P&G & Kimberly Clark Identify Complexity In Marketing Teams And Agency Partners As A Key Issue.

There is today no other function in the enterprise being disrupted as much as the marketing function and this was the topic of a very interesting article that recently appeared in AdAge. It highlighted a massive problem in an industry that is struggling to keep up with the pace of change and the complexity the change is causing in both their marketing operations and supply chain.

Disruption on many levels is challenging marketers to think about their ways of working internally and with partners. While the article talks about the way P&G and Kimberly Clark are approaching the challenge, the same issues apply to all marketing teams

Clive Sirkin, CMO of Kimberly Clark, and Marc Pritchard, CMO of P&G, both put forward different perspectives on ways of working with agencies – however when you boil them down the differences are not enormous. What both are looking for, is a way of working that can bring together the best talents to work in a cohesive way conducive to producing the most effective work.

So the challenge for both is how to bring together a collective of talents from inside one agency and/or from different agency organizations and get them working fluidly together.

Interesting Clive refers to Uber in his commentary, where Uber software has changed the way people move around. If you think about Uber for marketing, what marketing needs is a smart way to move ideas around and bring them to market time and cost effectively. What’s needed is an operating management system to underpin the new ‘collectives’ and ‘commonwealths’ of talent being created to power marketing programs at brands worldwide.

This is something that Screendragon has been passionate about for the last years and will continue to invest in so marketing ways of working don’t collapse from their own complexity.