While digital marketing is changing the way we advertise and communicate, some marketing and advertising processes seem stuck in the ’50s. Many agencies still use physical job bags and processes that resemble the industrial age rather than digital age ways of working, including more collaborative approaches and video conferencing replacing face-to-face meetings. As more tools, automation, and bots impact marketing departments, those that don’t adopt a future way of working will not only be left behind but become alarmingly less effective as they waste time doing tasks that can be done more efficiently.
As Vodacom SA continues its digital transformation drive, a key goal is to increase the pace of commercialisation of ideas into revenue-generating products. An important component of this is the faster turn-around of marketing from brief to campaigns deployed in market.
Knowing that a new agile marketing approach would increase demands on their marketing eco-system, the Vodacom marketing team identified the need to transform their systems and processes to increase the pace of work. Partnering with DYDX, a global product, and service design practice, a human-centered design approach was taken to reimagine how marketing could operate.
“New tools and ways of working are often scary even though they may have great benefits,” says Nevo Hadas, Managing Partner at DYDX. “Behavioural psychology shows that due to loss aversion, people are very sensitive to what they will lose, even if what they will lose is not really solving their problem well. We designed the onboarding and training processes to be iterative and support change management so that the users felt they had mastery over their changing environment.”
Within six months, seven agencies and four internal teams were on-boarded. The results have not only enabled better communication and faster issue resolution with agencies but are also providing key benchmarks for how efficiently the eco-system works, wastage reports and managing key SLAs. Marketers and product managers have better control over the process and save significant time from automated status views and exception reporting. Compliance also improves, reducing audit complexities.
“By mapping out the processes using service design, we saw a significant portion of time was lost in briefing, scheduling, coordinating and approving of creative work. Our new processes centered around reducing this waste.” Said Lana Strydom, Executive Head of Online and Self Service at Vodacom. While the new systems have a number of objectives and outcomes, most important is to achieve a better creative outcome by enabling agencies to spend more time in the creative processes and less time in admin or waiting for approvals. Delivering a better creative product to the market quicker.