One System, One Agency - The Jaguar Land Rover Approach

It's almost a decade since Jaguar Land Rover created its global agency joint venture and it seems it was on to a winning formular - a centralized system and inhouse agency.

  1. chevron left iconOne System, One Agency - The Jaguar Land Rover Approach
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Lucy Campbell-WoodwardSeptember 16, 2019
  • Digital Asset Management
  • Digital Marketing
  • Technology

A little while ago we explored Jaguar Land Rover (JLR)’s decision to create its own agency – Spark44. This wasn’t just a fancy name for JLR’s marketing department. It is a global agency joint venture which has created an autonomous agency with briefs, budgets, accountability, staff and resourcing needs to deliver what its client demands.

At the time – 2011 - it was viewed as something of an anomaly. After all, clients hired agencies, plural. There was a separation, like the moat around a castle, between brand and agencies. This arguably tapped into agencies’ broad experience, gleaned across a range of clients, and equally broad spread of resources as each deployed a different system.

However, in the intervening nine years, it’s becoming clear that the move to omnichannel rather than multichannel means that transparency and a flow of information across online, mobile, publishing (brochures, POS etc), sales, service and so on is now taking priority. And as a result, we are seeing a growing number of companies following suit. Lastminute.com has created its own inhouse media agency, Forward. Barclaycard has an inhouse team that remains nameless but handles around 85% of the creative needs for Barclays and Barclaycard (although those two entities remain treated as two distinct business units).

But regardless of whether or not an inhouse or own brand agency is the way to go, all these instances share a desire which is of singular import – a need for centralized systems, processes and data.

Keeping control of the data and assets flowing through and around the company serving its various internal and external needs is complex. The more that information can be centralized, creating a central repository for product information, content and data that subscribes to certain rule sets, permissions, templates and workflows, and from which all parties can work according to the needs of their function in a transparent and supported work flow (be they agency or brand), the more that efficiency can be increased and mistakes cut.

There is no shortage of proof to support this theory. Let’s go back to the original JLR story. Since its inception, JLR’s inhouse agency, Spark44 has helped to double sales from 300,000 to 600,000. It has also increased brand health and purchase consideration.

To achieve this, marketing had to become more effective, more impactful. It had to use data well – and that means data coming from a wide range of sources, not necessarily well tied together. Understanding that several different data sources refer to the same product is not easy and needs a system to pull assets and data together to allow them to mesh properly.

And, while JLR may be a household name, its resources are not necessarily going to match those of other well beloved brands such as P&G or Kraft. Its remit wasn’t just to create a smoother communications process, the agency also had to save the business money.

And it managed to do just that. Using a centralized system (censhare of course!), which is now used by 11,000 people, holds 300,000 assets, and serves 10,000 downloads each month, it saved JLR £55m since 2011. That money can go back into product development in an industry that is notoriously competitive and fast moving. And given increasing regulation around fossil fuels and developments in next generation engines, this movement will likely gather speed. With censhare, JLR and Spark44 could be on to a good thing in doing their part to facilitate this.

To learn more about the specifics of how Spark44 puts censhare’s DAM system into effect, and how they are able to maximize outputs, you can read and download the customer success story here.

You can also make use of this on demand webinar featuring Jerry Melichar, Director of Operations at Spark44, which provides listeners with a deep dive into how the agency makes use of the censhare Digital Asset Management system on a daily basis.

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Lucy Campbell-Woodward
Lucy is Head of Marketing for censhare, and leads the global team in the aligned planning and implementation of censhare's marekting strategy. Having joined the team in 2017, Lucy has played a pivotal role in the censhare Marketing team for a good few years now, and stepped up into a leadership role in 2022.

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