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Accenture

A sequenced review of creative material helps to ensure this material achieves its intendedobjectives and is delivered on time and on budget, while helping to manage brand and risk,both locally and globally.

Marketing is not for the faint of heart. For one, the investment required is staggering. Advertising Age, in its 19th annual global marketing report published in November 2005, reported that together, the top 100 global marketers spent $94 billion in 2004 – an increase of 12 percent from 2003. We estimate these organizations spent an additional 30 percent on the people and processes needed to get marketing content out the door.

Marketing is also an increasingly global game. The top 100 spent more than 50 percent of their marketing budget outside of the U.S., where marketing budgets are growing at a phenomenal pace. According to the same report in Advertising Age, spending in China, for example, by all marketers rose 85 percent in 2004.

Despite this enormous investment – or perhaps because of it – bang for the marketing buck is harder to achieve, with consumers now bombarded by 3,000 to 5,000 messages a day. Furthermore, execution grows ever more complicated, as digital assets and channel proliferation spur new compliance legislation and increased opportunities for litigation.

An effective process for approving creative content – one grounded in strategic objectives – can help companies cope with these challenges. A sequenced review of creative material as it proceeds from concept through production to deployment helps to ensure this material achieves its intended objectives, is delivered on time and on budget and manages brand and risk issues, locally and globally.

However, new research sponsored jointly by Accenture and Unica found that few companies are taking full advantage of the approvals process. Reviewing publicly available information and interviewing seasoned veterans of the process, representing both agency and client perspectives (including legal), revealed the creative approvals process to be dysfunctional more often than not.

A widespread focus on tactical rather than strategic issues undermines the value of the significant investment made in the approvals process. Inadequate audit trails make regulatory compliance a hit-or-miss affair, exposing companies to considerable legal and financial risk. Too many reviews – often more than 40 cycles – involve too many people with unclear roles and responsibilities, resulting in rush charges, extensive rework and high people costs (see Figure 1).

Back to Basics: Defining the Right Process

Now the good news: Our research also established that a dysfunctional process can be avoided. Companies can do much to avoid these problems and to enjoy the considerable benefits – simply by getting the basics right: the right activities executed at the right time by the right people focused on the right issues.

Just as a dysfunctional approval process is revealed by common warning signs, a best-practice process demonstrates several hallmarks.

• Balanced attention to strategy and tactics;
• The right numbers of checkpoints, review rounds and participants at the right stages of creative development; and
• Clear roles and responsibilities, including governance of the process.

No standard creative approvals process is right for every company or every project a company undertakes. However, leading companies will institute a process that looks much like the one illustrated in Figure 2.

Get the Balance Right: Strategy and Tactics

Leading companies recognize that the raison d’être of the approvals process is to keep creative development on strategy; that is, focused on effective delivery of the target messages to the target audience. Because the creative brief is so important to grounding the project in strategy, leaders make their first checkpoint a careful review of the brief. They know that even the most excellent tactical execution will not compensate for a weak or incomplete strategy.

Leaders also schedule checkpoints throughout creative development – one at each critical point when creative development shifts gears and the risk of veering off strategy increases, typically involving a “go” or “no-go” decision. They organize the process to make essential “no-go decisions” as early as practicable.

For an example of how it is not done, consider the global handset manufacturer that developed a worldwide campaign showing people in their cars and talking on cell phones. Concentrating on words and pictures that would play well around the world, the company failed to consider whether the campaign faced legal issues in any individual locations. Brazilian law prohibits showing people on cell phones even in parked cars. Running a consistent global campaign became a no-go issue, and the campaign had to be redone for Brazil. Early consultation with local legal counsel could have established parameters for a global campaign and prevented this costly error.

Leaders often use a template to collect campaign information, to ensure that the entire project team has the right understanding of project context and requirements from the outset. One of our interview subjects compared this document to a blueprint, pointing out, “Who would expect an architect to build a house without a blueprint?” Our interviewees also shared numerous horror stories describing the consequences of not knowing key issues – such as who the key stakeholders and real decision makers were, or how many languages they had to translate materials into – until quite late in the creative development process.

Quality Over Quantity: Reviews and Reviewers

Many of the approvals processes described in these interviews included far too many rounds of review at different checkpoints. The interviewees characterized the typical process as a free-for-all, with everyone feeling empowered to comment on any aspect of the material under review – like the product manager who, according to one interviewee, tried to nix a campaign heavy on nature images because “I don’t like trees.”

Process leaders, in contrast, often use templates to focus comments at each checkpoint and limit the number of rounds needed to make the go/no-go decision. Templates can eliminate such nonvalue-adding input and keep attention focused on issues appropriate to the stage of creative development – strategic issues sooner and tactical issues later.

Almost all of our interviewees also said that the least effective creative approvals processes they have known all involved too many people – as many as three dozen or more. While there is no “perfect” number of reviewers, one approvals veteran offers this advice: “Starting with your thumb, count how many people need to approve your copy before it goes to press. If you need more than one hand, you need to make some changes.”

Interviewees attributed many instances of too many participants to micromanagement, for example:

• The CMO who personally approves every ad that invokes the corporate brand; and
• The project manager who delegates decisions to his or her lieutenants in theory, but who does not follow this approach in practice.

Process Enemy No. 1: Roles and Responsibilities

According to almost all the interviewees, the No. 1 obstacle to an effective creative approvals process is the lack of clear roles and responsibilities. Leading companies know better. They do not take the easy path of designating a review team and simply requesting comments periodically throughout creative development. Leaders recognize that the focus of review should differ at each key checkpoint and may therefore require different expertise for the review to add value. They change the cast of characters accordingly.

Most importantly, leaders attend to governance, documenting clear roles and responsibilities, such as what kinds of comments are appropriate at which stages of development, when comments should be returned, what will happen if these deadlines are missed and how reviewers should deliver their comments. Many interviewees admitted that their approvals process works without documentation only because all participants are deeply experienced. Turnover could wreak havoc.

Governance should also include designating a single leader of the process. This leader may have ultimate decision-making authority or responsibility for achieving consensus among the key participants at each checkpoint. In either case this leader is responsible for the timely collection, prioritization and consolidation of input. The interviewees who have to act on such input were especially appreciative of this role, which saves them from the frequent free-for-all situation, in which they receive often-conflicting comments from multiple reviewers that trickle back to them over many days.

Further, organizations should maintain an audit trail throughout the creative approvals process to monitor the timely execution of assigned roles and responsibilities and ensure documentation of compliance efforts, should issues arise. Leaders understand that effective governance is not just an internal matter; it can do much to build strong client/agency relationships, which are not as common as they should be, according to the interviews.

Friend or Foe? Making Agency/Client Relationships More Productive

The words tension and friction recurred frequently as interviewees described agency/client relationships. Many cited an inherent tension between the creative focus of an agency and the business orientation of a client: Creativity takes time, but most businesses are deadline-driven. And interviewees reported that the time pressure only intensifies as a campaign approaches deployment. Effective governance can ease this tension by clarifying roles and responsibilities across, not just within, organizations. This is especially important with projects involving multiple agencies, an arrangement that is bound to grow more common and complicated as agencies specialize narrowly and as global campaigns tap agencies in multiple locations.

Ensuring shared understanding of project requirements is also critical – common gaps mentioned by interviewees include agency understanding of client strategy and client understanding of agency time requirements and other commitments. We also recommend spelling out the rules of review when feedback is due, in what form, who reconciles conflicting comments and who is on point to answer questions.

Flex the Process

The preceding discussion of creative approvals suggests that most companies face a Herculean challenge in developing a well-ordered process that aligns strategy and tactics.

But many companies that have defined thinking about how rigorously to scrutinize such a process recognize the need to build flexibility into the process – not every creative effort warrants the same rigorous scrutiny. Figure 3 illustrates a simple framework for thinking about how rigorous to make the approvals process for a given project, depicting exemplary projects and some of their process implications.

The greater the strategic importance and complexity of the creative effort, the more rigorous the approvals process should be. That typically means more attention to strategy, more participants (especially senior executive participants) and more time to market. Key dimensions of strategic importance include brand impact, audience size and influence, current or likely competitive actions, new market entry and market penetration goals. Key dimensions of complexity include cost, content, media (number and types), time to market, new product or category, need for local ownership of the effort or global consistency and joint campaigns with partners.

In setting parameters for a project’s approvals process, companies must often make trade-offs:

• Intense focus on risk management rather than on broad strategic impact. If compliance looms large, the process must include legal review early and often, which can mean trading creativity for safety.
• Limited number of people versus richness of multiple perspectives. Limiting participants speeds time to market but may sacrifice the fresh ideas that can cut through the clutter and enable a campaign to achieve real impact.
• People development versus longer cycle time. Many leading companies number people development among the strategic objectives of their approvals process, but investing the requisite time can slow the march to market and risk preemption by a competitor. On the other hand, strategic thinking is usually a matter of nurture, not just nature. (See the sidebar, “People Development.”)
• Global brand consistency versus adaptation to local culture and market conditions. As marketing spend shifts increasingly into the uncertain territory of emerging markets, companies face the constant need to address this balance. Mistakes are costly, as one company learned when it had to scrap plans to bring a global campaign predicated on images of people behind bars into Russia, where such images remain a painful reminder of the past, not a clever enticement to buy.
• Efficiency versus growing numbers of strategic partnerships. Many companies are forming more partnerships, to realize more rapid penetration of unfamiliar foreign markets, deeper channel penetration and more differentiated offerings. Counting on innovative channels to get the attention of exhausted customers, many companies are tapping the expertise of specialized agencies. Both can add cost to a campaign and time to the approvals process as more reviewers are likely to join the party.

Evaluate the Process

Few interviewees reported applying any metrics to evaluate the creative approvals process. This is hardly surprising since few develop the documentation required for evaluation. But evaluation is essential to understanding whether the approvals process adds value to creative development. That’s why leading companies measure both the efficiency and the effectiveness of their process. Key measures of efficiency include total process cost, number of people involved in the process and cycle time. A strong approvals process should reduce rush and rework fees, as well as media spend because the planning horizon for a campaign can be longer, with fees negotiated accordingly.

Effectiveness is more difficult to measure. But leaders review the process choices made at each checkpoint and ask themselves, did that choice make the process more or less effective? For example, if the process included senior executive review at every checkpoint, did that review demonstrably improve the campaign? How dangerous was any delay that resulted? If the process specified legal review of both rough cuts and final art, did both reviews add value? Would one have been sufficient? Which proved more valuable?

Using Technology to Speed the Process

Our interviews found few companies making significant use of technology to enable the creative approvals process. They’re missing an important opportunity to achieve faster, better and less expensive execution of critical activities. Leading companies tap marketing software to increase marketing productivity, including the efficiency of the approvals process, sometimes streamlining it 15 to 40 percent, by taking several measures:

1. Centralizing all process information, including project work plans and schedule, best-practice templates, documented roles and responsibilities – all the tools that people need to participate effectively in the process. This repository includes tools for electronically sharing and marking up files. The system is rules-based, so routing material to the right reviewers at each checkpoint is easy. The system also creates an easy-to-follow audit trail. All this functionality means less waste and duplication of effort, better allocation of resources (people and time) and confidence that the company can meet any compliance challenges.
2. Improving project team communication and collaboration, with alerts, message boards and tools that permit electronic dialogue and, by offering the ability to see and respond to other reviewers’ comments, build consensus. These tools are especially valuable as more marketing campaigns require global efforts and coordination across multiple agencies, and face-to-face meetings become less feasible.
3. Creating a single, secure repository of creative assets by harnessing the power of digital asset management to store them and other marketing materials. This library makes it easy to find and reuse creative assets, for greater return on the investment in developing them, and to see how campaigns around the world have tailored assets to local needs. The library typically includes guidelines that minimize the risk of brand-inappropriate use.
4. Providing easy access to results data for better marketing decisions, based on the performance results reported by the system. Systems can track basic measures like project expenses but also more sophisticated metrics like return on the investment in a particular campaign, segment, offer or channel. This information helps companies spend their marketing dollars wisely – avoiding unpromising and potentially competing investments and reallocating funds from underperforming initiatives.

A robust process is also essential to ensuring legal and regulatory compliance (“keeping us out of jail,” as multiple interviewees put it). Digital compliance violations have cost global companies as much as $15 million in penalties. Some of the most important benefits of a strong process are strategic and, therefore, key sources of that bottom-line impact:

• Sustaining project focus on reaching a target audience with a compelling value proposition;
• Freeing time for creativity, instead of project administration;
• Fostering collaboration between creative and business people and between clients and agencies;
• Striking the appropriate balance between global brand consistency and sensitivity to local requirements; and
• Enabling speed to market, including faster response to changes in market conditions.

As Figure 4 illustrates, an effective approvals process delivers important benefits directly to the bottom line, especially by reducing costs. Most companies are far from realizing these benefits today, but righting the creative approvals process can help close the gap.