Experts in the inaugural issue of CORE Content weigh in on their digital strategies for sharing information across departments.
Marisa Tom
Marketing director, milk + honey
“Milk + honey, pre-pandemic and now during a pandemic, has always been very collaborative and transparent. While we do have separate departments—marketing, procurement, product and operations, spa operations and accounting—we have daily meetings where we’re sharing information so that we’re all in the loop about the status of the business. We’re sharing KPIs and are able to make informed decisions. We also utilize a platform that synthesizes a lot of data from sales to client acquisition to traffic numbers. It can pull anything that you want to look up into custom data cards. We’ve created different dashboards to serve those needs so that at any point, any of us can check those on a daily basis to see how things are faring. We can ask data-driven questions based on that. All of that information is readily available to all of us, no matter what department you work in.”
Kevin Mabley
Managing director of strategic services, Epsilon
“We assume that marketing is going to be on the front end of innovation. You need to translate that to business value, back to the products or divisions you support. Given all the innovation we have in data, tech and insights, we can now show people in dollars, market share or customer engagement how their marketing dollars are being spent in a much smarter way. It’s one thing to have insights. It’s another to have results. Marketers need to go to the groups they’re supporting and say: Look, this innovative thing we did with data or this interesting way we engaged consumers is driving bottomline results to the entire enterprise. It’s taking credit for the innovation but using language that the rest of the business will get excited about. When we have a multi-brand client and we pull together the best of what’s happening in one brand and share it with another, for example, the whole organization is a lot more powerful.”
Sean Peters
Chief strategy officer, Publicis Media
“We start by knocking down those silos in our own agency, because one of the biggest challenges and trappings of agency teams is that if you structure yourself exactly the way your client organization is structured, then you’re compounding silos. In our most progressive models, we’ve integrated and actually created a team where our strategy team, our audience team and our analytics team are all one group. They’re all led by the same person; they’re all integrated. And those people are responsible for a strategy that connects an audience through the outcomes that we can analyze. The second thing we do is we force it. We intentionally over-invest our time in sharing data and information. As the industry changes, as the landscape changes, we do not and cannot risk our client partners not moving fast enough in those areas.”
Hear more from Sean Peters in "The incongruous nature of walled gardens."
Susan Hogan
Senior vice president of research and measurement, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)
“We have shifted to regularly scheduled, mandatory video chat meetings where leads across the relevant disciplines present plans, provide status and vet information. Each lead is fully transparent about the intent of their initiatives, customer base, reason for investment and project timing. As a result, we benefit from a full, cross-discipline perspective and can move in lockstep to create and evangelize each initiative across the organization. This also ensures time and ability to co-plan communications, events and other tactics with greater efficiencies. Is it time-consuming? Only on the front end! Ultimately it is effective and efficient.”
Hear more from Susan Hogan in "Lessons from the DTC revolution."
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