According to Vodacom, digital marketing is changing the way we advertise and communicate, but some marketing and advertising processes seem stuck in the 1950s. Many agencies still use physical job bags and processes that resemble the industrial age, rather than digital age ways of working — including more collaborative approaches and video conferencing that is replacing face-to-face meetings.

More tools, automation and bots are impacting marketing departments. Vodacom says that those who don't adopt a future way of working will not only be left behind but will become less effective, as they waste time doing tasks that can be done more efficiently.

Vodacom's digital transformation drive includes a key goal to increase the pace of the commercialisation of ideas into revenue-generating products. An important component of this is the faster turn-around of marketing from brief to campaigns deployed in the market.

Vodacom says that it knew that a new agile marketing approach would increase demands on their marketing eco-system. With this is in mind, Vodacom's marketing team identified the need to transform their systems and processes and partnered DYDX to boost marketing operations.

"New tools and ways of working are often scary even though they may have great benefits," says Nevo Hadas, managing partner at DYDX. "Behavioural psychology shows that due to loss aversion, people are very sensitive to what they will lose, even if what they will lose is not really solving their problem well."

"We designed the onboarding and training processes to be iterative and support change management so that the users felt they had mastery over their changing environment," Hadas adds.

Within six months, seven agencies and four internal teams were brought on-board. The results have not only enabled better communication and faster issue resolution with agencies but are also providing key benchmarks for wastage reports, for managing key SLAs and for how efficiently the eco-system works.

According to Vodacom, marketers and product managers now have better control over the process and save significant time from automated status views and exception reporting. Compliance has also improved, reducing audit complexities.

"By mapping out the processes using service design, we saw a significant portion of time was lost in briefing, scheduling, coordinating and approving of creative work," says Lana Strydom, executive head of online and self-service at Vodacom. 

"Our new processes centred around reducing this waste. While the new systems have a number of objectives and outcomes, [the] most important [one] is to achieve a better creative outcome by enabling agencies to spend more time in the creative processes and less time in admin or waiting for approvals — delivering a better creative product to the market quicker," concludes Strydom.

For more information, visit www.vodacom.co.za. You can also follow Vodacom on Facebook or on Twitter.