With rapid growth over the past 18 months, we've acquired many new clients coming to Decideware with greater ambitions for scale, productivity and ROI than we might have seen in the past. And established clients are lifting to greater heights faster than ever.
Decideware is again a proud sponsor of the ANA's Advertising Financial Management Conference, this year April 28 – May 1, in Phoenix, ARIZ.
In fact, as we’ve done for years now, Steven Wales will welcome all the attendees to the event Monday morning right ahead of Bob’s Opening Remarks.
Decideware would like to acknowledge all the nominees and congratulate Raja Rajamannar Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Mastercard on being named WFA Global Marketer of the Year, 2018.
Below are the October articles of interest from key trade publications, with excerpts highlighting key take-aways.
Decideware is pleased to announce an extension to our Strategic Partner relationship with the World Federation of Advertisers. Decideware first partnered with the WFA in 2013, sponsoring events and participating in the WFA's Strategic Partners program and we are pleased to extend the relationship into its 6th year in 2018.
To register for the webinar, visit: http://www.ana.net/webinars/show/id/COMWWP-180419.
Below are the February articles of interest from key trade publications, with excerpts highlighting key take-aways. This month's selection includes articles on ROI in 2018, agency productivity, as well as GDPR. We hope that you find this month's selections informative and valuable.
Decideware recently published an article, "5 Practical Steps to Increase Control over the Production Process and Gain Transparency" in the Industry Insights section of the ANA's Marketing Knowledge Center.
The ANA West Coast Joint Production Management and Advertising Financial Management meeting will take place on March 1, 2018 at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, CA.
Back in November, 2017, ISBA released guidance on the production competitive bidding process that has been under scrutiny lately in both the UK and the US. As part of that guidance, they recommend Decideware as a potential solution to help solve transparency issues.
Decideware recently published a Q&A article, "Stacy Jensen on Scopes of Work, Agency Performance, Breaking Down Silos and More" in the Industry Insights section of the ANA's Marketing Knowledge Center.
Decideware recently published an article, "Three Key Benefits of a Formal Onboarding Program" in the Industry Insights section of the ANA's Marketing Knowledge Center.
Below are the November articles of interest from key trade publications, with excerpts highlighting key take-aways. This month's selection includes articles on "chief growth officer" roles, TV dominating ad spend, as well as how much ad agencies ideas are worth. We hope that you find this month's selections informative and valuable.
The ProcureCon Marketing conference will take place from November 28-30, 2017 at the New Orleans Marriott.
Below are the October articles of interest from key trade publications, with excerpts highlighting key take-aways. This month's selection includes articles on the types of agency-client relationships, turning an in-house agency best-in-class, as well as McDonald's global media agency review. We hope that you find this month's selections informative and valuable.
You are about to embark on a road trip. You have relaxation on your mind and the destination in your sights. Your bags are packed and the keys are hot in your hand. What is missing?
Below are the September articles of interest from key trade publications, with excerpts highlighting key take-aways. This month's selection includes articles on the secret to great creative, what's behind the trouble on Madison Avenue, as well as tips for improving agency compensation practices and transparency. We hope that you find this month's selections informative and valuable.
There is no such thing as a perfect agency. While many companies place a considerable amount time selecting which agencies they choose to partner with, sometimes even the "perfect agency" seems to lose its shine after the actual workload begins.
Decideware, in partnership with the World Federation of Advertiser, will present "Agency Evaluation: Results from a 2017 Joint Survey" on September 21st at 10:00 am EST.
Below are the August articles of interest from key trade publications, with excerpts highlighting key take-aways. This month's selection includes articles on improvements in media transparency issues, how marketers would reinvest one month's worth of ad spend, as well as how digital consultancies are making inroads. We hope that you find this month's selections informative and valuable.
Included in the June ANA issue of FORWARD is a thought-leadership article by Richard Benyon, CEO of Decideware, titled "Why the Right Scope of Work is So Important: An Effective Scope of Work Ensures the Right Work Gets Done in the Right Way".
Included in the June ANA issue of FORWARD is a thought-leadership article by Richard Benyon, CEO of Decideware, titled "Why the Right Scope of Work is So Important: An Effective Scope of Work Ensures the Right Work Gets Done in the Right Way".
Below are the July articles of interest from key trade publications, with excerpts highlighting key take-aways. This month's selection includes articles on the failing share prices of WPP, the state of advertising labor rates, as well as where we stand today- one year after the ANA's report on media transparency. We hope that you find this month's selections informative and valuable.
Introducing Decideware University - Agency Management eLearning. Providing clients with 24/7 access to expert agency management tutorials and Agency Onboarding programs to educate and activate your agency stakeholders.
Most decisions made in the agency management arena are time-critical and must be accurate. This places an emphasis on having processes and systems in place that collect information efficiently, often across multiple geographies, business units and with different agency types.
Below are the June articles of interest from key trade publications, with excerpts highlighting key take-aways. This month's selection includes articles on the consultative nature of agencies, Unilever's 'less is more' approach to Marketing, as well as the lessons Marketers can learn from the departure of Coca-Cola's CMO. We hope that you find this month's selections informative and valuable.
Richard Benyon, CEO of Decideware presented "Advancing the Agency Evaluation Process" at a April ANA Procurement Series webinar, along with client-side input from Jim Zambito of Johnson & Johnson and Joyce Costello of IBM.
Below are the May articles of interest from key trade publications. This month's selection includes articles on agencies, hybrid CMO roles, as well as the changes in agency pay. We hope that you find this month's selections informative and valuable.
The ANA has just released the June issue of FORWARD, and included is a cutting-edge thought-leadership article by Richard Benyon, CEO of Decideware, titled"Why the Right Scope of Work is So Important: An Effective Scope of Work Ensures the Right Work Gets Done in the Right Way".
It is well-known that a strong relationship between a client and an agency can bring about great work, often resulting in more business and better brand success. The ANA has released an interesting slideshow proposing techniques for clients to build a stronger relationship with their agencies.
The speaker line up was great, the content was powerful, the networking was effective and the Samsung Virtual Reality Booth was . . . well, . . . it was just cool!
Decideware is a proud sponsor of the upcoming annual ANA Financial Management Conference, to be held in San Diego from May 23 - 26th at the Manchester Grand Hyatt hotel.
Below are the April articles of interest from key trade publications. This month's selection includes articles on benchmarking, briefing, as well as digital marketing fundamentals. We hope that you find this month's selections informative and valuable.
On Tuesday, April 25th, the World Federation of Advertisers heads to Toronto for Global Marketer Week - days of inspiration, discovery and learning. Steven Wales, CRO of Decideware, will attend the meeting representing WFA's Strategic Partner for Efficiency.
Below are the March articles of interest from key trade publications. This month's selection includes articles on how to build a better agency relationship, the importance of a client/agency contract, as well as the increasing trend in global consultancies buying up agencies and reshaping the brand marketing world. We hope that you find this month's selections informative and valuable.
Richard Benyon, CEO of Decideware, will present "Advancing the Agency Evaluation Process" in an upcoming ANA Procurement Series webinar, along with client-side input from Jim Zambito, Executive Director, Agency Relations and Finance Controller of Johnson & Johnson.
Decideware has enjoyed a long and productive relationship with the ANA.
On February 22nd and 23rd, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) held the annual combined meeting of their Production Management and West Coast Advertising Financial Management committees.
McKinsey & Company released an article in February discussing the current client-agency environment and provided guidance on how to get the most from your agency relationships.
Below is the February articles of interest from key trade publications. This month's selection includes articles on the challenges that marketers have faced over the past year, how to get the most from your agencies in the upcoming year, as well as the increasing trend in client project-based assignments. We hope that you find this month's selection informative and valuable.
In early February 2017, with the valuable support of a New Jersey based advertiser client, Decideware facilitated 4 focus groups over 3 days with advertising agency partners who work actively in the Decideware Agency Management Solutions system.
The West Coast chapter of the ANA's joint Production and Advertising Financial Management Committees will be taking place on February 22-23rd at Warner Bros, Los Angeles.
Each month, Decideware will highlight articles of interest from key trade publications such as AdAge, ANA's Smartbrief, Campaign Live to give Marketing and Procurement professional the latest news and relevant industry information. If you are involved in managing client-agency relationships, we hope that you find this information valuable and informative:
In November 2016, one of Decideware’s clients in NYC kindly hosted an opportunity for agency executives to meet with Decideware and provide feedback on their usage of Decideware’s Agency Management Solutions.
Decideware will present at the joint ANA Advertising Financial Management Committee and the WFA Sourcing Forum meetings held on December 6-7th in New York.
ProcureCon Marketing, held in Los Angeles from November 14-16, 2016, provided attendees with significant opportunities to understand how their colleagues have designed and implemented best-in-class agency Scope of Work programs.
Decideware is once again a proud sponsor of ProcureCon Marketing, which will be held at the Los Angeles Loews Hollywood Hotel, from November 14-16th, 2016.
In August 2016, the ANA and Decideware conducted a survey to better understand how companies are using data to manage agency relationships and how learnings from this survey can be applied to optimize client-agency performance.
Many organizations find it so challenging to administer and manage an agency relationship management program that they end up skipping one of the most important phases – Action Planning.
Some recent commentary (post from Clive Duncan) discussed the current state of the advertising production market and highlighted a number of interesting changes in the market:
This year, one of our clients approached us to help them design and implement a global Scope of Work program.
The ANA Masters of Measurement conference will be held from September 14-16th in Naples, FL at the Ritz Carlton. This conference focuses on measurement and how measurement can help marketers make better decision and ultimately improve efficiencies and ROI.
Over time, agency evaluation programs can run out of steam. Some reasons for this can include:
Agency evaluation programs are important but they do have challenges. One of the most important is designing what happens after the people working on the business have completed their questionnaire.
Adopting the world's best BI tools enables Decideware to help clients optimize their agency management programs.
Over the past 12 months, Decideware has invested in business intelligence software. This BI layer makes the complex task of analyzing data and answering key business questions, a simple and quick process.
In March, Steven Wales of Decideware presented a course at the ANA School of Marketing “Agency Lifecycle Management – Developing win-win agency relationships that deliver effective marketing campaigns”.
Yesterday, the ANA published the June issue of ANA Magazine which includes a special-section article by Richard Benyon "Surging Ahead: Getting stronger, faster, and better together. Trends and best practices for agency evaluations that build strong client-agency relationships."
One model you can use to help understand agency performance looks at a “Value Multiplier” – the two main elements all agencies should excel at; Strategy (their thinking) and Core Outputs (including creative ideation). In order to deliver this, the agency needs a set of “Enablers”, specifically their people, and their processes (including their financial management).
Once advertisers have collected their assessments, and analyzed the data, it's time to share comments with their agency and start taking steps to improve operations. Advertisers want to deliver in-depth, but constructive feedback to continue to enhance their relationship with their agencies.
To make better decisions, it is vital to have data you can rely on. An evaluation is nothing without a strong, in-depth question set. Designing questionnaires or scorecards can be one of the more complicated portions of the process, as advertisers need to include input from the various departments interacting with the agency, and in many cases the agencies themselves.
There are key elements that advertisers should consider when developing agency evaluation programs. Frequency, assessment models, and rating scales should all be carefully considered and developed to ensure the success of the program.
Many advertisers have trouble making use of data that could help them better manage agency performance, relationships and spend optimization. That data is often presented in Excel spreadsheets and it’s very hard to make sense of it.
Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is called whining.” This same principle can be applied to agency performance evaluations. Too often, free-text comments are used to simply complain about an issue, but they don’t provide a proposed solution or action.
Advertisers use evaluations to gauge and manage the success of their relationships with agency partners. These results are typically distributed to client and agency teams. However sometimes, stakeholders aren't properly engaged in the process. Without high rates of participation, advertisers can't fully learn how to improve their agency relationships. Therefore, it's important for advertisers to increase participation in their evaluations to ensure their relationships are strong, the work is good and that it yields the intended results. Here are some steps advertisers can take to do just that:
Decideware is currently attending the WFA Global Marketer conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from March 15-18th.
Brands spend a lot of money on advertising to reach their audiences, and production costs are a big part of the investment. It's always important for advertisers to weigh the costs of production with the required quality of the end product and advertising objectives. Simply cutting costs could result in less effective campaigns with negative outcomes bigger than the production cost savings. That said, advertisers want to optimize their investment and get the best value for the money.
Choosing a new agency is one of the most important decisions an advertiser can make, and it's crucial to get it right the first time. Selecting an agency is time consuming and expensive - for you and agencies, so you need to be efficient and thorough. Here are a few tips to help you get it right:
Decideware is pleased to announce our continued relationship with the Association of National Advertisers. Decideware first began sponsoring ANA events in 2010 and became part of ANA's Thought Leadership program in 2011.
At the upcoming ANA Joint Production Management and Advertising Financial Management, West Coast Chapter meeting on Feb. 25, 2016, Steven Wales will lead a discussion on the parallels between managing scopes of work and production budgets. Participants will be engaged in a discussion about their steps to standardize global data, centralize it and apply analytics to get the most from agency scopes and production budgets.
Mark your calendars: Steven Wales, Chief Revenue Officer of Decideware, will lead a daylong workshop for the Association of National Advertisers on March 8. The workshop will center on Agency Lifecycle management. Read on to learn more about the program and what we'll cover throughout the day.
As the marketing space becomes more complex, advertisers find themselves managing an increasingly diverse roster of agencies and vendors. While maintaining relationships with these partners has always been challenging, it's more difficult now than ever. The better your relationships with agencies, the better their work will be.
Large advertisers need commercials, banner ads, and everything in between.
A scope of work is the crucial document that'll help the agencies you hire and your brand decide what type of advertising work is required and how much it will cost.
The ANA and WFA will hold its ANA AFM Committee and WFA Sourcing forum next week from December 8-9th in New York, NY.
"It's become a recent tradition for the ANA and WFA to hold yearly, back-to-back meetings of the ANA Advertising Financial Management Committee and WFA Sourcing Forum in New York."
ProcureCon for Digital & Marketing Services will hold its annual meeting next week from November 16-18th in Nashville, TN.
"ProcureCon for Digital and Marketing Services is North America's only event specifically dedicated to issues pertinent to marketing procurement. This meeting has content geared toward all maturity and experience levels and contains a host of industry leading speakers to tackle important marketing procurement topics."
Recently, the WFA and Decideware held a webinar which explored how marketing sourcing teams can better leverage data to make smarter, more effective strategic sourcing decisions. The webinar included information on:
- How marketing sourcing organizations currently handle data;
- Ownership and management of data sets and their usage;
- Where opportunities lie for better reporting and visualization.
The webinar can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxB1xre30pM&feature=youtu.be
The ANA will hold its Masters of Marketing Meeting from October 14-17th at the Orlando World Center Marriott in Orlando, FL. Steven Wales, Chief Revenue Officer for Decideware, will attend the meeting.
The ANA AFM West Coast Chapter will be holding it's next meeting on September 15th at Nestle's office. During the meeting, Richard Benyon, CEO of Decideware, will co-present with Rene Dedeyko, Strategic Procurement Manager - Advertising, Nestle on "Using Agency Data Analytics to Gain Purchasing Efficiencies & Cost Savings."
The June 2015 edition of the ANA Magazine has just been released and Decideware features in a thought-leadership article on how business intelligence can be applied to marketing procurement and agency management.
In this article, Richard Benyon overviews the importance that data plays into marketing decisions and overall agency management. Currently, the processes need to make these decisions "suffer from significant overhead: it is slow to collect, labor-intensive to centralize,and often suffers from poor quality and transpositional errors."
Furthermore, Richard overviews the benefits of Business Intelligence and focuses on the importance of collecting data efficiently, using visualization in data mining (to help identify patterns), and understanding the statistical foundations used to make better decisions.
The ANA Magazine is distributed to 32,000+ ANA members.
It is available via the ANA site or click here: http://www.ana.net/am0609sp
Using Agency Management to Make Interactions With Creative Shops Smoother, More Productive
This interesting article recently published by Advertising Age discusses two presentations made at the 2015 ANA Financial Management Conference by Diageo's Marc Strachan and American Express Co.'s Eve Reiter to improve the overall relationship with between creative agency procurement and management.
Image above was provided with thanks to the AdAge Article
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