The Initial Situation

Founded in 1911, Campbell-Ewald with its 1400 employees is now one of the ten largest advertising agencies in the United States. The agency with its headquarters in Detroit produces marketing campaigns for its clients that range from print to TV and radio and extend to online and guerilla activities.

In search of optimization opportunities the managers at Campbell-Ewald identified a number of projects, which when processed conveniently have proved to be time consuming and cost intensive. For instance the processes employed to date of creating, coordinating and agreeing upon advertising campaigns throughout a number of sites and regions were considered to be in need of improvement. This becomes clear if we consider a client from the retail sector whose approx. 120 affiliated stores are distributed throughout the whole of the United States. The stores on-site mainly employ print campaigns for the communication and placement of their products―that are regionally brought in line with the respective target stores. To ensure they can always react on time to these individual market requirements at least twelve different campaigns are initiated per region each year. In this way more than 1,400 individual advertising motifs are produced in total for the clients each year. Campbell-Ewald develops, designs, adapts, and agrees upon them with both the legal contacts and also with the product specialists.

The Solution

Campbell-Ewald was looking for a solution to make the production of the numerous, regionally customized marketing materials quicker, simpler, and better. In this way the costs should be reduced and time consuming routine and coordination processes should be standardized. The essential requirement was additionally to guarantee flexibility for the regionally differentiated advertising campaigns and also to retain the corporate design in all the materials: “It was important for us that the intended solution merges all the phases involving the production of marketing materials on one platform and ensures a consistent brand image,” according to Bob Travis, preMEDIA Production Director at Campbell-Ewald.

All the conditions were fulfilled with the iBrams web-based brand management solution: Client, agency, and printing services provider can centrally access all the marketing and communication materials. In this way the staff of the retail group have the option of adapting templates flexibly in terms of their content within pre-defined areas for their specific regions. Consultations and releases between the parties involved in the stores, the agency and the product specialists are made more transparent, rapid, and in overall terms less expensive due to the central platform as well as the clear distribution of roles and rights.

The Successes

The upshot of the conversion to iBrams: Agency, client, and regional managers save time and money during the production of marketing materials that are guaranteed to confirm with the Corporate Identity. After a campaign has been released by the managers the files can be sent directly from iBrams as a PDF/X1 to the local print shops. The cost savings attained through iBrams are directly passed on to the clients by Campbell-Ewald which increases the levels of customer loyalty and means they have more time for creative work aside from routine tasks. Bob Travis about iBrams: “The launch of iBrams has made the working sequences that we have had up to now much easier. One of the major advantages is the control over the Corporate Design guidelines. We are already considering extending the solution by means of the addition of a dynamic layout so we can adapt templates to different format specifications for magazines, daily newspapers or the web with just a few mouse clicks.”