Adgistics: Supporting companies to enrich their branding activities

“A successful brand has value beyond the revenues it generates.”

Adgistics was founded in 1999 to provide internet-based capabilities for the marketing and communications supply chain. Working initially in the storage and distribution of marketing assets and collateral, its solutions platform, the Brand Centre^® has evolved in-line with the changing demands of brand management and the challenges marketers face. Adgistics was born in the mid-stream of enthusiastic internet-based entrepreneurialism that closed the 1990s. Established in 1999, the founders believed that using many of the technical capabilities and transformational processes that the worldwide web was beginning to bring to mainstream business, a software platform could be created that both tackled the evident inefficiencies of brand management and offered the potential for the creation and recognition of new value that could be attributed to the effective denition and deployment of brand activity.

By combining their technical insight with their founding brand expertise, Adgistics quickly established a niche that distinguished it from both brand consultancies and technology businesses.

Surviving the ebb and flow the global economy, Adgistics approached its 10^th birthday facing a common conundrum: the customization of software and service that created competitive advantage at pitch, and subsequent long-term client retention, also hit profitability and the ability to plan for effective growth. The solution was to restructure the management team around a new leader with long and fruitful history in evolving, growing enabling and disruptive technology companies. This team, lead by new CEO Joe Jarrett, has since established Adgistics as one of the world’s leading providers of brand and marketing technology solutions.

Market scenario

During the last decade, the brand management market landscape has changed dramatically and continues to change and evolve at a rapid pace. Globalisation and the opening of markets see a sea change of how businesses are structured. On-demand is the rule and businesses are instantly connected to all consumers through the advancement of technology. Indeed, there is so much content and information available today, that marketers need to continually interpret it and turn it into something ‘useful’ for the company.

Adgistics needs to ensure that it stays cognizant of the challenges facing marketers today as they conceive new ways to aggregate and curate content, while simultaneously managing campaigns and maintaining a strong brand value identity. However, it also needs to ensure that it also ‘operates’ in a rapidly changing digital landscape where marketers must re-think the roles their brands play in the lives of their customers and how they bring those roles to life across platforms and touch points.

One of Adgistics’ great successes has been to make brand techniques that were once the exclusive territory of multi-billion dollar companies available and practicable, through a unique combination of technology and human services, to businesses around the world. At whatever scale, the company plays as a hub for the clients’ ‘Martech’ solutions and publication channels, so as to provide a 360° view of all their marketing content and processes. It achieves this through ongoing, collaborative and co-creative work with the clients, helping them to recognize and respond effectively to a rapidly changing, technologically driven communications environment. In particular, it focuses on the management and measurement of Customer Experience (CX) and how the clients are now recognizing how CX can be a driver of both business differentiation and protability.

Highlighting factor among the peers

Adgistics’ definition of what a brand is, and the unique value proposition that stems from it enables it to compete effectively both in terms of technology and service. As a marketing technology solution provider, it views every aspect of an organization’s business system through the lens of the brand and believes that a company’s brand extends beyond marketing communications. The brand is a management asset and business system, providing a common language across the multiple specialties in a business. From this perspective, a Brand Centre can be deployed to optimize its management and to create growth, profit, resilience and long-term value.

Marketing solutions offered

The Brand Centre

The Brand Centre is a suite of networked technologies that enable companies to optimize and support some or all major brand and marketing operations, activities and processes. The Brand Centre has been developed on solid, proven marketing asset management and business process management technologies, but it also matches specific functionality to individual enterprise needs, and recognize that these needs evolve. By doing this, it ensures optimum uptake, operational efficiency, improved productivity, organization-wide transparency and contribution to building brand advocacy.

Adgistics Services Group

Adgistics believes that brands are about people, and therefore it compliments the technology with a dedicated team of brand delivery specialists whose skills ensure to get the best value. The Adgistics Services Group covers any administration and management tasks relating to the Brand Centre. It manages any process that makes end-to-end brand activation more efficient for the clients. This includes all the capabilities of a traditional production offering. However, keeping the fulfillment services integrated with the Brand Centre ensures that all of the efficiencies that technology can provide are passed on directly, leading to more accurate and cost effective results.

By combining the strategic brand experience, project management skills for Brand Centre deployment & the production management capabilities, it offers a world-class brand delivery system.

It ensures that each Brand Centre will fulfill the requirements it congures the services that add most value. It also offers several other services such as Implementation Services – Professional Services and Production Services.

The future sight

CEO’s words: As a growing business in a rapidly evolving market place, the balance between innovation, our focus on customer service and the scale of distribution is the key to our agenda. I believe that our working, dynamic model of the brand and the ways in which people interact with it will drive our technological development in a way that remains commercially relevant.

Looking towards the future, I am very condent that Adgistics will continue to grow in 2016 and beyond. Why? It would be too easy to focus on ‘delivery and results’ and lose sight of what is more important. We need to ensure we have clarity on what we stand for, where, why and how we’ll get there. We operate in the ‘world of Branding’ and the world becomes more ‘social media friendly’ through the development of new and exciting ground-breaking technologies. The technological advance has and will continue to transform life, business and the global economy which has shaken up the status quo and enforced a management re-think. At Adgistics, we want to stay on this ‘wave of change’ and be the company our clients look to for inspiration.

Client success story: Adidas

The challenge

Ensuring the consistency of adidas marketing communications has been problematic, as the global leading sportswear manufacturer operates through a network of subsidiaries, distributorships and licensees. The previous paper and people-centric process resulted in advertising inconsistency, cost inefficiency and non-compliance with copyright agreements (which is of particular importance given that much of adidas advertising includes celebrities with precise usage agreements).

Solution

Adgistics delivered a Brand Centre – a single destination for adidas authorized marketeers to view and order localized campaign material. The adidas Brand Centre is built in compliance to the brands guidelines; fully following the look, feel and tone-of-voice of the adidas brand, web-based, simple to navigate and instantly accessible for authorized users. The intuitive navigation and user-friendly interface ensures multi-cultural usage, without any need for specialist training.

Results

• All adidas advertising is managed via the adidas Brand Centre, ensuring total brand consistency and copyright compliance

• Fulllment is centralized over 50 markets yielding significant economies of scale

• Coordination staff in central agencies have been reduced or reallocated

• Inefficiencies caused by incorrect advertisements and duplications across markets have been removed

• Total annual cost savings are in excess of €2 million

Meet the Master

Joe Jarrett, CEO:

Joe joined Adgistics in April 2010 and has many years of experience in senior management with media and technology companies both in the public and private sectors. Dynamic, entrepreneurial and supported by a young and committed team, Joe has applied Adgistics’ innovative spirit and leadership skills to grow the company’s ‘footprint’ and product portfolio. Joe is passionately involved in a number of international not-for-profit organizations that develop standards for the marketing and advertising industries. Under his leadership, Adgistics has grown to become one of the world’s leading providers of brand and marketing technology solutions.