Agency Ops Leaders 2024: Nine Takeaways

7. OPS EFFICIENCIES HELPING DRIVE EFFECTIVE EXPERIENCES

But even costs leveling off and better planning and pre-advancement isn’t enough to get some event programs produced on-time and on-budget, which is why operations teams are, as they always have, pushing harder and faster to mine additional efficiencies that give them more time on the clock and more dollars and cents to work with.

MARK DRIGGS, LEGACY MARKETING. There is a huge focus on efficiency and effectiveness—from time and cost standpoints.

JUSTIN HAYES, INTERSPORT. Definitely. We’re being asked to be more careful with how we spend money, while still trying to create the same type of ROI numbers associated with [larger budgets.] Clients are getting back to leaning into ROI and asking what can we do to make things work better within a budget or what can we do differently to drive cost efficiencies—like rather than completely customizing a vehicle do we have something that’s already in inventory we can re-wrap.

JUSTINE ROWLAND, ALL TERRAIN. To Justin’s point about ROI, clients are asking for hard numbers and data to show that the decisions we’re making are in fact the right decisions and will benefit their brand. So we’re investing in technology and tracking, figuring out the best ways to track data and determine what the ROI is going to be [in advance] so that when we’re talking with clients, we can show them what we’re able to do and that we can do it in real time—and adjust onsite if needed.

COLIN FAUL, AGENCY EA. So for us to be able to build a better experience, we need to find savings on the backend in advance. The last few years it’s been about doing more with less—finding creative ways to build bigger and better experiences that are also more efficient. So we’ve leaned into a lot of our AV partners, our fabrication partners and figured out where we can, for example, pre-build things—modular builds we can just roll into a lot of larger event spaces that are unionized.

BRYAN GLIBOWSKI, ENGAGE & RESONATE. With larger activations and more complex builds with shorter timeframes, we’re doing things like multiple setup and strike tests during training. We may run three to four mock setups and strikes with different sets of hands and with differing levels of experience so that we know, worst-case scenario, how long it’s going to take to load-in—and if, for example, we have to be show ready in say three hours, we’ll actually need nine people instead of the initially anticipated six. This front-end work also helps create install efficiencies with our leads to incorporate onsite.

MATT ANDREWS, HIGHMARK OUTDOOR. Time is money, obviously. So as the partner who actually builds the structures on-site, if we can get something done in two days instead of four days we’re always going to push to do just that. And we prioritize different labor levels to hold costs down by keeping the higher hourlies more focused. So if we’re setting up on a golf course, obviously we can’t roll 53 footers onto the course. So we’re cross-loading onto stake beds and one guy’s job may be to drive back and forth with a stake bed, unload and put it on the main structure. But we’ll assign that role internally so we keep the [required] expensive labor working on the product build.

BRYAN GLIBOWSKI, ENGAGE & RESONATE. We’re getting more efficient with our national event tours—but efficiency depends on the type of tour. If it’s a sampling focused tour for example, then efficiency comes from getting as much product into the hands of consumers as possible, and determining where that break point is with staff to achieve the best ROI based on the location foot traffic at varying times of the day, etc. If the tour is focused on raising awareness, it may not be about the samples distributed, but more about how the time onsite is utilized, such as varying programming and their associated costs to align with foot traffic to create the greatest impact as cost-efficiently as possible. 

BRAD FOGLE, PRODUCE. And with that 10-hour day, four of those hours are your prime time anyway. You can accomplish 90% of engagement in that prime time, so we’re working with clients to cut hours down and move them around.

COLIN FAUL, AGENCY EA. For b-to-b events, clients are packing more into the day—efficiency comes with adding more engagement to the schedule. More learning programming, trade show programming, main stage elements. Events are definitely running longer than 9am to 5pm, and there’s a lot packed into what is now 9am to 6pm, or 7pm. So we are pressing to ‘maximize’ each event. And with that comes a push to really look at how [expanding] schedules impact things like labor rates, overtime and so on.

JUSTIN HAYES, INTERSPORT. It’s also about guiding clients and saying, ‘rather than focus on reaching more and more and more people, let’s focus on talking to the right people’. So we use our insights and strategy team to help them find the events attended by the right people and then focus on activating at those events.

BRAD FOGLE, PRODUCE. And one thing that is getting big play [in our attempt to maximize efficiency] is the weather. I can’t tell you how many times we are moving the crew call time up by two hours or back four hours because we are chasing activating in good weather—obviously in good weather you can get twice as much done. So with getting more efficient comes the need to be a little bit of a weather whisperer.