Scalability

Keeping pace with online consumers who expect new content each time they refresh their social media feeds comes with a price. Fast-paced, high-volume brand content creation, and agency production support mean high agency fees.

At the end of the day, you need content. As previously stated, you now need more and more content to keep your customers engaged with your brand and offerings. At the same time, the technology-driven fragmentation of the media landscape has caused a proliferation of digital brand touchpoints and digital screens through which brands can reach customers. This business environment change eventually triggers internal capability change or adjustment to new market conditions if companies want to thrive in current market conditions. Fast-paced digitization and digitalization of the marketing environment for global organizations creates an urgent need for incubation or acquisition of digital capabilities.

Even though digital brand and creative content capability gaps were initially bridged by extending agency rosters, this proved to be an economically and operationally unsustainable model for most global brands. While agencies were able to plug the capability hole for some time, they also made a couple of financial holes in corporate marketing budgets.

The change in technology as a result of social media triggered the shift in consumer behavior. And the cost of working with a long list of highly specialized agencies also came at a management price—and in some cases, discrepancies in brand consistency as well. We will get back to the consistency topic shortly, but first, let’s look at how you can set up your team for success by factoring in scalability into everything you do.

It’s often the smaller in-house teams that are under pressure to complete a growing number of projects with the same number of resources and budget. Being so close to the business, being part of the company, and having go-to-market speed, brings another layer of challenges —perception of infinite internal resources, marketeer’s request, and last-minute changes that take a toll on both resources and morale.

81 % OF IN-HOUSE AGENCIES LIST VOLUME (a.k.a. PROJECT COUNT) AS A TOP THREE MOST IMPORTANT OPERATIONAL METRIC.

Source: In-House Creative Industry Report (Cella, 2021)

Heavy workloads and poor planning lead to stressed teams, which is exacerbated by insufficient digital enablement, where heavy reliance on spreadsheets to manage projects and resources can result in more work for creative teams. This is something you need to factor in when you are setting up your Win-Win-House team. You need to have that list of “can-do” people you can call in for extra help. Being internal doesn’t mean that you should do everything yourself. You need to build a scalable setup where you have specialized freelancers or offshore capabilities to bring in whenever the workload gets too heavy. Just like your agency does.

In a later section, we will get back to how you can manage these resources and keep track of everything from a Creative Management Platform, but for now, let’s focus on how you need to think about your solutions and your day-to-day work.

The first thing that we always recommend in-house creative teams to do is to start “thinking scalable”. What does that even mean? It means that whenever you run a campaign or even just a photoshoot, try to imagine how the content could be used in multiple ways.

It also means that you need a scalable setup. Your in-house team is phenomenal when it comes to proximity, but they will suffer when you roll-out extensive campaigns. It is not enough to have people close by—you will eventually need an offshore setup as well. As part of your everyday team sitting next to you, you will also need a team of specialists seated on the other side of the globe to support you when you need that extra muscle to scale. Whenever you have a campaign that you need to roll-out in 27 markets and 200 different formats, your in-house team will not be enough.

That is why you need to think about scalability in the concept development phase. You must ask your team how they will handle versioning, translation, and all the formats that they will eventually have to deliver.

There are a few ways to cater for scalability. One could be digital tools that help your team multiply their work by automatically creating banners in all the right formats with just a click of a button and handling the translation part with ease within the platform. Another could be aligning yourself with a partner or two. Offshore teams can quickly scale up things when you are in the marketing production phase. And they can do it overnight while you and your team are asleep. But they need quite an amount of guidance for them to understand what you want them to do.

Your team needs to think about how the various elements will be translated, versioned, and used in different markets as soon as they have the first initial idea. In our experience, it is crucial to build in this way of thinking in your processes. Teach your team to think about scalability early on. How will this campaign element work in other markets? How will it translate to other cultures? How will you handle versioning and translation? And how will the idea work in other formats? It’s about going back to pen and paper when they brainstorm campaign ideas. That way, the team will focus more on the concept than what it will look like in the final stage. And it will be easier for them to consider scalability possibilities and issues that come with the idea.