MarTech

Content Activation Platforms – the next MarTech Revolution?

Over the past 10 years there has been a revolution in the transformative potential of Marketing Technology or MarTech. There are few areas that remain untouched by a wide range of new marketing technologies - including e-commerce, sales automation, programmatic buying and a suite of creative tools that have really disrupted traditional ways of producing and distributing content. But global campaign activation remains a highly complex area for global advertisers. A new breed of Content Activation Platforms (CAP) is emerging, but what are CAPs and how do they solve the problems of global campaign management?

The marketing industry today has certainly been enhanced by the impact and continued development of MarTech tools, allowing agencies to offer highly scalable and efficient solutions to even the most demanding of clients. As an example, organisations now have ability to automate elements of content creation, create dynamic audience groups in digital channels and obtain greater insights into their marketing performance than ever before. The possibilities are endless, and that is exciting.

However, it is less clear if MarTech is always being used to its full potential. Many studies suggest that utilisation of tech is low, for example almost a quarter (24%) of Gartner’s 2019 Marketing Organisation Survey respondents said that marketing technology strategy, adoption and use, is one of their top 3 weaknesses in their company’s ability to drive customer acquisition or loyalty. There are also some areas of enterprise marketing and advertising that still haven’t seen the benefit of the MarTech revolution.

Why has global campaign activation missed the MarTech boat? 

The process of deploying a centrally produced creative campaign across all channels and into all markets (usually on the same day of a global product or service launch) remains a complex challenge for global marketeers. Many organisations opt for a centralised localisation and production model that consolidates the complexity to a single supplier in an attempt to overcome the challenges of multi format, multi lingual content adaptation.

However, significant challenges often remain even with the best partner in place.

  • Global campaign activation produces many, many more assets than campaign origination, increasing already stretching budgets and resources.
  • The limited amount of time available to meet a single global launch date can stretch even the most resource rich organisation
  • Transcreation and Production activities are often happening concurrently, making handovers and workflow extremely complicated
  • The nuance of local, global and legal requirements is complex and often results in countless emails, excessive versions and elongated production timelines
  • Relying on agency account management teams and manual consolidation of different local market data is often the only solution provided for reporting

How can a Content Activation Platform help?

Whilst there are an increasing number of agencies providing localisation and global production services, many use a suite of off the shelf tools to meet challenges listed above. These capable solutions may offer project management, digital asset management and creative approval technologies, they often lack tight integration and the specific workflow required to execute localisation and global production at speed and at scale.

We believe that Content Activation Platforms will be one of the next areas of MarTech revolution. These platforms are specifically designed to meet the needs of businesses with a global outlook. Our vision is that the minimum requirements of a CAP are the following:

  • Cloud-based, enterprise-level tools, with the highest levels of security
  • Simple and easy-to-use for all types of users
  • Robust campaign management to deliver a high-volume of outputs in a short timeframe
  • Automation capabilities to deliver the scale of modern campaign activation
  • Custom workflows to manage complex approval requirements
  • Creative annotation to allow feedback on every format within a single tool
  • Detailed visibility and insight into local production activity produced instantly

Splash has used this vision of Content Activation Platforms to develop our latest proprietary tool – called VIVID. If you don’t have a Content Activation Platform in place or you would like to understand more about how our VIVID tools work, please drop us a note at hello@splashworldwide.com