When we last briefed you on Decideware, they were Taking Agency Expense Management to the Next Level! Their Production module had just entered beta, and they had the facility to track not only quotes but actual costs down to the lowest level of detail and associate it with tasks, budgets, providers, and even individual resources.
In the production module, clients define jobs in detail, associate team members, define workflow, assign to vendors, breakdown costs, and go. The definition of job can be quite detailed — name, scope, lead, budget and budget period, type, geography, org unit, and so on. It can be as detailed as necessary, supporting everything from the creation of a simple banner advertisement to a full-scale shoot of an extended informercial, with costs ranging from 10 thousand to 10 million.
Costs can be broken up by phase, and then broken down by expense type, and even resource. The module can track estimated, actual, and will then compute the variance automatically by line item, task type, and phase. This may simply sound like an enhanced version of their scope of work, but the breakdown is much more detailed and their ability to capture data much more refined. This is important, because it supports their new dashboard module.
Their dashboard module, which needs a better name, is not a dashboard at all, but the release beta of their new deep BI capability. Decideware have recently integrated Tableau and can finally bring Marketing the deep insight into spend, and performance, that Marketing has until this point lacked.
Using Tableau, they have developed custom level 1 and level 2 dashboards for over a dozen big clients and are providing marketing spend insights that are going light years beyond what Marketing has ever seen, with the deep drill down you’d expect from a standard spend analysis tools.
At level 1, clients can see how much they are spending by agency, project type, phase, task, or resource, drill down on any available dimension, and, once and for all, see average costs for resources, tasks, projects and other deliverables. They can see when the average cost per hour for banner ad creation and management is $75 and one firm is charging them $125.
This is great, but the real value comes when you start importing performance data and contrasting it against cost. Nowhere is it more true than in marketing that “it’s not what you spend, it’s the impact you make”. It’s not how much more or less than the average you pay for social media campaign marketing, it’s how many impressions you make and clicks you get. If the average impressions on a campaign that cost $5000 is 500, and the average click throughs 15, then paying a company $10000 for a campaign that gives you 2000 impressions and 100 click throughs is a great deal, as you are paying 100 per lead vs. 333. And while most good marketers will get this data from a focussed campaign, how many can integrate it with the cost of campaign (banner ad) creation, how many can contrast it against similar campaigns, and how many can do that against normalized costs around the globe? None. But now they can.
With their latest development, DecideWare have not only taken (Marketing) Agency Management to a whole new level, they have also taken the insight into the ROI into a whole new level. Which creative genius is worth the $500 / hour (as his contribution can now be compared to end results across all his projects and his cost per effect normalized and compared against the other creative geniuses at the other agencies)? And which one isn’t even as productive as a $50 grunt doing stock art. With the new Decideware platform, not only can Marketing win the Agency Management Battle, but the cost management war.