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  • Free yourself from Excel

    Free yourself from Excel

    People talk about ‘Death by PowerPoint’, but the biggest killer in marketing is not PowerPoint, but its Microsoft stablemate: the Excel spreadsheet.

    Among the numerous big brands and retailers we consult with about helping them make their marketing operations more efficient, the most commonly occurring statement I hear is, “can you do anything about all these spreadsheets?” – usually accompanied by pulling out of hair and a sallow-faced, wide-eyed look of despair.

    As it turns out, there is something we can do about it – but more about that later. First, what is it that makes marketers refer to their campaign spreadsheets by such affectionate names as the Spreadsheet of Doom or the Squares of Despair?

    The first horror is version control. When companies run their campaigns and allocations via spreadsheets, there’s necessarily a requirement for several departments to be involved. Legion are the stories of departments all working off different versions, leading to the wrong assets being briefed, the wrong amount of print being ordered, and the wrong allocations being sent to stores.

    Excel almost encourages easy mistakes. Delete one figure linked to a formula, and you can throw whole rows of important data out.

    Checking and checking

    There are also tortuously long checking processes to ensure all the information that has been put into a master spreadsheet by everyone from legal to HR to procurement is accurate and matches up.

    “I’ve got a marketing degree,” I was told recently, “but I’ve just spent my afternoon running my finger over a spreadsheet.”

    When you couple Excel issues with communications via email, with all the lack of visibility for anyone not in that particular chain, emails going into junk folders, and people never being able to find the right email, even when they have a vague recollection of receiving it, you have a recipe for errors and vast unnecessary duplication of effort.

    Some of our recommendation to companies looking to us to help drive efficiencies is about process; the rest is about technology.

    MRM efficiency

    In an efficient marketing operation, the two go hand-in-hand. Manual campaign planning, email briefings and approvals, assets held on suppliers’ hard drives, store allocations spreadsheets (and guesswork) – all of these and more can be replaced by an efficient and flexible MRM platform.

    Everything you require to run your operation is in one place, accessible to anyone with permissions, and with only one version of any data – the one within the system. All briefings, amendment and approval information is held in an easily accessible part of the software, rather than in the middle of a virtual forest of emails.

    With the right MRM system, you can say goodbye to the Spreadsheet of Doom altogether – and get on with doing all those nice strategic things you dreamed of when you were doing your marketing degree.

    Until next time

    Simon Ward

    About Simon Ward

    Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.

    Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.

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  • Is Sir John Hegarty right?

    Is Sir John Hegarty right?

    Marketing Week recently quoted advertising guru Sir John Hegarty as saying, “Brands are populated by people who don’t understand the basics of marketing.”

    Is he right? And if so, is this the whole story? Simon Ward discusses.

    Is Sir John Hegarty right?

    Marketing Week quoted advertising guru Sir John Hegarty as saying that brands are “populated by people in thrall to technology” who “don’t understand the basics of marketing.”

    The analysis seems a bit harsh.

    Yet the argument is not without merit. He goes on to say, “big brand-driving ideas are few and far between”, and in this he makes a fair point.

    However, while some of the blame for this may well fall on a lack of understanding in some marketing departments, my experience of dealing with numerous big brands is that the greatest blame must be laid at the door of growing complexity, not poor understanding.

    The proliferation of digital channels and calls to connect with consumers across every single one, while guaranteeing compliance and accurately assessing the ROI of each, can leave marketers drowning in admin and processes.

    As Sir John says, “creativity is fundamental to business growth”. But how is a marketer to come up with and constantly adapt big ideas when they’re swamped by process?

    The sad truth is there are so many other calls on a marketer’s time because others in the C-suite prioritise instant ROI and feedback over pursuing long-term strategies and the much-needed big ideas. Few marketers have the time to prioritise the goals Sir John correctly identifies as being so important.

    Unfortunately, with pressure on budgets and the demand for almost 24-hour reporting, things are not likely to change any time soon.

    The answer, therefore, has to be to adapt to this changed environment. To find a way of enabling marketers to focus on the big idea without sacrificing the process and reporting that the board and shareholders demand.

    The first thing that is required is to split the marketing function into those elements that are fundamental to developing creative strategy and those that are based around the mechanics of procurement, execution and reporting.

    The second is to take everything in the latter category and automate and outsource the hell out of those processes so that, as far as possible, they’re removed from the marketer’s desk.
    Technology has caused the problem; technology can provide the answer – whether it’s managing the mechanics of campaigns, dealing with procurement, or providing you with real-time campaign reporting via your mobile.

    When marketers are freed of those burdens, they will have the opportunity to show their mettle – to spend their time driving the brand forward through creativity.
    Only when that happens will we truly know whether the fault lies in the dominance of process, or with the marketers themselves.

    Until next time,

    Simon Ward

    About Simon Ward

    Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.

    Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.

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  • Making Local Marketing Work

    Making Local Marketing Work

    Simon Ward explains how, by using Media Centre and SP, Inspired Thinking Group has solved the conundrum of local marketing.

    As your company grows, and operations silo, having a complete view of your marketing activity becomes increasingly difficult. You may find ways of running a slick national marketing operation, but what about your local outlets?

    Local stores make up large retailers’ bricks and mortar frontline, and progressive companies are finding that investing a bigger part of their budget in local marketing can reap enormous benefits: basing campaigns on local knowledge of customer demographics and preferences can deliver big ROI rewards.

    The downside is you can lose visibility and control. Keeping your national activity joined up is tough enough, but how do you ensure your local managers come up with intelligent local marketing strategies and produce only on-brand assets?

    Added to that, where are your local managers going to find the time to run a multichannel marketing campaign? They’re too busy trying to run a shop. This is the conundrum: if the only way you can get local marketing to work is to put in huge amounts of resource from central marketing, you might as well go back to a one-size-fits-all national strategy.

    Making local marketing work

    Over the years, Inspired Thinking Group has had a lot of time to work out how to unravel this knot. We work with brands that have large retail outlets – including car manufacturers Renault and SKODA – and those with smaller outlets, such as Weight Watchers, whose local leaders and meetings we support.

    In every case, we have helped devise local marketing programmes that increase local footfall and sales, use guaranteed compliant assets and give complete visibility to the central team. As a bonus, local managers report increasing satisfaction with national marketing support as the programme matures.

    How have we done it?

    Key factors in local marketing success

    Neither technology nor local marketing expertise on their own can unravel this knot. Both are required – and they have to work seamlessly together.

    First, the technology. Local and national operations need a simple-to-use platform that stores all assets and can be viewed by all required parties. The software needs to be able to schedule campaigns, keep track of budgets and handle bespoke requests.

    In 2010, we found exactly the software we needed in Media Centre by Total Marketing Services. Media Centre is an advanced marketing resource management platform built around core modules – Asset Library, Local Marketing, Workflow Manager, and so on – so marketers only need to invest in the functionality they need.

    We were so impressed, we – sorry about the cliché – but we bought the company.

    Six years of development later, Media Centre now sits at the heart of many of our clients’ marketing operations, with the Local Marketing module providing the means for local managers to run geographically relevant, compliant campaigns, with full visibility for central marketing.

    Our Status Pro (SP) reporting app provides realtime campaign data on any desktop or mobile browser, combining Media Centre data with information from numerous other sources, including Google Analytics and social media activity, providing the ability for central marketing to drill down into the data to a granular level.

    Central marketing creates and constantly updates a comprehensive suite of multichannel local templates that reflect national assets. These are stored in the client’s Asset Library and can be accessed through any browser. Every local manager can view, resize, amend and order any of the templated assets.

    Service support

    With the technology in place, the next thing is to look at service support. Local managers may not have the time or marketing expertise to run brilliant campaigns, so we provide expert local consultants who research the location, study the results of previous campaigns and recommend channel strategies for each outlet.

    To ensure local executions are inexpensive, we also provide a Dynamic Template module in Media Centre that enables easy customisation of templated artwork directly through the browser. We also run a 24/7 artworking studio, dedicated to producing bespoke customisations of on-brand assets.

    Our QC team ensures compliance of bespoke artworks, and all briefing, approvals, bookings and requests for quotes are handled through Media Centre.

    An ITG account manager or account team works full time at the client’s head office, and is the first point of contact for all Media Centre and local marketing activity.

    The result is a constantly innovating local marketing programme that provides increased ROI, is on-brand, and mirrors national executions. With the extra advantage that it requires no painful admin input from either local managers or national marketers, enabling them to spend their time doing what they do best – developing creative marketing campaigns or running stores.

    Read our Renault local marketing case study here

    Until next time,

    Simon Ward


    About Simon Ward

    Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.

    Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.

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  • A day is a long time in technology

    A day is a long time in technology

    Simon Ward explains how a day can make a big difference to marketers – especially when it’s dedicated to innovation.

    I’ve always been immersed in technology. As CEO of SP Group’s digital arm, I was at the cutting edge of what was on the face of it a very traditional industry – printing.

    At ITG, our core offering is based around automation technology, and we’ve just taken our first steps into the big data arena, with our recent addition of ITG Creator.

    But even people who run technology companies can struggle to keep up with every development – the time investment can be daunting, especially as not every invention will make it off the drawing board.

    Pace of change in technology

    It took decades for telephones to reach 50% of the population. It took five years for mobiles to achieve the same penetration. Innovation is not only getting faster, so is its adoption.

    Companies with a competitive technology edge are better placed to attract customers than those who are baffled by technology. But there are so many areas of innovation out there, how is a marketer to find the time to keep up with them all?

    We decided to help.

    Over the past week, our offices have been teaming with clients. This was an innovation for us – generally we only entertain one or two clients at a time. However, over 140 clients, most of them marketers, visited our offices together, but it wasn’t just to see us. We’d invited some guests.

    An appetite for innovation

    Augmented reality, 3D printing, virtual reality, 360 degree cameras, interactive video, HyperSound technology – there are a huge number of technologies designed to improve retail customer engagement. We sought out the best, and invited their keepers to demo them for our clients.

    Marketers from Heineken, Puma, Tesco, Boots, Sainsbury’s and numerous other retailers and brands moved from area to area, scrutinising innovation after innovation, interrogating the technology, and putting faces to buzzwords.

    It’s not the most obvious tactic for a technology company, to showcase other people’s products alongside your own. But building a partnership with your clients is about more than simply selling your wares – it involves providing added value, just as they aim to give added value to their customers.

    It was an exceptionally successful day, eliciting numerous positive comments. But perhaps the most satisfying were from those who said, “I knew about this technology, but until I saw the demo I didn’t realise it was for us.”

    This shows that even marketers who keep up with technological innovations rarely have the time to delve deeply enough to see all the angles. Even when you attend technology exhibitions, you often spend a lot longer tracking down items of interest than you do experiencing the innovations.

    A single day spent looking at a dozen specially selected technologies, with the ability to question experts in a relaxed and engaging environment, can give you a significant catch-up.

    It’s certainly something we’ll be doing again.

    Until next time

    Simon Ward

    About Simon Ward

    Simon Ward ITG – Simon is the founder and CEO of pioneering technology-led marketing company, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). ITG delivers best-in-class marketing software, procurement and studio services to dozens of blue-chip clients, including Audi, M&S, KFC, PUMA and Heineken.

    Simon Ward SP Group – Prior to ITG, Simon founded SP Digital in 1998, and in 1999 bought SP Print to form SP Group, creating innovative marketing and point of sale displays for some of the world’s best-known retailers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and Calvin Klein.

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