Blog

From marketing operations best practices to industry insights, the Simple blog delves into all things relating to managing marketing projects, brand assets and technology.

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Why Starting a Growth Fund Will Make You a More Effective CMO

How does a company know their chief marketing officer is effective? Is it when they can quantify the return on marketing investment? Perhaps they’ve launched a social media campaign that went viral? Or when they can speak authoritatively about every aspect of your brand’s relationship with its customers?

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Under or Over Your Marketing Budget This Year? What To Do?

For anyone who’s in charge of a marketing budget, and rapidlyapproaching the end of their organization’s financial year, it’s a tricky time. Because closing out the financial year over budget is generally frowned upon. But so is finishing the financial year with budgeted funds un-spent. What to do at the 11th hour?

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One Simple Tip to End Marketing Planning Chaos

If you reach the rundown to the end of year and find yourself scrambling to pull together all the information and resources you need to create your marketing plan for the year ahead, here’s one simple tip that will make your life much easier and save your team loads of time: plan your marketing work in a tool that also captures your objectives and results.

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Why Marketing Operations Has Become Essential for Financial Services Teams in 2025

Marketing in financial services has always been complex, but 2025 brings a new level of pressure. Tightening regulations, rising compliance expectations, increased scrutiny from regulators, and a wave of new competitors mean marketing teams must work smarter, faster and with more control.

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Why Your Marketing Plan Must Direct Your Team

A great marketing plan is like a brain that directs, aligns and activates your marketing team and its available resources around the right collective goals. Conversely, teams that don’t have a functioning plan risk wasting resources, time and energy working on the wrong things. So why is it so rare to see marketing teams executing against fully functional, real-time, connected marketing plans?

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Why Telstra Wholesale Appointed Simple for Agile Marketing

The marketing team at Telstra Wholesale has been on a digital transformation journey over the past 12 months, implementing new customer relationship and marketing automation platforms to support sales and marketing. Now the team has turned its focus to improving the internal marketing processes, adopting agile marketing and using Marketing Operations platform Simple to help streamline the way marketing works with a complex range of suppliers and stakeholders.

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From Brief to Amplification: 7 Tips for Building Buy-In For Marketing

From Brief to Amplification: 7 Tips for Building Buy-In For Marketing Ansell’s chief marketing officer Mitchell Mackey has a saying about marketing: “If we just executed on the basics well, we’d be way ahead.” In line with this philosophy of keeping the marketing organisation’s foundations strong, and with marketing briefs and creative briefs going to creative agencies around the world, Ansell’s global marketing team underwent training recently on how to write a clear brief.

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The Creative Brief: ‘It’s the Platform, Not the Rocket Ship’

The Creative Brief: ‘It’s the Platform, Not the Rocket Ship’ Many marketers struggle to write the creative brief for their agencies. So we asked a high-profile creative director for their perspective on the importance and role of the brief. A good brief is single-minded and should contain something to inspire the creative team, according to Sean Cummins, founder, global chief executive and chief creative officer of creative agencyCummins Partners.

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The Role of the Business Problem in the Marketing Brief

The Role of the Business Problem in the Marketing Brief “If you don’t know the question, the chance the answer’s going to be right is pretty slim.” Too often, marketers brief a campaign in to their creative agency without describing the fundamental business problem the campaign needs to address.

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Why Every CMO Needs a Marketing Ops First Mate

Marketing operations is something of a misunderstood role, and can be a catch-all for the responsibilities that don’t fit easily into other senior marketing remits. “You get everything the chief marketing officer likes the idea of but doesn’t have time to do,” is howone senior marketing operations executivedescribes it.

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Understanding Marketing Operations and its growing importance.

What is Marketing Operations? Marketing operations (marketing ops) uses technology and data to create better experiences for customers and employees.It forms part of a broader change in how marketers work. There is an increasing understanding of the need to manage the entire organization as one interconnected ecosystem as leaders. While the definition of marketing ops is widely agreed upon, some companies have taken a different approach to solving problems. Other firms view product management as the equivalent of marketing ops. A marketing operations function provides critical tools for collaboration and communication, which improve efficiency across the entire marketing function.

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How to Run a Marketing Productivity Program

“Start by doing what’s necessary. Then do what’s possible. And suddenly you are doing the impossible.”St Francis of Assisi might have been talking about something entirely more altruistic than marketing, but his words still hold true when it comes to tackling any complex task — and finding ways to make your marketing team more productive surely falls into that basket.

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12 Ways Simple Supports Decentralised and Distributed Marketing Teams

The structure of marketing teams has undergone some big changes in recent years with the re-absorption of digital skills into marketing, the return of data to marketing — driven by rapid technologisation, and the increasing centralisation of marketing teams. But centralised marketing structures do not suit every organisation. Many national and multinational marketing organisations are decentralised, dispersed or distributed, often with a centralised global brand team and local marketing execution teams.

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All The Gear But No Idea

As we enter the new year of 2022, and leave the troubles of 2020 and 2021 behind us, it’s time for a fresh start. We are ready to kick all the gears into action and come back stronger than ever – but where do we start?

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Why is a DAM Important and Why Should You Have One?

We know how you feel, digital marketing is becoming increasingly complex with more channels, more strategies, more competition, and, yes, more digital assets. Yet, it’s crucial that all your processes are as efficient and your team as productive as possible.

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15 Tips to Help You Master Marketing Planning

Former Unilever ANZ vice-president of marketing and previously Kellogg ANZ marketing director John Broome — now chief executive officer of the Australian Association of National Advertisers — has seen more marketing plans than most of us have had hot breakfasts. And the marketing planning process in the under-pressure fast-moving consumer goods sector is arguably more disciplined and rigorous than in any other.

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Fix Your Marketing Process and Fix Your Inner Winner

So you’ve recently started a new job. Your boss asks you to take charge of the latest digital marketing campaign. No problem – you did that in your previous gig. Then she goes on holiday for two weeks. The afternoon before she leaves, she sends you an email with some instructions and contact numbers. You don’t have the chance to review it with her. The next day, you realise you don’t know your brand’s performance benchmarks, or whether anyone needs to approve the creative, and you’re missing a few log-ins.

Simple.io appoints Darin Lloyd as new CEO

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Manage the review and approval of marketing video content with admation

As predicted, video marketing continues to grow as the preferred way to connect with consumers. InVideo report that by 2022, onlinevideos will make up more than 82% of consumer internet traffic, Studies show that 54% of consumers want to see more video contentfrom a brand or business they support, and MarkinBog report that87% of marketing professionals use video as a marketing tool. So why is video outperforming other types of content? For starters, video is more accessible for viewers as it utilises the two top senses: sight and hearing. We also process video content exponentially faster than written content. That's 60,000 times faster if reports are accurate. Subsequently, marketers are finding it easier to illicit an emotional response and build trust through video content.

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Together we Work Better: Admation Simple

We are passionate about making marketing work better. So today, we are thrilled to announce the merger ofAdmationandSimple.With both companies leaders in marketing operations and retailmarketing workflow technology, it made perfect sense to come together as the new Simple.But it is not just the technology at the heart of this merger - it's the combination of technology with people, processes and insights.

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Best Practices for growing your ad agency

To grow your ad agency, you not only need a solid vision, you need to implement failsafe strategies and practices to ensure that you accomplish your goal. The last 12 months are a reminder that we operate in a highly competitive industry and agencies need to be adaptable to cope with the rapidly changing landscape. So how do you grow your ad agency with the current landscape? Well here are some best practices for growing and thriving in your ad agency.

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Managing Creative Teams 2021 and Beyond - The New Normal

The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound effect on the world. It changed the way businesses work, how they acquire customers, and, unsurprisingly, the way they market themselves. As a result, creative teams were not spared any disruption during 2020. They faced new challenges, but going into 2021, they also have a unique opportunity to take advantage of the market evolution and changing customer needs. But what were the challenges in 2020, and what will be the new normal in 2021 and beyond. Let's look. The Past Year With more people using the Internet and social media than ever before, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated many businesses' digital transformation efforts. As a result, the need for digital content exploded, with consumers now not only needing but also expecting digital engagement.

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Admation Awarded Fastest Implementation Software

The pace of the marketing and advertising industry is well documented and felt by most working in different roles across the industry. The market demands that creative teams are quick to respond to the demands of consumers and the businesses that service them. So when it comes to the tools that creative teams rely on to deliver campaigns, it is critical they can be quickly adopted and meet their needs. The Software Suggest Recognition Awards 2021 recently awarded admation with two gongs forFastest Implementation Software andBest Software. It's always a good feeling when our creative project management software is recognised in the industry as it shines a light on the hard work we do and the value we deliver our customers around the globe.

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All you need to know about marketing compliance

Like every industry, marketing is bound by its own spiderweb of regulations and layers of compliance that must be adhered to. There are legal and regulatory standards that need to be adhered to and they can be set and enforced by both external and internal bodies.

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Tips To Deliver Creative Marketing Projects on Time

Aah, deadlines. As a marketer you'll face a lot of them. Actually, when you manage creative projects, they?re par for the course. Some of them you make, and it?s inevitable that you?ll miss some. Hey, it happens, and most clients understand if you miss one occasionally.

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How to Improve Operations with Marketing Project Management Software

In today's dynamic business landscape, marketing managers and creative teams are constantly immersed in a whirlpool of tasks that demand considerable time, resources, and effort. Crafting groundbreaking creative content is no small feat; it is a monumental undertaking that involves a myriad of complex processes. While different businesses have distinct methods of navigating this complexity, it's clear that the discipline of Creative Operations is coming into its own, evolving into a formidable force that is steering this industry to new heights.