Plan for Success with an Integrated Production Partnership

Brands seek ways to deliver content faster, at-scale and at a lesser cost—all without diminishing quality. Pulling off each of these might sound impossible, though the integrated production partnership model is ideal for meeting these needs by lending organizations with the support and resources they need. Still, brands will have to take some initial steps to ensure success when working in these partnerships.

An integrated production partnership provides brands with a core team custom-built to their unique challenges and goals, whether it be producing content, optimizing work streams, easing workloads or platform support. Designed for the long term, integrated production partnerships start small but can easily scale up and flex out to meet new challenges and opportunities (for example, localizing in a new market). But despite the convenience of an integrated team, no major change is without growing pains. If you’re considering investing in an integrated production partnership for your brand, take some time to mull over these considerations for success first.

Be Open to Change

Because integrated production partnerships are built from the ground up to support brands’ unique needs, each one begins with a discovery phase that identifies key challenges and their solutions. This process raises questions that can range from fairly basic to quite specific, prompting brands to lay it all out and take a long, hard look at the way they operate.

One major step within this phase includes a data boot camp. Throughout this data audit, we work with the brand to understand what data is available and how it can be used more efficiently across levels of the organization. “Instead of letting data go into a black hole, we can choose a handful of the most necessary data points to focus on,” says Louise Martens, Head of Embedded Production at MediaMonks.

Unlocking data potential often involves revising work streams across an organization—for example, breaking down departmental silos—which requires a brand and its stakeholders to be open and honest about the challenges they face. But nothing is off-limits, and any challenge raised should be viewed as an opportunity.

Look Toward the Future

Once we’ve discovered the most relevant or needed key data points available, we can put them to action by cementing key KPIs that result in success. This takes us to the next major step in discovery: developing a forecast calendar. It can be difficult for brands to extend their view six months to a year into the future, especially when business decisions or priorities can change at a moment’s notice.

Ter Haar asks this all the time: “Will we be relevant in X?” That X could be years, months, or even weeks in the future. While it once was easier for brands to forecast far ahead, that distance is rapidly shrinking, which can be scary for an organization to process. “Because some brands face challenges that far into the future, they may have a fear of locking in a group of people for long-term tasks,” says Martens, “so we keep our core team lean. Flexible and able to tap into the larger MediaMonks talent pool when needed, this new model alleviates any retainer fear that brands might have.”

The process also helps us learn whether the nature of the work is more ad-hoc or rigid in scope. This is where the benefits to an integrated production partnership become clearer to brands: it allows your organization to become more agile and adaptive for when the going gets tough. Forecasting can help map out possible opportunities or capabilities that might become needed in the near or distant future.

“We don’t do this to nickel and dime our services, but to establish a plan that tackles a key issue with the opportunity to scale out organically,” says Martens. While this might sound like typical program management, what makes our partnership unique is the closeness of both parties involved. “Any efficiency we enable benefits us just as directly as our partners,” says Martens. “We want them to be better at their jobs.”

Learn to Love Automation

You can’t push for greater efficiency within your organization without talking about automation, but teams often bristle at the thought of it. And it’s easy to understand why: for creatives, automation can often feel limiting. “Marrying the systematic approach with creative freedom is a general challenge and a natural point of friction,” says Martens. But automating rote tasks and processes can allow for more cost-effective creative without sacrificing quality.

Partners who seriously want to increase their efficiency should view automation as a creative advantage, not hindrance. With automation, says a Forrester report detailing the AI marketing renaissance, “CMOs will be able to let their teams refocus their energy on core marketing activities such as brand strategy, creative thinking, new product innovation, and business models.” This allows creative teams to devote more time to complex, rewarding creative tasks rather than repetitive ones.

As discussed above, an embedded services team can help you define the data most essential for optimizing your output. But how effective that strategy will be boils down to whether your team is prepared to embrace new creative frameworks using automation. For what it’s worth, pushing the limits of machine learning to make creatives’ lives easier is a key motivation for our experimental creative technologists at MediaMonks.

Include Stakeholders from Across the Organization

Forming an integrated production partnership means altering the way your organization works, and therefore requires input from people across departments and levels of the business. “The more colorful the room is, the more points of view you have for building the operation in a tailor-made way,” says Martens. A diverse range of viewpoints also makes it easier to pinpoint problems and KPIs for the core team to tackle.

Often, this places your brand ambassador into the role of mediator, ensuring that all sides of the equation are kept happy or being heard. A great example of this is the point raised above about automation: procurement might love the cost-saving benefits of the initiative, while creatives may push back. But by distilling everyone’s concerns to arrive at a solution, brands can end up with a creative framework that allows for cost-effective, insights-driven content that engages consumers at scale on an individual level—a win for everyone.

“A typical agency might say ‘It’s my way or the highway,’” says Martens, “though our view is that the plan is only relevant when built for the brand.” Gauging pain points among several stakeholders from across the organization allows us to work with brands to prioritize the most pressing needs for efficiency.

Whether your brand struggles to support a continual stream of content or needs long-term platform support, an integrated production partnership helps to zero in on goals, discover opportunities for efficiency and plug in any talent gaps your team might face. After considering the points discussed above, you’re ready to begin envisioning how such a partnership can enhance your organization.

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