Nokia turns to Adstream's WorkPath tool to cope with changing marketing needs

For Nokia, this is a time of significant change and, consequently, significant pressure. The mobile phone company can no longer make money from only selling handsets, as it always has. Now, its revenue streams are also dependent upon consumers buying experiences and applications.

This has implications for how the company deploys its marketing resources, and in that regard there is much work to be done, according to marketing solutions and process development manager Katie Nykänen, whose responsibility includes managing campaign and asset management projects globally.

Speaking to PMM at mediaPro 09, Nykänen outlined the issues that Nokia was facing: “Our business is totally changing, and we can no longer just make money from phones – it’s the whole solution, and therefore the relative revenue from what we sell is reducing. We now have to make twice as much to get a return. The pressure really is on for our organisation.”

However, inefficiencies in the process are not helping the company to be as agile in its marketing as it needs to be. “It takes a long time from idea to market,” Nykänen says. “Six months from campaign planning and coming up with a theme, to creating material. It has to change because our business model has changed from devices to experiences and solutionsprocesses need to be more agile and flexible.”

That is what Nykänen is now trying to achieve, using Adstream technology in part, but also – and this is the more difficult part – bringing about a different cultural view throughout Nokia’s marketing departments.

On the technology front, Nokia has been using Adstream’s WorkPath campaign management workflow software for around 18 months now, initially as just a centralised asset repository, but increasingly with greater scope. Its implementation in the organisation wasn’t without its own cultural hitches though.

“We implemented WorkPath last summer with a medium degree of success, because we did not dounderestimated the change management very well,” says Nykänen. “We did not address the business impact; we assumed that people would see the tool as progressive but in reality they found it restrictive. say it was as great an idea as we thought it was. We’ve now refined since made continuous changes to the system so that users people can understand see the benefit.

“You will never have a total automated and online workflow, because you’re dealing with marketing people, who won’t tick every box. But we can hope to get the important parts of WorkPath in better use: approvals, tracking, and visibility as to where and how assets were used in our markets.”

The system is now in use, and digital distribution of TV advertising is proving to be successful for Nokia through WorkPath. The next stage of roll- out will be on the production side, with automated re-sizing of adverts and automated print validation. Nokia is pushing development of the WorkPath product itself, says Nykänen: “We are probably one of the first organisations to use WorkPath, and Adstream didn’t so we didn’t have a detailed roadmap themselves for this, so together and we are developing it as we discover it. We have a very good relationship with Adstream and we are pushing them to develop WorkPath.”

What has been a startling discovery for Nykänen, partly through using WorkPath, has been the sheer volume of advertising material being created that is never actually used. Identifying where this wastage occurs and giving marketing heads within Nokia visibility on these issues is a key task.

She says: “People still think that saving money in marketing is about cutting what we produce reducing the scale of our advertising and promotion, but we have a different angle, and that ’is: ‘why not just do it more efficiently?’ People have never really thought about it before. I was talking to a couple of our lead agencies the other day and we discovered huge waste activity since our TV advertising began. that We we were still producing a format of video that is never used nowadays. Tracking out Now campaign activitymanagement is centrally and using tools allows us centralised, we can go andto look for ways to make savings, and it could be up to 30 or 40 50% minimum for TV, through looking at the way we distribute videos.”

Nykänen says the message is being put before the top marketing executives through a monthly score card that shows the wastage of assets created, ie marketing collateral which is created but never actually used in Mmarkets. This is an example of where tools can help marketing teams identify areas to improve the efficiency of their processes. The hope is that this exposure at higher levels in the business will drive change throughout Nokia.

“My view is that if we buy media well in advance, we don’t need to create versions of press ads and materials that we’re not going to use. We should just produce what we need, and I don’t think that compromises creativity at all,” she continues.

“It’s not about stinging the agencies either. It’s just about not wasting time. Our procurement departments are pushing the agencies all the time on cost cutting, but ourthe objective is just about stopping wasting money on inefficient activities, and spending more time on creative thingswork.”

The challenges going forward remain substantial. There is room for improvement in the cost, speed and quality of creating Nokia’s adverts. Bottlenecks in campaign delivery tend to be caused by Nokia itself, and too much money is being spent on creating material that isn’tnever gets all used. It is hoped that breaking down the costs for individual elements of every job will help build a clearer picture of where savings can be found. Nykänen is looking for better ways to work with Nokia’s agencies and internally.

She says: “The inefficiencies in the advertising process are not just the agencies’ fault. There has to be shared responsibility, and I feel we are quite good at that. I do see a change coming in how agencies are used by clients though. Is it necessary for agencies to have dozens of offices around the world? Will the technology push us past that point? We need people who are culturally aware of local markets, but do we need them working in every market, when we have the technology to move work around? That will be a consideration at some point. big problem.

“Our key challenge however is gaining Internally, unless we have support from the top to and give people an incentive to change ways of workingmindsets, otherwise we will develop great technology tools but no-one will use them. Marketers don’t want to record things, so we have to find ways to get them to. The technology is there, but that’s the relatively easy part. Cultural change is the bigger challenge. bigger, but it’s only because of the technology. When we can say to marketers ‘look at how the world would be if we used this’, then there will be more chance of success.”interest in cultural change.”