Before it merged with T-Mobile US in 2020, Sprint was the fourth-largest network operator in the United States, providing wireless services to over 50 million customers. While, like its competitors, most of Sprint’s sales were transacted either over the phone or in-store, company leadership knew that more and more customers would be interacting with the brand online—and expecting more from those interactions. To enhance the company’s ability to respond to the market in real time and curb rising advertising and customer acquisition costs, Sprint sought to revamp its digital marketing operations and gradually move media planning and buying in-house.

The Sprint team was confident that being closer to their marketing data and execution would help them win in an extremely competitive telecom space, but there were few examples of other companies having made such a change. Given our deep Google ecosystem knowledge and flexible service model, we were selected to partner with Sprint in facilitating the transition.

After a very brief audit phase, we took over Sprint’s media management and embedded our teams within the Sprint and Boost Mobile digital marketing organization. We spent the first year laying the groundwork for an effective digital marketing team—rebuilding their campaign structure, reporting and best practices. We then spent the next 18 months assisting with recruiting and hiring efforts, and then trained in-house teams to self-sufficiency.

Before Sprint was able to more effectively activate its enormous wealth of customer data, it was crucial to gain transparency into Sprint’s digital advertising technology fees, data fees and inventory costs. We worked directly with Sprint’s external vendors to identify opportunities to decrease tech and data fees and eliminate waste from audience oversaturation. These efficiencies allowed Sprint to reduce overall ad spend while continuing to increase working media.

With transparent service models and media spend in place, Sprint was ready to run with its wealth of marketing data. We oversaw the consolidation of disparate data sources into in-house data lakes, allowing for significantly more granular segmentation and targeted programmatic campaigns. Sprint’s newfound laser focus on precise and meaningful audience segmentation helped the brand realize increased efficiencies in its programmatic media spend and stronger campaign performance.

In the early stages of the project, Monks was on-site twice a month—and more frequently as the in-housing phase approached—to facilitate clear lines of communication with Sprint’s project stakeholders and familiarity with the personalities and working styles of auxiliary team members across web analytics, design and website development. We worked hand-in-hand with the team to manage the transition from their external agency and to refine their digital program. We helped identify new KPIs and measurement models, found ways to reduce waste, and created an audience framework that attracted higher-quality traffic. We also developed a multi-touch attribution model for better insights and built a system for real-time reporting.

After proving the early results of bringing digital media in-house, we helped Sprint with the next phase of the journey—assisting in the design of their team structure, creating candidate profiles to identify the right talent to handle digital media planning and buying. In-person training—literally with hands on the keyboard together as key capabilities were turned over—ensured a smooth transition from Monks to Sprint team members.

Beyond the benefits Sprint experienced over the course of the relationship, in 2020, we had the privilege of working with the Sprint digital team and Harvard Business School to create a case study on Sprint’s digital transformation success. We are humbled that our work is included in the Harvard curriculum for future business leaders.

Bayer’s Consumer Health Division brings consumers some of the world’s best-known and most trusted over-the-counter medications, nutritional supplements and other self-care products. In 2018, Bayer Consumer Health US sought to make its digital advertising more responsive, effective and cost-efficient. So the company embarked on a plan to bring digital ad operations in-house. 

The goal of transitioning to an in-house shop was to improve performance and transparency while reducing fees, improving speed to market and developing data insights for smarter decision-making. They also wanted to broaden and deepen digital expertise across their organization. To execute on this vision, Bayer partnered with Monks to support the transition and help build out the in-house team and systems.

Our team worked with Bayer to develop a two-phased approach to digital media self-sufficiency. In phase one, we took interim control of campaigns and technologies across two dozen brands while we helped Bayer establish frameworks and processes for digital ad buying that would drive efficiency at scale.

As a first step, we helped Bayer gain access to underlying campaign data and identify opportunities to reduce or eliminate fees from digital media buys. Bayer brand expertise, coupled with access to data, immediately unlocked opportunities for the team to quickly gather insights and make them actionable. Data fueled the creation of a highly complex but unified taxonomy to assist with analysis and provide a consistent data feedback loop. We integrated cleaner data into dashboards, giving the Bayer team fast and easy ways to interact with data and uncover insights. With ownership of media costs, weekly sales, profit data and competitive reports, the Bayer team was empowered to make optimization decisions that would have the most meaningful impact.

To build a self-sufficient team and ensure a smooth transition, we worked with Bayer to create and establish job descriptions, communication flow and performance and workflow standards. We implemented a staggered transition plan, with a period of overlapping support, so Bayer could hire and train the necessary talent to take over day-to-day ownership of media, search, social, programmatic, analytics and strategy—all achieved two months ahead of schedule.

Given the success of the Consumer Health engagement and the strength of our partnership, Bayer sought Monks’ advice and support on digital transformations for the Pharma and Crop Science divisions.

Digital marketing is most effective when you know how to whet consumers’ appetite and play to their taste—and this takes on an entirely new relevance when you’re a global snacking brand like Mondelēz. By unlocking data from silos and transforming digital ad measurement, we helped Mondelēz build better consumer connections through data.

Mondelēz wanted to gain new insights into consumer buying habits and the effectiveness of its digital advertising, though silos inhibited its digital media team from building advanced data sets and running higher-order analytics.

 

First, we helped Mondelēz standardize one new global campaign-naming taxonomy—making it easier to compare apples and oranges, salty and sweet. Next, we brought together cross-platform media data and offline sales with Google Cloud. This automated, cloud-based approach was not only faster—it was also more flexible than legacy reporting methods, giving the brand a lifetime competitive advantage.

With multiple retail and marketing partners, it was difficult for Mondelēz to standardize digital measurement—a common challenge for CPG brands when retailers hold much of the relationship with customers.

 

We consolidated more than a baker’s dozen of Mondelēz ad server networks into four global regions, and established data governance standards to advance reporting data. We then built real-time spend and performance dashboards so its global teams could quickly access insights that previously took weeks to compile.