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.

A commissioned study out today, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of MediaMonks, has found that the next phase of digital transformation is virtualization, a process that includes “creating distinct, digital environments in which customers can interact with brands.”

In the early stage of the pandemic, virtualization mostly took the form of livestreaming events. We’ve had our hand in making some: when we took BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival out of Prospect Park and onto the world stage, we were able to extend its audience globally while creating a more intimate viewing experience. With Pride marches canceled due to the pandemic, Netflix was able to unite the LGBTQ+ community through stories and culture, asking people to share stories of their own.

But these activations did more than simply try to recreate the in-person experiences that inspired them: they wielded technology and data to infuse experiences with new value that could only be achieved through digital.

This gets at the heart of what virtualization truly means. Marketers must re-energize their teams and deliver upon new opportunities to engage with consumers across channels and throughout the brand ecosystem. This requires brands to rethink how audiences connect with one another in virtualized worlds–environments in which people and brands increasingly exist today.

What Brand Virtualization Is — And Isn’t

A major distinction made in the research notes: “The pandemic has popularized the term ‘virtualization,’ but many efforts are just a small step.” Other areas of virtualization include virtual and remote production, connecting data across the customer decision journey and simply making the brand available to consumers across channels and platforms. These capabilities enhance every part of the brand ecosystem, including but not limited to events.

This makes the difference between experiences that feel inferior to their in-person counterparts versus innovations that enhance the customer experience, resulting in indelible experiences that weren’t possible before. When the pandemic hit, finding a way to recoup on existing event plans was top of mind for brands who wanted to show they can continue engaging with consumers digitally without missing a beat. This was an adaptation out of need; data from the study shows that “56% of decision makers reported shifting in-person events into digital ones.”

But brands shouldn’t stop there. Much like how digital transformation of old has put brands in a CX rut, failure to move beyond this initial investment in virtualization can make it tough to stand out and deliver differentiated experiences—for example, a livestream might look and feel no different than many other digital events or, in a worst-case scenario, a workplace videoconference.

Brands Are Facing an Urgent Need to Broadly Transform

Before the pandemic exposed gaps in digital customer experiences, brands had taken a slow and incremental approach to digital transformation that didn’t always deliver on its promise. “The past decade has been defined by perpetual digital transformation: brands put it in the ‘important but not urgent’ category, consultancies made money on consulting rather than creating, and brands focused on laying technology pipes over enhancing the user experience,” says MediaMonks CMO Kate Richling. “Then COVID happened, serving as a stress test for how transformed brands actually are––revealing just how effective, and necessary, brands’ investment in all this time, money and resources have been.”

In 2020, the very notion of digital transformation has transformed. Likewise, marketers are shifting their priorities to accelerate digital, better align brand promise with customer experience and more. Research from the study indicates a drastic change in marketers’ priorities between the start of 2020 and today, with new focus on digital experience offerings and omnichannel digital experiences to engage with consumers anytime, anywhere.

Next Steps on the Path to Virtualization

Moving beyond initial steps to virtualization requires brands to strategically rethink how audiences connect with one another in virtualized worlds—the space in which brands and consumers increasingly find themselves today. Brands must look toward building discrete ecosystems and environments that drive culture and connect with consumers on an emotional level.

Powered by data and infused with relevance, virtualization enables brands to deliver content on par with that which consumers actively seek out and enjoy. It’s through the totality of these experiences that consumers fall in love with brands, says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. “The hyperadoption of new user behavior has rapidly changed how we use tools to create and connect,” says ter Haar. “These changes offer an opportunity to become part of the conversation in interesting and meaningful new ways.” But they also require new skillsets, prompting marketers to switch focus and reskill their teams.

For example, Forrester’s study found that “Currently, only 23% of marketing leaders strongly agree that they are able to use analytics to understand how marketing’s performing, and only half reported their firms are using customer lifetime value as a key KPI to track their success.” This gap in data maturity makes it harder to follow the consumer across ecosystems—online and off—to lend value when needed.

As brands seek to build creatively differentiated customer experiences across investments in virtual events, extended reality and virtual content production, they must not only hire for new skillsets, but also negotiate new KPIs that focus on long-term brand health. The commissioned study, which you may access to read below, lays out several areas where marketers aim to invest and digitally mature as they finally deliver on the promises of digital transformation.

Take a bold step to brand virtualization.

There is one statistic that no one in the travel industry can ignore: tourism generated a revenue of US $1.7 trillion in 2018, according to the World Tourism Organization. From hotels, to casinos or airlines, the opportunities available for the myriad of players in this industry abound, and in one region in particular this is crystal clear: Latin America. In our most recent report, Destination LatAm: Trends Shaping the Travel Customer Experience in the Region, we focused on this part of the world to highlight the main trends that are shaping the present and future of tourism through a regional lens—viewed with a global perspective.

New technologies, digital transformation and disruptive new players are just some of the trends that are revolutionizing the travel industry all around the globe. But there is one thing that unites them all: a focus on delivering the best, most innovative customer experience. 

If brands want to survive in this increasingly competitive industry, they must better understand and address their customers’ needs, then deliver upon them with premier, differentiated digital experiences. But achieving this is a complex task that requires adopting new content and production strategies that are better equipped for personalization, positioned to meet users across the digital ecosystem.

Transformation is an enormous challenge not only for small, budget-limited newcomers but for established brands too. The investment needed to achieve this will test their capabilities at every level of the organization. Wanting to satisfy the customer’s needs will not be enough, as brands must develop agile processes and forge partnerships spread across the wider consumer journey to better support their users’ every travel need.

With customer experience in mind, brands can begin their digital transformation to make their travel as smooth as possible while enhancing their business.

Find out how customer experience is impacting and moving the travel industry in Latin America.