Dennis Pannuto, CEO Aha! Insight Technology

Let me see if I can illustrate the model, or framework, a bit differently.

The first step is to establish the teams. Right? That’s something that’s so often neglected. There’s got to be a lot of careful consideration of who’s part of that team.

I always say the first part of that team is the executive advisory team. I hate using the word, “Committees.” Committees just have such a negative feel to them.

The executive advisory team is key. That team is very instrumental at developing the framework of operations and defining strategies and expectations. They need to make sure that the framework is in place to support the initiatives across the enterprise.

Any company that’s going to engage in this kind of effort has to have the support at the highest levels. Why? Because it’s disruptive. You’re going to cause disruption throughout the entire culture of your business. And the only way you’re going to get the support to do that and be successful at it is if you have support at the highest level.

The first part is putting together that executive advisory team. The CMO has to be at the head of that group, or has to have a very strong designee that’s leading that group.

The next group that’s part of that is your implementation team. That team is actually going to implement whatever you’re going to do in this first phase.

Another key pillar there is what I call developing the business and technology model. Whether you’re sourcing one brand or two brands or whatever works–whatever makes sense in your particular environment. You’re going to develop business and technology models.

Part of those business and technology models-again-whether you’re dealing in the social media space or the traditional media space… You’re going to define those content strategies.
Another key part are your best practices–particularly your online marketing best practices. You’re going to spend time defining what those marketing best practices are. That will then lead to your search optimization modeling and how you define your taxonomy and vocabulary standardization.

Now, how do I optimize my workflow to remove all these unnecessary overheads that I may not even be aware of? I’m not going to implement any kind of technology solution on top of dysfunctional ways of working.

MM
For example, Dennis-a company might have an online group that’s a completely rogue maverick group that’s part of the overall marcom. They don’t really report into marcom and they don’t really share assets. They’re off doing their e-commerce or their online thing.

That would be an example of something that would have to be reintegrated back into more of a coherent marketing content strategy. Did I get that right?

DP
Perfect. Perfect example. Especially for global Fortune 500s. It’s so common. It’s amazing to me how there is a lack of sensitivity to that. You cannot have a global brand communications platform to leverage content via multiple channels, without being able to at least centralize a lot of the way content is managed.

MM
Another area we’ve run across has been this notion of localization centers.

DP
That’s right. That’s huge. I can certainly speak to that. I have some good experience with that. In fact, I’m working on a project right now with a healthcare company that needs to deliver localized content both online and in print.

In the past, I worked with one of the automotive manufacturers where online interactions initiated offline marketing materials. It was basically a web-to-print initiative with print-on-demand capabilities for personalization and better management of print marketing costs. Based on how you built your vehicle determined what materials you received in the mail. The printed material was the red minivan, the interior you’d selected and it was personalized, printed material. You kept your printing costs down because you were only printing what you needed but more importantly you were able to get insight as to what models and colors people were searching on to help manage future production.

Maybe you selected a red vehicle, minivan, gray interior and specific options. You typed in your zip code and other key data and we collected all of the data. And the longer the interactions, especially after the transactions, the more data we collected. Ultimately we wanted to get you into a loyalty program.

MM
Another thing, Dennis. That’s this notion of what I’ll call, “The end of campaigns as we know them.”

If you think about campaigns-campaigns really kind of reflect a flat-world 1.0 kind of world framework. That is to say, I’ve got this insight and I’ve validated it with some customer research. Some focus groups. Maybe some survey research. I’ve put together a strategy to execute on that insight. I’ve put together my marketing brief and my creative brief. I’ve got all of my agencies running around executing their respective creative briefs.

The problem today is that it’s no longer enough simply to start 6 months ago with insights. I’ve got to execute a campaign virtually every day.

So all of a sudden the whole mindset-the whole mental framework of a campaign begins to implode. It begins to simply no longer function because it’s no longer a linear process. It’s a 360-degree omni-directional brand interaction. And these brand interactions tend to evolve through a maturity lifecycle for the brand as it lives in the customer.

DP
That’s absolutely correct. The reality is that brands have to use the 360 model and get away from the traditional linear marketing approach.

MM
As it relates to marketing operations management, how does this change things?

DP
It’s going to have an effect there, as well. The reality is that marketers have to get into that 360-degree mentality. They’ve got to get into thinking about how to dynamically manage campaigns.

Maybe not all of the campaigns, but a larger percentage of that campaign is going to have to be managed dynamically. That is then-reciprocally-going to effect how marketing operations and management are done effectively.

MM
That’s my point, Dennis. It’s no longer a campaign, any more. It’s an engagement.

DP
That’s right. It’s a continuum, too. It just continues. It’s an engagement that is dynamic. It’s alive.

Marketers have so traditionally in the past driven so hard to a date. So hard to meet a date and deadline. That’s gone. The new company-the new marketer-gets that managing the relationship is much more important that managing to the campaign. Before managing the customer was more of an ideal, today is the reality of effective marketing. That is a major transformation that’s happening today.

MM
Maybe now what we need to look at is more of a suite of tools. Right? For the marketing operations. We’re no longer thinking in terms of campaign management. We’re really now needing to think in terms of engagement management.

Upstream, the part of engagement management is the whole multichannel marketing analytics-what’s going on out there.

The other piece of this whole engagement management is now scheduling. Scheduling not only staff internally, but a whole network of contractors and agencies and partners. Scheduling looms even larger and more strategic than project management.

The big area of innovation-both in terms of technical innovation and process innovation-is the interplay. The feedback loops between this multi-[inaudible] and engagement. That then starts to define the new core practices and technologies and disciplines of the effective marketing operations.