, in the same way that humans and animals can.
Emerging Perspectives on Marketing’s Back-office and the Realities of Current Solutions.
This eBook aims to help marketers better leverage available Marketing Resource Management (MRM) technology by decoding vendor capabilities with real-world understanding of how the software functions.
This analysis informs how marketing and IT may choose to apply MRM off-the-shelf solutions to their respective enterprise ecosystems. After reading this paper, marketing and IT will be better able to apply vendor technology and consulting direction to the way marketers think and operate.
This year’s trend report examines how our relationship to and usage of the Internet has changed in the past 25 years: from the time we spend online, to the opposing personal perspectives that we are able to amplify because of the Internet, to the rapid speed in which false information travels compared to facts.
The report also looks at several Webby-winning projects that are leveraging the power of technologies like AR, VR, and voice to create positive reality-bending experiences.
The massive growth in digital marketing has created many new opportunities for businesses, but also new challenges. Marketers have more distribution channels and more file formats and types to deal with, all the while trying to stay on-brand and consistent.
In this episode of Inside Jobs, Meg Graham (www.linkedin.com/in/meggalligan/), Director of Corporate Content Development at Mary Kay Inc. talks about her fascinatingly diverse professional journey, all at one employer! She tells us about her 17-year career, starting as a copywriter, then to a project manager and even to IT manager. She discloses how she handled this transition, what obstacles she faced, and how she conquered them.
Anyone who works in content marketing knows the trends can change faster than the seasons. And if there’s one area where transformation is even more rapid, it is the technology that powers content marketing.
In this world of constant innovation and inundation, one thing that’s reliably true is that adopting the right content marketing technologies is absolutely critical to success. This was made clear again in the latest benchmarking research from CMI, which found huge gaps between the most successful and least successful teams based on proficiency with content marketing tech.
Kao, creators of many well-known consumer brands, launches more than 1,000 new products every year — and each of those launches means thousands of digital assets that need to be available and accessible to designers, marketers, and retail partners.
Given the pace of Kao’s launches, it’s not uncommon for their digital assets to top 500,000 active images, audio clips, and video. In the past, this volume slowed down their processes.
Back in June, Censhare visited Hearst UK in Leicester Square with their project manager Matt Gibbs. The publishing house is famous for its brands, including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazaar, and has been using censhare since 2009. Censhare spoke with Bob Bousfield, a publishing technology expert who’s been instrumental in implementing censhare throughout the company, and Sophie Wilkinson, who’s been overseeing programs to streamline Hearst’s print production in the UK.
A collection of recent DAM-related articles from around the web, sourced from DAM Federation member, Planet DAM.
As digital marketing becomes more automated, marketers have found themselves allocating more of their budgets to technology.
In an August 2018 study by Gartner of 621 marketing leaders in North America and the UK, respondents reported that, on average, they expect to spend 29% of their budget on marketing technology this year, up from 22% in 2017. This makes marketing tech the single biggest investment area for marketing resources, according to Gartner’s researchers.
Vespa is a well-known brand of Italian scooters that became cultural phenomenon and has fascinated millions of people around the World. As an example of great design and overall experience, Vespa was copied by companies from different countries: England, Germany, the United States, France, USSR, etc. Stylish design, affordable price, ease of maintenance and driving comfort have made Vespa the first successful scooter in the World.
Search marketing continues to be the biggest and most powerful form of digital marketing. Search Marketing Expo – SMX® – has been the leading conference for SEO and SEM professionals for over a decade, helping thousands of search marketers from across the world boost conversions, increase sales, maximize awareness, and achieve their goals.
When Selecting DAM being strategic about your DAM selection will help you reduce risk and optimize your business operations.
Great resource of agile webinars and podcasts from the team at Agile Sherpas.
How useful would your household budget be if only you only tracked your biggest and most predictable expenses—like your mortgage or rent, utility bills, groceries, and car payments? It turns out that iTunes downloads, Amazon purchases, and Starbucks expenditures have a tendency to add up.
Mockplus has put together the top 20 UX design blogs and resource in 2017(updated) to help you understand the field of user experience design.
USE KPI LIBRARY TO
• Discover Key Performance Indicators based on industry and interests
• Ask advice and read expert articles on how to measure business performance
• Benchmark your business performance against industry peers
In an ideal world, red would be red, blue would be blue and green would be green. Often, when we’re designing, the ask is “make it blue and yellow”; which seems simple enough, but the truth is there’s thousands of options of blue or yellow. I’m not just talking light blue vs. dark blue, I’m talking CMYK, RGB and Pantone values and the seemingly unending options they each hold. It’s important to understand the difference between these color modes and when to use each.
Travis O’Neal, Director of Creative Operations at Aquent Studios, knows a lot when it comes to in-house creative teams versus creative agencies. We sat down with him to hear his opinions, experiences and predictions for the future of this dynamic landscape…
In operations, you’re figuring out the who, what, where, when and how everything gets done. You’re managing people, growth, systems, finance and more. Some things you may have all figured out. Others, maybe not so much. Wouldn't it be nice to get away for a few days and connect with your true peers? Join us this December to trade insights and experiences, while enjoying the charm and excitement of New Orleans.
Digital innovation will soon outpace the ability of many organizations to keep up, and have dramatic impacts on artificial intelligence and related skills, cultural advancement and processes becoming products.
We used to look forward to emails. When we received a “you’ve got mail” alert, we were eager to see who it was trying to communicate with us. Now, outside of work, most of us receive email overload and rarely want to open them. Vendors have it rough. If they want to engage with us, whether it be on the phone, by email or via the ads we see online, it better be worth our while. Consumers of today want personalized messages and offers, and if vendors can’t keep up with those demands, competitors are easily accessible and just a few clicks away.
Time is a tricky thing— particularly in the business world. If you don’t plan carefully and effectively utilize your resources, you could suffer from financial losses.
That’s where tracking your key metrics comes into play. (More on that in a bit.) If you want to effectively manage your company’s time, it’s critical to determine your agency utilization rate.
When Gartner’s annual CMO Spend Survey for 2017-2018 came out last year, many people seized on the fact that the money CMOs allocated for marketing technology had dropped to 22% of their budget, on average, down from 27% the year before.
Some took it as an unmistakable sign of an impending martech apocalypse (“martech-alypse?”).
October was all treats, no tricks, as the community traded resources and tools online and in-person at Owner Camp Colorado. Much of the conversation focused on finding the right people and building successful teams, as well as tools and resources to make organizations run more smoothly and profitably.
MarTech® is where forward-thinking marketers gather to discover, learn, share, and connect. It preps you to navigate the marketing complexities, technologies, and organizational challenges you face daily.
Whether you are starting out in your DAM implementation, or you have a mature system, making sure your application is as easy as possible to use is one of the most important things to keep your users engaged. Here are 5 tips that you can review to make sure your user experience is in tip-top shape!
A collection of recent DAM-related articles from around the web, sourced from DAM Federation member, Planet DAM.
Just posted, 2018 IHAF Silver Winners from last weeks SHIFT - IHAF Confrence and Awards show - November 8-9 | Boston, MA
Just posted, 2018 IHAF Gold Winners from last weeks SHIFT - IHAF Conference and Awards show - November 8-9 | Boston, MA
Just posted, 2018 IHAF Best of Show Winner from last weeks SHIFT - IHAF Conference and Awards show - November 8-9 | Boston, MA
Digital Asset Management is a complex business with many a moving part. The guys at Codified Consultants created a infographic to help navigate the choppy waters of DAM. MasterData lands, through Content Islands and on to the hot waters of the Datalakes
Listen to Nancy Price talking about Digital Asset Management
With DAM San Diego 2018 nearly upon us, here is some great content and insights from our awesome speakers that you may have missed in the run-up to the DAM community’s largest gathering on the West Coast. Whether you’re traveling to San Diego for the event or on your daily commute, enjoy something to make the journey go that little bit quicker.
From political and social unrest sparking controversial ad campaigns to the complexities of GDPR, 2018 has been a wild ride for CMOs. With all that turmoil, marketing chiefs may very well be looking forward to what the New Year has to offer.
Forrester has presented a preview of what to expect. The research firm today (5 November) released its CMO predictions for 2019, its version of a crystal ball for brands looking to better connect with consumers.
As the trend continues of brands bringing their digital marketing activities in-house, they’re increasingly turning to experts for ways to accelerate their team’s growth and development.
The difference, after all, between an in-house team that’s energized and knows both the company’s culture and its powerful differentiators, and the best practices in digital marketing, and one that’s mired in internal politicking and “business as usual” can make or break a company.
A little over a week ago, the ANA’s annual Masters of Marketing conference took place in Orlando. It’s a wonderful gathering of the best marketing minds in the business, sharing ideas, networking, and brainstorming for the future. The conference theme was “Driving Growth.”
The event echoed several trending topics covered at other meetings we’ve attended this year – i.e. the need for authentic storytelling for your brand; creating memorable experiences, rather than simply more content; and data and technology’s critical role in communicating efficiently and effectively with customers.
Zulu Alpha Kilo has created a list of ways they think that clients, agencies and, yes, even consultants, can improve the pitch process. Fun Video too.
There are clear advantages to an in-house marketing team. You own the data, you own the message, and you know the culture.
And then there are the challenges.
How do you keep ideas fresh? How do you maintain focus? How do you continue to learn?
Just as in nature we can’t “make” anything grow but only create the conditions where this occurs naturally, so it is with our teams. A garden’s growth is naturally increased with the right amounts of fertilizer, sunlight, water, and tending. A team’s growth is accelerated with the proper proportions of support and challenge and with the attitudes, strategies, and resources that enable it to reach and continually expand its potential.
Want to be a better content marketer? Don’t overlook the importance of technology.
Need convincing? Consider this: CMI’s 2019 B2B research found that 67% of the most successful content marketers rated their organization’s content tech proficiency as expert or advanced. Only 5% of the least successful content marketers rate their organizations as expert or advanced in content tech proficiency.
Listen to Chris DiNenna talk about Digital Asset Management with Henrik de Gyor
From time to time, every leader has to deliver news that is hard for employees to hear. Even when businesses are doing well, organizational and structural change is to be expected, and acquisitions, reorganizations, or policy changes can affect people’s jobs in ways that create feelings of fear, anger, or sorrow. Each employee wonders, “How will this change affect me?” or assumes, “Oh, this won’t be good! How am I going to get my work done?”
Announcements like these can be daunting. And they go awry if they’re insufficiently planned or poorly delivered. But by attending to the following crucial components, leaders can be ready to communicate the news in ways that will help recipients adjust well and recover as quickly as possible.
One of the most common questions I receive is how to manage a digital asset management system. This details everything from how to create the business case, to securing executive buy-in and financial support, to building the right team, deployment, roadmap and more. There is much to do, and it takes time. Many foundational layers will clamor for your attention as you prepare the roadmap of work.
Andrew Coulter-Enright is Vice President of Brand Design at Cole Haan. Henry Stewart sat down with him to learn more about his personal experiences within Creative Ops and what he plans to talk about at Creative Operations San Diego.
Williams Lea Tag group CEO David Kassler told the Festival of Marketing that agencies will struggle to meet the challenge around creativity and may not be in the conversation if their model is still built around TV.
Companies that use a large network of freelancers often waste significant time and money and risk legal action. Kalo has solved these challenges for Google, Airbnb, Expedia, MTV, The Economist and others by automating and standardizing freelancer on-boarding, management and payment.
Jenna Mac Killop recently became the first ever Customer Success Manager (CSM) at IO Integration. This means it is now officially her job to make sure that IOI customers stay IOI customers. It means making sure our clients have solutions, technologies, and services that are aligned with their desired outcomes. Fortunately, she has a team of smart, driven, innovative, and customer-minded individuals to help her help their customers. When marketing and creative operations leaders come to IO for advice on making technology decisions, she knows IO has the expertise and experience to guide them to the best solutions to meet their needs.
PPC stands for pay-per-click. Pay-per-click is a pricing model for online marketing where an advertiser pays each time its ad is clicked on.
The best-known platform for pay-per-click ads is Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords). Other platforms include Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, Outbrain, and Taboola. However, because of Google’s dominance in search engine traffic, when you hear people talk about PPC, they’re generally talking about Google Ads.
The Lego Group is making a big marketing push this holiday season with its first-ever Christmas campaign. Last week, the Danish toymaker debuted on social channels a 60-second spot that positions Lego as a conduit for a child's imagination; the video will air in 36 TV markets beginning on Monday. The spot was created by the Lego Agency, the brand's recently renamed in-house agency.
In a sweeping study of 2 million pieces of financial data and 100,000 design actions over five years, McKinsey finds that design-led companies had 32% more revenue and 56% higher total returns to shareholders compared with other companies.
For years, the design community has been working to build the case that its work has significant business value. A groundbreaking new study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company can put a number on the impact design has on business.
A compilation of 9 of the best website layout examples and ideas in 2018. These websites are also great places to get free web design templates.
It is true what they say about having only one chance to make a good first impression. Good website designs can take one’s breath away at first sight. That’s why homepage design matters a lot. And when it comes to designing websites, getting the layout perfectly is imperative.
The difference between good and excellent is action: this is a common refrain from organizational development experts. Technology and processes are among the key tools best-in-class Marketing organization use to take action and strive to ensure the work of Marketing achieves the expected outcomes successfully.
Wrike announced today at the Wrike Collaborate conference that Wrike for Marketers will include a guest review capability, enhanced proofing and approvals with Wrike Proof, and a Digital Asset Management (DAM) integration, Wrike Publish, which allows digital assets to be moved to and from either MediaValet or Bynder from within Wrike. The company also announced Wrike Resource, a new resource management tool, enabling Marketing Departments to meticulously manage and control team members’ workloads.
Companies are struggling to handle the growing volume and velocity of content, relying too heavily on a collection of disparate systems, applications and processes to build their customer experiences. Alongside internal departmental silos, the knock on effect of all these issues include fragmented customer journeys, and enormous inefficiencies for companies engaging with global audiences across multiple languages.
Great collaboration is an essential ingredient of every creative team but there comes a point when too much of it gets in the way of ‘real work’. Creative time is being eaten up with online chatter, email chains and confusing feedback cycles.
In this webinar, hear how Greg Hides, Group Director of Creative Operations at Geometry NA/Team Unilever Shopper (Screendragon client), manages to deliver more content, more quickly at less cost and some of their lessons learned along the way.
Having a beautiful color palette doesn’t matter if people can’t figure out how to navigate your design.
Anyone can pick great colors, but using colors to guide users through a new experience is an art in itself. As a designer, color is one of the most powerful tools in your belt.
Anytime you’re picking colors, your main goal should always be to increase the usability, and understandability, of your design. Here’s a quick guide on how to create color palettes that not only look good, but also make your designs easier for first time users to understand.
Today, marketers have new mandate: to craft a coherent and consistent customer experience without losing efficiency or scalability. But with an ever-increasing number of touchpoints and channels, the customer journey is more complex than ever. Creating the right content to cater to each stage, persona, and platform is a challenge that few organizations have mastered. A Content Marketing Platform is an essential solution for brands looking to invest in updated tools and process for producing the right offers to engage their customers.
When asked why he robbed banks, legend has it that Willie Sutton replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Get any group of internal agency leaders together and the talk quickly turns to talent. Where to find it. How to keep it. And, what motivates morale.
If your in-house agency is located in a market where there’s stiff competition for creative talent, these factors increase significantly.
Teams located in high-priced commercial real estate markets face the additional pressure of space availability.
What’s a leader to do?
In 'How to Win & Grow Client Relationships with Agency Operations' you will find out how to:
- Streamline your briefing process to increase speed-to-market
- Effectively implement workflows to accelerate content production
- Make traffic management easier by automating resourcing - assignment and forecasting resource capacity
-Improve budget control with predictive analysis of cost overruns and revenue projections
- Simplify building estimates and ensuring accurate SOWs go out to clients
- Win back time by automating manual project and finance reporting