Tangram Managing Director and Founder, Helen Johnson joined Ticker TV’s Ahron Young to discuss how smarter operations and better data can deliver real results for agencies.
How can businesses actually grow with better data?
Good data has always been important. It’s important to good management reporting and timely management reporting. And that’s important to give business leaders the ability to make timely and well-educated decisions. What’s really changing now is that we have the ability to automate, to leverage machine learning and AI to do some of that work for us, to make those recommendations for us. We’re already using it for marketing data to improve our marketing insight. But for business data, we’re not quite there yet. So leveraging meaningful data, ensuring our data is consistent and ensuring it’s simple means that we have the opportunity to use machine learning, to use AI to actually automate and enhance internal operations. That means that we can reduce the cost to service the business and it means that we can find more efficiencies through automation in future.
What do you see as some of the best ways to streamline processes and achieve more with less?
Process management and process mapping is tricky because so frequently we can gloss over the detail. Ensuring that we know how we get from step one to step two. What are the inputs? Who’s gonna do the second task? And what triggers that person to do that second task? What task is triggered next? If we have those processes itemised, if we have the step-by-step understood, and then going back to data, if we have the data that relates to those steps, that’s when we have the ability to automate our processes. Not only automation, but through mapping processes and through well-understood business processes, then of course you’ll find other efficiencies even without the technology support. Which is pretty incredible.
How can agencies approach change management as well to try and stay competitive?
I think when we embark upon change management, we can sometimes be a little guilty of thinking that we’re only going to improve from when the change is embedded. Whether it’s a technology change or a process change, we’re always going to see a dip in performance. So going into any change, knowing that is really critical for leaders to understand that we’re going to see that dip in performance. And when we’re in that dip, to have a plan to lift the business out of it is critical. So that means great communication. It means your leaders understand that this kind of dip in performance is going to happen. And it also means that you need those people who are going to keep sharing the vision and keep pushing, pushing the change. Regardless of that temporary dip in performance. If we don’t do that, the dip in performance will last longer.
Which ad agencies are actually excelling in the area and what do you think sets them apart from others?
The best agencies that we have seen see their great operations as a competitive advantage. They have well understood processes that after a certain amount of time become invisible. We recently released a Playbook where we worked with George P. Johnson and Digitas and we interviewed them to understand the key areas that they’ve really succeeded in. And they came down to a few key things. One; creating really commercially savvy operational and teams. Two; really getting the workforce planning right. So people aren’t overworked, they have the right balance of resources to meet their internal business needs and their client needs. And then finally, once they have these two things correct, they can leverage technology to improve their operations.
