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AlixPartners stays ahead of the marketing value creation curve by filling long-neglected gaps
Conventional wisdom has long held that a healthy marketing budget is essential for retailers and consumer brands to increase sales, profits, and brand favorability. As such, CMOs tend to avoid bringing procurement teams on board for fear of disruption, but in today's inflationary era, this strategy is no longer an option.
Rather, marketing procurement is more important than ever, putting pressure on these teams to become more strategic, tech-savvy, data-driven, and agile. AlixPartners, a global management consulting firm, creates marketing value by leveraging innovative sourcing methods and a roster of leading industry partners who look at marketing holistically and drive both bottom-line and bottom-line improvements. We are changing the way companies think about
libra barian
“At AlixPartners, we want to exceed our customers' expectations by implementing a unique combination that drives marketing efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness,” said one of the company's senior vice presidents of procurement transformation. Libra Varian told BOSS. Prior to joining AlixPartners, Varian led his global marketing sourcing at Tiffany & Co., where he was able to generate millions of dollars in marketing value while maintaining the brand's luxury feel.
To increase media efficiency, companies need to modernize their approach with procurement teams in the driver's seat. Traditionally, procurement teams have not had a seat at the table, so this is a big change. “We help clients understand the nuances of media buying and educate them on how to drive efficiencies across the complex media ecosystem,” said Varian.
For example, companies are finding that their programmatic media purchases include a significant proportion of “advertisement-only” websites created by AI bots that earn advertising revenue solely by offering low CPMs. You may not be aware that it is being used. AlixPartners has contract language with media partners that protects clients from purchasing media that does not meet viewability or brand safety standards.
Media Marketing Compliance, a leading marketing financial compliance audit firm, realizes significant efficiencies through media and non-media contract compliance audits. These audits allow advertisers to maximize the value of their marketing investments, improve operational efficiency, and ultimately strengthen relationships with their agency partners.
From complex media supply chains, ad fraud, brand safety concerns, funneling your own private media agencies, to simply mismanaging an advertiser's marketing budget, there are countless challenges advertisers face today. Among the challenges, auditing agency contract compliance is an important one. An essential tool to ensure transparency, accountability, and financial health in the advertising ecosystem. Media Marketing Compliance's senior auditors come from the agency finance industry and analyze financial transactions, assess an agency's compliance with negotiated terms, and assess billing without impacting the client-agency relationship. Identify inconsistent or non-compliant agency actions. Advertisers can then take most, if not all, of the audit results back into their business, ensuring they only pay for the services agreed upon in writing. This will deliver significant cost savings and significant added value through operational and contractual enhancements, fostering a culture of excellence and continuous improvement across both organizations.
As advertisers grapple with this increasingly complex media and marketing landscape, the benefits of a marketing agency contract compliance audit go far beyond mere financial scrutiny. The imperative of transparency and accountability for government agencies has never been more salient. Embracing rigorous compliance audits is not only a prudent business practice, but is paramount to our commitment to excellence and integrity in our advertiser and agency contractual partnerships.
Content creation offers another immense opportunity to increase marketing efficiency. CMOs are faced with the challenge of creating more creative assets than ever before to achieve their omnichannel marketing plans. Financial management in content production is typically a black hole driven by budget approvals rather than strategic cost considerations. Companies often don't consider quotes on an item-by-item basis, leaving them with no visibility when negotiating cost reductions.
Innovative production spend management and analytics software Decideware provides unprecedented visibility into tracking photo and video shoot costs. Decideware's Production Manager module provides advertisers with sophisticated tools to scope, approve, track and analyze production spend. Production Manager focuses on granular tracking and approval mechanisms that enable advertisers and their procurement teams to effectively oversee spend across different brands, business units, and geographies. This feature gives you a strategic and comprehensive view of your spend, making it easier to negotiate and strengthen partnerships with creative agencies.
Clients utilizing Decideware's industry-leading tools have experienced up to 18% year-over-year cost optimization in agency fees and production spend. With real-time data and customized dashboards, procurement professionals can strategically and efficiently allocate budgets for content production.
“The detailed data obtained with this software allows us to visualize the pricing of items and ensure they stay within approved guidelines,” Varian said. “Procurement departments can analyze this rich data and leverage volume to improve staffing and deliverable pricing.”
Procurement teams typically do not focus on improving marketing productivity, but these can provide rich opportunities for cost reduction. Varian, who managed the operations of Creative Her Studio in a previous role, helped clients identify which marketing activities could be rethought to maximize results while minimizing resources and time to market. We will support you to do so.
As an example, AlixPartners teaches its clients' creative operations leaders how to effectively incorporate AI into their process workflows, from generating production-ready brand imagery to developing copy with the right brand tone. “A typical content creation lifecycle takes weeks to months, but with generative AI tools, it can now be completed in weeks or days, cutting the cost in half,” Varian says Mr. “AI is a real game changer for our in-house creative teams and partner agencies.”
Storyteq is a global leader in creative and workflow automation and is at the forefront of innovation with its revolutionary BrandCore engine, setting the standard for safe and usable AI in the industry. This advanced model is designed to learn from user interactions and brand guidelines, facilitating the delivery of brand-compliant marketing assets at an unprecedented pace and scale.
Built on its renowned creative automation technology, Storyteq continues to drive significant production efficiency gains by automating repetitive manual tasks traditionally reserved for creatives and designers. Storyteq leverages dynamic templates to quickly create marketing assets across channels and markets, from premium video content to digital and print. Storyteq revolutionizes the content creation process by allowing users to generate thousands of assets within minutes with the ability to easily swap out key elements such as language, logos, pricing, and images.
The introduction of the BrandCore engine comes at a pivotal time as brands and agencies address the growing marketing execution gap: the disconnect between content creation capabilities and consumer demand. Traditional resource allocation methods are no longer sufficient or economically viable in today's evolving economic landscape.
Ken Madsen
Ken Madsen, Chief Marketing Technologist at Inspired Thinking Group, emphasizes the importance of creative automation in bridging this gap. He emphasizes that creative automation has moved from being just a “nice-to-have” option to an essential tool for brands looking to scale production without stretching their budgets or resources. This shift in technology has become even more pronounced in light of the pandemic, highlighting the critical need for efficient content creation methods.
But creative automation isn't just about increasing volume. It's about delivering better, more relevant content across all channels. By streamlining manual tasks, creative automation frees up creatives to focus on your brand's storytelling, driving meaningful engagement and driving revenue. Strategic use of this technology not only improves operational efficiency, but also unleashes human creativity and enables brands to grow in a rapidly evolving digital environment.
Storyteq's innovative approach to creative automation, combined with the groundbreaking BrandCore engine, represents a paradigm shift in the industry. By adopting AI-driven solutions, brands can navigate the complexities of content creation with agility, precision, and unparalleled efficiency to achieve lasting success in today's dynamic marketplace.
Traditionally, marketing effectiveness has not been part of the scope of procurement, but AlixPartners is helping our clients achieve that by evaluating their media tactics to ensure they are delivering measurable results. We are focused on changing the situation. Using direct mail as an example, procurement teams can lead a data-driven assessment of whether these mailers are effective in the first place. AlixPartners' digital experts perform incremental analysis and A/B testing of direct mail campaigns to determine their incremental effectiveness in driving specific outcomes (sales, leads, store visits, etc.) compared to a control group. Masu. Ultimately, this analysis will determine the true value created by your campaign.
From a digital media perspective, clients and agencies are typically more focused on achieving predetermined goals and performance averages than on minimizing marketing “waste.” AlixPartners advises clients on the process and ability to conduct periodic tail spend audits of digital media investments. This allowed us to reduce unprofitable expenses by 15-25%.
Procurement can increase marketing effectiveness at a holistic level by bridging the gap with finance teams and analyzing the bottom-line improvements driven by marketing spend. Clients typically plan spending and revenue by business line or industry, which limits optimization possibilities. By taking a portfolio approach and investing in his ROI increasing in terms of profitability and customers, AlixPartners' clients have increased their media effectiveness by 10-15%. These efforts free up unproductive spending to be reinvested in areas that can drive visibility and growth, ultimately creating a more effective marketing organization as a whole.
No matter where your company is in its journey to maximize marketing value, improve marketing value creation by leveraging the procurement-led tactics listed above and partnering with proven, industry-leading third parties. and can be optimized. For companies without internal category expertise, companies like AlixPartners can help bridge the gap and enhance their own sourcing efforts for both revenue and revenue.
