Best Practices in Digital Production
A Deliver White Paper, September 2010
IntroductionAccording to Forrester Research, spend related to search marketing, online display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing will collectively grow to nearly U.S. $55 billion by 2014.
1 More importantly, as marketers are getting better at balancing channel investments with consumer media time, digital spend will increase from 12% of overall advertising to over 21% by 2014 as marketers shift dollars away from low-performing traditional media into more relevant interactive channels.
In the last eighteen months, almost every marketer has faced significant pressure to reduce budgets. In 2009, the Gartner Group predicted that more than 75% of marketing budgets worldwide would be cut by at least 20%, and that budget levels for marketing were unlikely to rebound in 2010.
2
At the same time that budgets are being squeezed, the number of available digital platforms and channels continues to increase exponentially. New technological solutions appear daily; there are more than twenty technologies that are ubiquitous in digital marketing and hundreds of others available. This provides marketers with the unprecedented opportunity to create highly interactive and engaging multichannel digital campaigns that can run across diverse consumer technology devices. However, this also challenges marketers to keep up to date with the tremendous number of releases of new and updated tools and platforms. If a marketer is not up to date in these technologies, many opportunities may be missed; for example, a consumer may never give you a second chance to correct a video that failed to open in his new phone brower. Almost every marketer who deals with digital production has experienced production failures they wouldn’t want to experience ever again–a website going down in the middle of a campaign launch, a video not playing correctly in a key browser, a banner leading to the wrong landing page.
A promising solution for reducing spend while still producing the desired breadth and volume of digital marketing assets is for marketers to take a closer look at the cost of their digital production. Digital production spend has not generally been transparent to marketers due to the traditional agency model of bundling media, creative, and production services into a single pricing structure. However, experience gained from providing digital production services to a diverse set of marketers has shown that production often accounts for a significant portion–often from 30% to up to 50%–of their overall digital marketing spend. Optimizing digital production operations in order to minimize this cost provides opportunities for savvy marketers to significantly decrease their digital marketing budgets without reducing their marketing output or compromising its quality or sophistication; the resulting budget savings can be redirected to new campaigns and to taking better advantage of new digital platforms.
Our goal in this white paper is to outline the best practices utilized by the leading digital marketers. These best practices utilize people, process, and technology to ensure consistent, high-quality digital marketing output while minimizing effort, cost, and time to market. While many of these best practices seem straightforward, they are often overlooked or neglected. In high-volume, multi-brand, and multi-region environments in particular they become challenging, but even more critical, to maintain.
To read the complete whitepaper, please contact
Kristen Tate.
1 U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast; Forrester Research, July 6, 2009.
2 Don’t Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste; CMOs Should Act Now to Innovate Marketing; Gartner Research, October 21, 2009.