Marketing procurement leaders are more than bean counters. From driving diversity to enabling innovative workstreams, there are several ways procurement teams drive impact within their organizations—thanks in part to standing at the heart of the relationship between a brand and its service partners.

Having worked on both the brand and the agency side, Maryl Adler, VP of Business Strategy at MediaMonks, explores the nature of these partnerships in a new report (download here). Titled “Striking the Balance: How Stronger Brand-Partner Relationships Fuel Long-Term Value,” the report details the ways that brands and their partners can achieve a truer sense of partnership through greater transparency, revised remuneration models and a commitment to shared success. Gearing up for the report’s release, we sat down with Adler to discuss some of the report’s main insights.

To start things off, what was your goal in writing this new report? What do you want brands—or perhaps our peers on the agency side—to come away from the report thinking?

Maryl Adler: Before I joined MediaMonks last year, I had spent over a decade working across categories in marketing procurement. Now on the agency side, I want to advocate for marketing procurement teams by identifying ways partners like ours can really help them drive impact and value beyond savings. This report is a starting step for those conversations, in which I want to help both brands and agencies realize what the other is looking for based on my experience in both of those worlds. Just like the title suggests, readers should finish reading with a better understanding of what a true sense of partnership is built on: a shared desire to push brands and their impact forward through creativity and innovation.

The premise of the report is largely inspired by Project Spring, an initiative by WFA that aims to help marketing procurement realize value beyond cost savings. As someone with a background in marketing procurement, how has Project Spring resonated in your procurement approach?

MA: Project Spring is a pivotal initiative that does away with the notion that procurement people are simply bean counters. Realizing that Procurement teams have the power to drive innovation and deliver value beyond cost, the WFA has done an excellent job drawing together content—articles, videos, reports and more—showcasing ways marketing procurement leaders at the world’s leading brands are doing just that.

I think in the past year we’ve had a chance to really see how true that is, with the important role Procurement is playing in helping brands adapt amidst disruption. When the pandemic began, many brands had to hold onto their budgets and seek out new efficiencies. There’s also been renewed interest in CSR, with brands seeking partners that reflect their social values. Procurement is at the heart of those relationships, and teams need partners they can trust to help them achieve those goals.

A critical idea in your report is that marketing should be treated as an investment, not a commodity. Could you explain the difference? What are some initial changes in mindset brands should take?

MA: Yes! Marketing’s impact and ROI are certainly measurable, but not in the same way that your average Procurement team would benchmark the cost of commodities. For example, digital assets can’t be compared like for like, and no two creative partners are truly comparable in quality of work. That said, I recommend a series of KPIs in the report that Procurement teams can use to better determine how well a creative partner’s work has contributed to the growth of their brand—and I think that question is what’s key.

Remuneration models are an important component of procurement. You advocate for performance-based models. Why is that so—and what stops brands from using that model?

MA: This again speaks to that idea of thinking about marketing as an investment. Ideally, your partner won’t just create deliverables—they’ll find ways that you can work more efficiently and effectively, stretching the value of your dollar. A performance-based model holds your creative partner accountable for their work but also incentivizes them to go that extra mile.

The report isn’t just about changes for brands to make; you also discuss how agencies must strive toward a stronger sense of partnership. What’s a key way that agencies should change?

MA: Overall, agencies and production partners would do brands (and themselves) a favor by being more transparent to their clients, as transparency is the foundation for a strong partnership. Many agencies treat cost like a black box, for example. But if agencies went beyond hourly rates and broke down how exactly cost is weighed against seniority and creativity levels of those who do the work, it would help brands make more informed decisions, provided they understand the value that each of these different roles bring to the table. Ultimately, a partnership is built on compromise between both sides—and to do so effectively, brands and agencies must both understand one another better. That said, transparency doesn’t mean asking agencies to share confidential information like their overhead and profit margin.

It’s time to build toward a truer sense of partnership.

In a fast-moving world with teams spread across a myriad of partnerships (and across the globe), effective communication and collaboration are critical to success. To ease the friction felt between teams, Firewood Marketing, now part of MediaMonks, recently released their guide to getting the most out of digital campaigns by communicating more effectively: “Talk.”

Because effective collaboration is a group effort that requires alignment of all teams, we thought, “What better way to discuss collaboration than by collaborating across MediaMonks and the partners we’ve merged with throughout the past year?” We picked the brains of leadership from across our various teams, getting their own take on some of the points and strategies readers encounter within the guide.

From the start, “Talk” identifies several things that businesses miss out on when teams don’t communicate as effectively as they could. Could you summarize the imperative for better communication?

Kristoffer Belau (VP Digital Media, Firewood): A lack of communication means you risk making errors: the creative isn’t to spec, the campaign is not targeting the right way, you’re competing with other parts of the company. These are all ultimately errors, and they come from this lack of coordination from the various parties involved. Team alignment mitigates these risks.

“Talk” offers a handful of strategies in different situations to establish stronger collaboration. What’s your go-to strategy?

Mansi Mehta (Business Development & Global Expansion, WhiteBalance): We don’t wait to align and join together teams. Often, brands and their partners face long gestation periods before the concept is refined. This is predominantly because conventional agencies do not have their go-to artists in-house, which risks causing a game of “telephone” that results in something other than what they first envisioned.

Vera Cvetkovic (Managing Director, BizTech): Over the years working with various clients in different verticals, we learned the importance of asking the right questions, clearly setting expectations and guiding our clients as trusted advisors. Great listening skills are also very important before finding the best future-proof solution that is aligned with clients’ specific requirements. Given the complexity of what we do that spans client silos of business, IT and marketing, we have to go the extra mile with our communication to be crystal-clear within the context of the audience. Each of the clients’ silos are likely to have a very different lens on the same problem and potential solution, so it’s our job to bring them all together and be that “translator” that binds the common strategy and execution.

The guide also cites internal silos as one of the greatest challenges that many organizations face. What are some strategies or benefits to getting everyone a seat at the table?

Lieseloth Wisbraun (Brand Partnership Manager, IMA): We host workshops with all teams to get everyone in one room. From there, we aim to be clear, stay nice and share knowledge.

Louise Martens (Global Head of Embedded Production, MediaMonks): Any concerns about silos can be nipped in the bud when establishing a team architecture. When the team is partially in-housed, for example, the lines naturally blur, making a really positive impact on the nature of the collaboration. It’s less scary to hand over power because it feels like one unified team.

Managing expectations is the true test of effective communication. How do you establish expectations from the start?

Jason Prohaska (Managing Director, MediaMonks NY): Understanding through education is one of the best ways to afford great collaboration together and on behalf of the client—and this isn’t something we treat as a one-time event. Everyone benefits when we can try, test and learn together with opportunities to dialogue openly throughout a project. We set these up at the outset as a mandatory part of the scope, letting us frequently revisit shared understanding across the arc of collaboration.

Martens:  I’m a huge fan of partnerships in which gaining efficiency is among the KPIs. This unlocks a totally different type of conversation, and both parties benefit from better workflows and ease of working. When these efforts gain speed, a great relationship naturally follows. Our first step to achieve this is diving deep into the brand. We establish brand ambassadors that truly live and breathe the brand.

Belau: We strive to offer a very clear vision of what the experience could look like when everyone pools together, aiming to make the process getting there as comfortable as possible for the client. On our end, this means getting everything nice and organized with no uncertainty, so the client still feels control in the situation.

There’s so much more to talk about.

As the world’s largest and arguably most influential tech trade show, you know we wouldn’t pass up the chance to visit CES this year—and this time we brought the whole family along, including our programmatic sister company MightyHive and parent company S4Capital. At the dawn of a new decade, this year’s CES placed industries at a crossroads, highlighting the challenges and opportunities that stand before them.

CES has become so big in recent years that it’s also sparked its fair share of side events, including C Space: Marketing and Advertising (devoted to disruptive trends that shape consumer behavior and advertising media) and the Brand Innovators’ Mega-Trends summit. MediaMonks had a presence at both events throughout the week, with S4Capital Executive Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell calling Brand Innovators “a CES within CES,” noting its more intimate feel. Below, let’s dive into some of the insights that surfaced across these events.

The Rise of the Challenger Mindset

At the start of the new year, MasterCard CMO Raja Rajamannar gave Brand Innovators some choice advice: “Adapt quickly, or you risk being left behind. Marketers need to stay constantly curious, take thoughtful risks and scale fast, as the pace of technology and innovation will not slow down anytime soon.”

Speaking of marketers’ role in envisioning the tech-infused brand experience, Silke Meixner (Partner, Digital Business Strategy at IBM Global Business Services) noted how “As MediaMonks thinks about putting emotion into the brand as a partner, marketers need to, too,” mentioning how AR presents an opportunity to achieve that.

Whether being more purposeful in adopting a challenger mindset, raising relevance with the aid of new partner models, or building value in emotion-driven experiences, this year’s CES offered ample opportunities for brands to build stronger connections with consumers through tech. As they embark on a new decade, the discussions at CES look optimistic for brands—and we can’t wait to help refine their big ideas and bring them to life.

It’s a mentality shared by Mitsubishi’s VP and CMO Kimberly Gardiner, who looks outside of her industry for learnings and inspiration. In conversation with Nick Fuller (SVP, Growth at MediaMonks) in a fireside chat at the Brand Innovators summit, she said, “We don’t look at auto competitors for inspiration—we look at DTC companies. We want to be a brand that challenges convention.”

This challenger approach has helped Mitsubishi—which enjoyed its second year in a row as the fastest Asian-owned auto brand—zero in on a dedicated audience. “We can’t outspend our competition, so we focus on a narrow, focused audience,” Gardiner said. “We want to target people that aren’t like everyone else.”

In his own fireside chat shared with MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar, Sir Martin also embraced the disruptive, challenger mindset by building a connection between S4Capital’s mission and Burning Man. “Burning Man reflects creative disruption—it’s about creating something and destroying it every year,” he said.

Achieving Growth and Personalization at Speed and Scale

For brands to successfully challenge conventions and adapt to the quickening pace of technological innovation, they must have the capabilities in place to scale up or pivot with speed. This is especially important given the rise of consumer hyperadoption, or the speed at which consumer behaviors shift, and further challenges traditional metrics of success.

At the S4Capital Storytelling Session at C Space, moderated by Marta Martinez (Director of Google Marketing Platforms), S4 leadership met to discuss some of the reigning challenges and opportunities that brands face while moving into the new decade. Louise Martens, Global Head of Embedded Production at MediaMonks, mentioned how the uptick in social conversation and tech adoption has quickened the pace at which brands must deliver.

“In the past, you may have had four big moments in the year, but now marketers have to turn around thousands of thousands of assets across formats and channels.” The solution? New partner models that satiate brands’ need for speed and scale: “That pressure on organizations has sparked new models like co-location, in housing and embedding.”

And as digital platforms become increasingly saturated, ownership and implementation of data become critical to success. “To win, brands must look at their ecosystem: measure it, test it and feed that data back inside to the creative,” says Martens.

Noting that personalization is table stakes in 2020, MightyHive CEO Pete Kim also mentioned the battle for first-party data and integrating it more closely with a brand’s creative strategy. “I hope to see continued progress as we forge the processes of the future—putting the right message and the right creative in front of the right person at scale.”

Recognizing Value in Emerging Tech

The showroom floor at CES offers its fair share of hits and misses, which presents brands with a sober reminder to ensure their investment in new and emerging tech provides real value, both to the business and consumers alike. Olivier Koelemij, Managing Director of MediaMonks LA, participated in a panel as part of the Digital Hollywood track at CES that sought to highlight the value that one such technology—augmented reality—can offer to brands. Titled “The Augmented/Mixed Reality Experience,” the panel included industry experts such as Magic Leap, Microsoft, IBM Global Business Services and more.

One of the key challenges to mixed reality that the group highlighted, perhaps counter-intuitively, is its fast-growing maturity. While tech leaps have made it easier to design and implement impressive digital experiences—take Depth API’s addition to ARCore, for example—they also raise the bar on what a truly assistive, value-added experience looks like. For brands at a lower digital maturity, the panel highlighted the role that partnerships can play in homing in on that value factor and bringing ideas into reality.

“There are many ways to define value,” says Koelemij. He discussed the Dark Knight Dive, a 4D VR experience that lets users “fly” through a virtual Gotham City while suspended in a skydiving wind tunnel, as a best-in-class example of what brands can achieve when going big on extended reality. “With this project, we were able to connect AT&T with the Batman IP that they’d recently acquired, and the press was all over it. Marketers must think about how they measure and define success.”

Today’s brands must be more agile than ever. For one, there’s the need to produce always-on, personalized content at scale to continually engage audiences with relevance. Add to that the many different touchpoints that marketeers must support with a consistent and coherent brand image, and it’s clear that they face a real need in developing more efficient ways of working internally or collaborating with external partners.

Many have found success with the SCRUM process. Originally a product development teamwork strategy, it has since inspired ways of working on a variety of tasks, including creative. Its popularity is in its agile process designed for adaptive problem-solving, in which projects are broken down into a series of short-term tasks (called “sprints”) to be completed within a month or quicker. This process enables teams to frequently assess mistakes to avoid in the future, continually optimize processes and switch gears at a moment’s notice when new needs arise.

SCRUM is a popular agile method, but it’s not the only one. In fact, at MediaMonks we operate in a structure that we call Accountable Agile, in which trust is placed at the fore of the relationship. It combines the best from a handful of processes like SCRUM and Waterfall to provide some added flexibility to how we work alongside brands. And the “accountable” in Accountable Agile isn’t just lip service; it guarantees we can provide the highest-quality product to brands by operating within the model that works best for them. Below are some of the considerations we take to ensure smooth, efficient operations and quality of service.

Set the Pace That Benefits Your Organization

Some organizations hear about the agile process and think that it means they can quickly innovate by supporting any new idea on short notice—but this approach is messy, if not unsuccessful, and isn’t at all what agile is about. While the agile process is designed to help organizations become more flexible, its success ironically results from its heavily organized and strategic structure, requiring organizations take some steps to prepare themselves for agile collaboration.

The process must begin by first identifying where your organization currently stands in its resources and organizational structure, which helps your partner begin planning how to best organize teams that fit. Take supermarket chain Jumbo for instance: its website and apps were handled by different teams, with only the website being supported in-house. As they sought to unify both environments in-house, we helped support by integrating UX and design team members directly into their development operations.

We organized efforts to make the most efficient use of resources while Jumbo scaled up their IT team. At first, the UX and design teams operated within their own silo to service all digital solutions. As the in-house team grew, we began transitioning UX and design into dedicated, multidisciplinary teams. The lockstep approach shows how brands can evolve their operations at their own pace.

On that note, brands that are just beginning to embrace an agile process must also consider how the initiative will integrate and work with other sides of the organization. Business Monk Joeri Lambert notes that “The rest of the organization may not be thinking agile yet,” and seeking approval from stakeholders across the organization—marketing, sales, operations and more—risks slowing down the overall process. That’s why Lambert says it is essential to have a project manager within your organization who has the power to approve within the sprint system.

Embrace the Iterative Process

So now that you know how a partner can help your team grow into an agile process, what about the flip side of the equation—how does it actually build upon a creative idea or business need? The sprint-based agile process is well equipped to iterate upon ideas, or even reorient into another direction by taking learnings from a post-mortem review.

Jumbo has a sizeable selection of wine and beer—so much that the supermarket’s customers could easily feel overwhelmed if they’re unsure what would pair with tonight’s dinner or fit their tastes. Jumbo wanted us to produce a beer and wine finder that would recommend a selection of drinks based on users’ responses to a handful of simple questions. Our UX and design personnel worked within their teams to produce the questionnaire.

But the process didn’t end upon the questionnaire’s completion; it was only the first level. We knew that the tool could become more personalized based on whether the user was a novice or an aficionado, changing the questions based on initial responses. For example, you might ask a novice whether they prefer something fruity or dry—but a seasoned wine drinker might have more specific tastes. “This was too advanced to implement in the first step,” says Lambert, “so we gave everyone a taste of it, and slowly grew towards a more advanced method of questioning.” This is a process that we call “zero-to-one”: rather than boil the ocean with a level-10 experience, we start small to yield quick results for brands, which they can then use to gain buy-in and ladder up to larger, longer-term goals.

Just like with scaling up operations, iterating and improving upon a creative idea requires your partner to really understand and identify the goals you have in mind through your agile efforts. This requires close, continual alignment between parties. “To set up such a project, you need to onboard someone with more expertise than a salesperson,” says Lambert. “With our production experience, we’re well capable of helping a client go ten steps faster, but it requires taking the time to sit in a room to discuss rather than sell.”

Getting into the Agile Mindset

Many brands face an innovation imperative: the reality that they must continually improve their user experience by embracing new, often experimental technologies—and that they must do so quickly. But those who want to innovate must be prepared for a constant state of learning and experimentation. As MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar says, “Real innovation lies in learning how to start matching your products and services to evolve with user behavior.”

A flexible partner can help you grow into a more agile operational setup by helping you translate business outcomes into actionable goals. “You’re helping the internal organization to begin to think more agile,” says Lambert on the role that MediaMonks plays in its SCRUM processes. “We help them gather these challenges and bring these stakeholders together.”

Agile and planning go hand-in-hand.