Corralling Creatives: Driven by Marketers...A Three Part Series: Procurement for Rogue Marketing
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses.' - Henry Ford It seems counterproductive to put Creatives in a box. They are meant to be thinking outside the box. Yet finding a way to work outside the box when it comes to sourcing the marketing function can be a challenge. At the SIG Global Summit in Fort Worth, I was lucky to be able to sit in on a session given by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and LogicSource. UFC's marketing production team was in a grudge match with managing terabytes of digital assets while attempting to responsively support a rapidly growing global brand. With over 31 major events in 2012 alone, the vast accumulation of assets and dramatic increase in workload put the creative and procurement teams in a stranglehold. The UFC's internal marketing department took off their gloves and took up the fight partnering with LogicSource's OneMarket solution to create a system that automated the end-to-end process from creative requests complete to sourced services. Contracts and pricing on the backend for services were negotiated and monitored within the cloud-based system, greatly decreasing time and money spent on the bid process out of the marketing department. The deals were in place, the pricing locked in, and at the click of a button, video production or print work could be bought and executed seamlessly. By taking a year to fine-tune, document process and implement the system, the UFC put chaos into submission through the integration of digital asset management and eProcurement, cutting significant time out of the creative approval and procure-to-pay processes while enabling a lean buying team to more effectively manage its complex marketing production spend categories. This was a marketing driven project, however, and its success was driven by the fact that they had buy-in from the marketing side to begin with. What does a company do when the marketing department won't adhere to an 'approved' portfolio of services and vendors? In the next part of this series, I'll share the details from a conversation with the TELUS procurement department and find out how they lassoed their marketing team successfully.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses.' - Henry Ford It seems counterproductive to put Creatives in a box. They are meant to be thinking outside the box. Yet finding a way to work outside the box when it comes to sourcing the marketing function can be a challenge. At the SIG Global Summit in Fort Worth, I was lucky to be able to sit in on a session given by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and LogicSource. UFC's marketing production team was in a grudge match with managing terabytes of digital assets while attempting to responsively support a rapidly growing global brand. With over 31 major events in 2012 alone, the vast accumulation of assets and dramatic increase in workload put the creative and procurement teams in a stranglehold. The UFC's internal marketing department took off their gloves and took up the fight partnering with LogicSource's OneMarket solution to create a system that automated the end-to-end process from creative requests complete to sourced services. Contracts and pricing on the backend for services were negotiated and monitored within the cloud-based system, greatly decreasing time and money spent on the bid process out of the marketing department. The deals were in place, the pricing locked in, and at the click of a button, video production or print work could be bought and executed seamlessly. By taking a year to fine-tune, document process and implement the system, the UFC put chaos into submission through the integration of digital asset management and eProcurement, cutting significant time out of the creative approval and procure-to-pay processes while enabling a lean buying team to more effectively manage its complex marketing production spend categories. This was a marketing driven project, however, and its success was driven by the fact that they had buy-in from the marketing side to begin with. What does a company do when the marketing department won't adhere to an 'approved' portfolio of services and vendors? In the next part of this series, I'll share the details from a conversation with the TELUS procurement department and find out how they lassoed their marketing team successfully.