Use case: Managing Agencies with 99Ravens
The Challenge
Julie, the CMO of a leading sporting goods company, faced a critical problem: managing seven agency partners. Across creative, events, social, digital media, traditional media, SEM, and PR the company’s brand message to felt more like a cacophony than a unified roar. Each agency, while excellent in its domain, operated with its own interpretation of the firm’s brand identity and all were briefed separately.
This led to:
- Inconsistent Messaging: The tone on social media didn’t always align with their event activations, and PR statements sometimes felt disconnected from their traditional ad campaigns.
- Inefficient Review Cycles: PMs spent excessive time providing feedback, often reiterating the same brand guidelines to different agencies.
- Diluted Brand Impact: Customers experienced a disjointed narrative, leading to confusion and a less powerful emotional connection with their products.
Julie could see that the messages her strategy specified were getting lost in execution. She needed a solution to ensure every communication, across every channel, spoke with one clear, compelling voice. After a failed attempt to find an implementation tool that would work across all channels she realized it was wiser to encourage alignment upstream at the strategy and briefing stage.
The Solution
Julie tapped 99Ravens to serve three core agency management functions:
- Centralized Strategy Development: The marketing team used 99Ravens to define a singular, comprehensive brand strategy. This included clear guidelines for tone, messaging, audience insights, and overall objectives. This ensured everyone (internal teams and external agencies) started from the same playbook.
- Derivative Brief Creation: For each campaign, the team created derivative briefs tailored to each of their seven agency partners. 99Ravens ensured that these derivative briefs were always aligned with the central strategy.
- Brand Compliance: The brand team built an expert AI Agent that embodied the brand’s strategy and each of its iterations by product and made it available to the agencies.
Managing across seven agencies was new for 99Ravens as well. A whole new workspace management workflow had to be built so that the flow of information could be properly controlled.
Results
Immediately after roll-out the cost and complexity of managing agencies on multi-channel campaigns fell drastically with the most obvious impact being far fewer meetings and creative revisions.
While the project was started as a way to manage external stakeholders, the most impactful and unexpected result was with their internal social media influencer management team. Due to the lower management burden the company is now able to tap micro-influencers who each have lower reach but higher impact and conversion metrics.
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If you have a complex ecosystem of external partners to manage within your marketing workflow then book a demo today to find out how we can help
