Earlier this year, we announced partnerships with Stagwell Assembly and Dentsu as our new paid media agencies of record. They will be working with us on specific areas of our global media strategy, planning and advertising operations, as the next step in our journey to evolve Lenovo’s global marketing capabilities into a center of excellence.
I’ve worked in marketing both brand side and within agencies, so I’ve experienced the advantages and challenges of both. But I wanted to examine the topic a little further beyond my own wheelhouse. So for this piece, I got together with our Global Media Strategy Center of Excellence team leads, Alberto Spinelli and Rick Corteville, who are both experts in the paid media/advertising realm and running the relationship with our global agency partners - to explore the topic of optimal ways of working, and discuss how exactly we bring together hybrid teams for the best outcomes.
EK: Marketing teams within a brand are on the front lines - effectively serving as brand custodians. They are experts in their field and the long-term goal is always to build their brand’s IP. What do you think agencies can learn from brands’ in-house marketing teams, and vice versa?
RC: I agree - and deep customer knowledge is in itself, a superpower that agencies need to grasp from brand side marketing teams by being great listeners so they can get up to speed as quickly as possible. In turn, agencies will have more of a complete view of the customer - both sides of the table usually have research and business intelligence teams, so the formation of customer archetypes can be developed and made comprehensive. The brand side has website behavior and CRM data, while agencies have access to 3rd party tools and surveys to contribute to the audience's psychographics, likes, and dislikes. Sharing this data and combining these elements will fuel more intelligent optimization and, in turn, more effective campaigns.
AS: In my experience working for Tech brands across the globe, they can often find themselves operating in legacy systems - doing things a certain way because that’s the way they’ve always done it. Agencies can help us learn about new trends, which new channels to tap, what has worked for other brands like ours, and not like ours, so we’re learning about the wider customer trends Rick mentions via 3rd party data, to stay competitive.
RC: All of these points have an undercurrent of openness to change. If both sides are willing to learn and consider new ideas, there will be continuous learning on both sides.
EK: Agreed. From your own experiences, are there any tasks, roles or responsibilities that you think should always be performed by in-house teams? And what about agencies?
AS: I’ve always believed that in-house teams are best placed to take care of media strategy and planning, deep diving into audience understanding, constant optimizations and data gathering. Agencies, on the other hand, I’d leave in charge of media-buy at scale, market analysis and benchmarking, executional roles and innovation.
RC: Yes, we believe that strategy roles, across media, creative, and data, are crucial for our in-house teams. For example, we started with communications planning positions with our team in North America so that we could start to better allocate and target our campaign budgets. On the agency side, as Alberto says, they are super helpful in maintaining those ‘hands on keyboards’ roles. As the media industry is a transitory one and there is a current talent crunch, having the comfort that the agency can deliver across media activation and reporting is great.
EK: What were some learnings from your past experiences, about working with agency partners and media teams, that you brought in when you joined Lenovo?
RC: One of the biggest things that I’ve learned is the importance of the cross-vertical knowledge that agencies have through their client portfolio. Through this, agencies can provide perspective on the trends and insights that are unique to our business or vertical and match them back with the ones that are being experienced across the industry. This can help speed up optimizations in those shared cases which enables us to hit our KPI targets at a faster clip. Access to a wider data set is key and we look to our agency partners to provide us their point of view as we’re planning campaigns and reviewing results, during and after their conclusion.
AS: With the fast-changing pace of the media industry and the digitalization of media it has become more and more clear to me over time that the best “media set up” for a company like Lenovo is a hybrid model. Working with external agencies to harness their strengths, while building core strategic skills internally, enables us to achieve full control across the media value chain, constant media optimization and always-on data gathering.
EK: Best-in-class marketing in an accelerating digital environment is a fluid state. I’m interested in hearing both your thoughts on what a ‘best-in-class’ hybrid operating model could look like and what would the winning qualities be?
AS: We saw many benefits that I believe contribute to a ‘best-in-class’ model when we were setting up our in-house Center of Excellence:
- Full Control: Internal employees are more up to speed on the latest company developments and product portfolio. This enables full control of the process from brief to launch through optimization, so that campaigns can be run at a faster rate.
- Transparency: In-house teams can unpack all fees/rates and ensure there is clear transparency to stakeholders and what the brand is paying for across different media channels.
- Relevant Creative Assets: Disparate processes can be merged through in-house teams where the creative development and media planning teams are closely aligned. This can contribute to the creation of more relevant assets from the start, so that materials aren’t being developed and then not used as part of a campaign’s flight. The creative can also fuel the company’s testing roadmap or through innovative media sponsorships that will help hit KPIs.
- Data Strategy: As a brand’s first party data is so valuable, the in-house teams can work with internal teams to aggregate the company’s data on customers and prospects, then help supplement the information on contacts and leverage it for more accurate targeting.
- Optimization and Performance: With a dedicated business intelligence team, performance KPIs, regardless of whether they are branding or direct response based, can be reached and exceeded faster as the number of approvals are reduced and access to additional data sources is more seamless.
RC: I’d add the final benefit of our hybrid model is ensuring that we’re consistently putting ourselves in a state of perpetual learning, opening ourselves up to new thinking, accessing new channels, new media and in doing so - continually, and creatively innovating.
EK: Couldn’t agree more! We all know that diversity of thought leads to better innovation and creates richer outcomes. And working with external agency partners is a simple way of inviting new thinking into existing teams. What are some ways to ensure you are empowering internal and external teams to collaborate effectively?
AS: The key is to clearly articulate and align goals with your target strategic partner, making sure they are fully understood from both parties. It is only when both internal and external teams are collaborating as true and trusted partners, that opportunities for nurturing and developing each other can rise up in a truly win-win situation for all.
RC: Optimizing for innovation means creating an environment in which everyone knows they have an equal seat at the table. We want our agency partners to contribute their ideas and opinions and not be afraid to challenge the brand, our current practices or ways of thinking. Additionally, transparency is key – we want our agency partners to operate with clarity so that we know the brand’s best interests are always first and foremost on the team’s mind.
More practically speaking, now that we’re able to travel a bit more freely and meet in person, some of the most effective ways that I’ve liked to employ are in-person offsites, workshops, and team-building events to socialize and get to know each other out from behind the screen, and post-mortem sunset reviews (or what Lenovo calls ‘Fu Pan’ - replaying the chess board for learnings).
Getting together to review our work in a non-judgmental way means individuals are more likely to feel open to speak their minds and real business change can be implemented. Carving out the time to get our heads together to tackle a set of specific topics can be massively helpful in moving the business forward.
EK: When the relationships are open, generous, and candid enough to work together with agility, the combination of in-house customer insight and agency value is really special. Amazing things can happen when experts come together from different angles, unlocking new ideas and opportunities from both sides.
I believe that the transformation of Lenovo’s global, hybrid marketing model will reshape the way we engage with our customers and audiences. It’s a prime example of one of the internal transformations that accelerate and help perpetuate innovation at a company level, and even at the global level of marketing excellence.
This article is featured as part of LenovoPRO Community’s “Inside Lenovo” series where we feature content and insight from Lenovo’s own people.
Are you seeing more organizations move towards a hybrid marketing model or have you moved into this model yourself? What advice or questions do you have when it comes to adopting a hybrid model for marketing operations? What advantages come with bringing certain tasks in-house rather than having everything handled by a third-party?
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