Mountain: Post-Mountaintop Removal
2009 was a year of taking sledgehammers to budgets, not least agency spend. Many marketers have relied on the equivalent of mountaintop removal to get at those agency savings. They’ve launched agency reviews or have consolidated agency relationships. These approaches are imprecise, crude and unsightly—but can be effective in reducing spend.
However, most of these marketers will be under continued budget pressure in 2010. The problem with mountaintop blasting is that, once you do it, you can’t play that card again (uh, the top of the mountain is gone). So what are marketers to do to find additional cost savings that won’t harm communications quality?
The answer lies in the many hundreds of individual-level, daily interactions happening between client and agency personnel. Council research suggests that many clients have 25%+ in potential labor savings tied up here. But to get at them requires a technique far more precise than mountaintop removal. To extend the mining metaphor, you need something more like solution mining.
In the business world, that’s lean process management. I know, I know. You’re thinking “fat chance of applying lean management to a creative activity involving fundamentally right-brained people.” But hear me out.
The key insight enabling marketers to get those 25%+ in labor savings is this: you don’t apply lean process management to the creative activities themselves—you apply it to the dozens of process steps surrounding those creative activities.
MLC members: evaluate whether you might be able to apply lean techniques. See this case study and then view this webinar replay showing how one CPG reduced labor by over 45% in FSI production.
Here are a few tips for getting started:
- Pilot with a low-risk, highly-repeated marcomm activity: there are dozens you could choose from (see the last page of the case study for a list), but find one that would be a low-risk test case.
- Use a neutral party to facilitate: You’ll want a neutral party (i.e., outside of marketing) to ensure an objective view of individual process steps.
- Aim for high granularity in your process mapping—the savings come from making a set of surgical changes to an often overlooked set of steps in the processes we repeat over and over with our agency partners. Granularity matters.
For a good, short read on lean process application, see this WSJ piece detailing how Starbucks has applied lean in its shops.
