The Challenge

Creating a marketing workflow management and automation tool to centralize marketing activity globally.

A leading luxury automotive manufacturer transitioned all global marketing activities to a collective of 17 agencies operating as a single team as the ‘agency of the future.’ This large-scale transition prompted an immediate need to develop a means of briefing work, routing work to centralized teams, executing the work, and in turn reporting to and billing the client in a central location. With a transition promise of marketing centralization and accountability, and just under three months to deliver, the team faced significant time constraints to design the marketing processes needed to integrate multiple agencies as the ‘agency of the future,’ develop the technical solution, and onboard over 500 team members.

The Solution

Enabling a streamlined and standardized luxury-level service.

The team conducted process discovery and definition workshops across the 10 workstreams to understand the way they worked and define a single consistent way of working that would satisfy all workstreams, while meeting contractual and operational requirements. Designing an end-to-end marketing process for an agency that will scale to 1,500 people presents real challenges for operational efficiency. Ongoing collaboration with operational teams, the end client, as well as the users, proved key to yielding a design that works for everyone.

With requirements and processes defined and aligned, the team produced a proof of concept (POC) of Horizon in just four weeks, with a fully functional MVP in three months. The project involved integrating a bespoke-configured instance of Screendragon (an existing marketing resource management tool), along with Microsoft Teams, PowerBI, and multiple existing Omnicom tools. This approach met the business’s immediate needs, became the operational backbone of the agency, and future-proofed the team’s approach to operationalized marketing.

The Results

Turning centralization into reality.

Through diligent, coordinated efforts, the team built a workflow management and automation solution in record time that powers the agency of the future for one of the world’s biggest car brands. As well as being critical in enabling the collaboration between client and supplier, it also delivers on the client’s goal of centralizing marketing efforts and creating more transparency across the marketing lifecycle.

The solution was successfully adopted by over 500 team members across 17 Omnicom agencies, enabling the team to execute marketing requests from day one at the local, regional, and global level. The agile, iterative delivery approach enabled the team to quickly turn user feedback into functionality enhancements, meeting needs while empowering the luxury automotive manufacturer to mature its marketing capabilities.