A new concept is finding its way into day-to-day business: #AgileReporting. Agile reporting is initially a new, universally adaptable and automatable form of reporting. It supports constantly changing questions and decisions from any stakeholder in marketing and communication departments. It is based on completely standardized KPIs and content tags. The path to agile reporting starts with a simple question.Which decisions should actually be supported?
Decisions in marketing and communication departments relate to very differently organized companies and functional areas. What all the differences have in common are the more or less similar hierarchical levels. Management level and operational level can be found in every company.
The management level sets goals and organizes.
The operational level executes and optimizes.
If both levels have incompatible reporting systems, targets are not implemented and/or resources are "optimized" according to criteria other than the company's targets - as is the case in every media silo today.
What decisions does agile reporting support at management level?
The management level makes non-operational decisions about goals and organization. It requires data on the achievement of objectives and proof of trouble-free control processes.
- Management objectives always relate to results and impact. These are either brand/reputation (sales and margin in the long term) or directly triggered target actions (sales and margin in the short term).
This impact data is typically reported at longer intervals (e.g. every six months) in regular operations. If the reports provide information on whether targets have been missed or achieved, organizational changes are decided or new targets are set. If the impact data is within an expected corridor (forecasts), a decision is made to continue the measures.
- Impact data is also requested after the completion of projects (campaigns, events). The aim is to evaluate these projects as part of a final report using a cost-benefit analysis (ROI). Due to widely differing project variables, it is hardly possible to transfer learnings from final reports to other projects. Project reports therefore generally remain inconsequential unless the company operates a fully standardized and automated analysis landscape.
- In well-positioned communication, management goals never refer to media performance KPIs such as reach, followers, click rates, etc. No communicator should be measured by KPIs that do not describe added value (impact), but merely necessary precursors of impact. In addition, such performance data comes from unverifiable platforms, such as Google, and is extremely easy to manipulate through opportunistic media buying, e.g. by buying followers or engagements. The expertise required in these environments is so specialized that companies either (have to) bundle it in "newsrooms" or, if there is no high demand for in-house content production, continue to outsource it to agencies.
What decisions does agile reporting support at the operational level?
- The operational level (newsroom, editors, media planners, etc.) must report to the management level on their own performance status. This is usually done in monthly reports based on selected KPIs.
As a rule, they provide information on the resources used (budget), the output produced (posts) and, if applicable, the media performance achieved. - For the management level, the uniformity of the monthly reports is more important than the content. What counts here is the fact that the operational level has to report monthly and monitor itself. This effect also makes unread monthly reports an effective management tool. Monthly reports only trigger questions or decisions if major deviations or irregularities are noticed. As a rule, this is not the case.
- Newsrooms and teams do not use monthly reports for their own operational decisions . Instead, they use daily or weekly reports with very different evaluation perspectives. Or they go straight to the dashboard for interactive in-depth analyses of specific issues. The aim of such reports is always to support internal team decisions. They relate to the selection and optimization of content topics, content formats, creation and media purchasing - in a wide range of channel and A/B variants.
- The various reports and analyses must be so detailed at this level that they have no relevance for the management level and are simply incomprehensible to non-experts. This means that "analytics" is almost inevitably disconnected from any management.
The symptoms:
1. the team "reports" to itself
2. exorbitant analytics costs with a lack of benefits (which can be seen from the lack of use in the organization)
3. the amount of data-based information is almost impossible to manage at an operational level
4. data-based decisions promote the interests of isolated media silos such as Facebook, Linked In or websites - but not the communication goals and messaging of the company. - Effective antidotes are
1. integrating statements about impact targets into all operational reports on media performance, including individual silos
2. integrating such reports into the regular meetings of as many stakeholders as possible
What is the key to agile reporting?
The core task is to link operational data-based decisions to the objectives of the management level. Uniform KPIs and content tags (for evaluation by topic and campaign) are essential for this across all channels.
If this standardization starts at the lowest level of individual posts, then agile reporting begins, as supported by our Content.ONE system.
Reports can then effectively support all organizational levels because they can be quickly and easily adapted to any use case. Standardized data can be freely aggregated and filtered. By country or business unit; by topic or campaign; from the highest index value to the best posts in those channels according to any detailed KPI.
What are the characteristics of agile reporting and where does it lead?
- Agile reporting is based on a standard KPI model for the cross-channel evaluation of communication. Our model is called Content.ONE. It was developed in our #ExcellenceForum and compares billions of impressions annually. Content.ONE is based on the 2007 DPRG/ICV model by Zerfass et al., which is the recognized European standard for analogue media work.
- Agile reporting uses omnichannel KPIs that work across ALL channels and levels and can therefore be fully aligned with WHAT (organization, goals, projects) you want to control and support with data.
- Agile reporting adapts to constantly changing structures, goals and projects with little effort and at high speed.
- Agile reporting is the basis for #DataDriven, but requires centralized analysis services in companies and, last but not least, a cultural shift towards agile methods.
And the future? Communication will become as "data-driven" as performance marketing is today. There, MarTech combines placement costs and click figures in the KPI "cost per click" and automatically optimizes them for a clear goal: short-term promotional success.
Now, two decades later, communication with CommTech is following a similar path, albeit geared towards long-term brand development. This tech stack includes both operational and analytical components, such as our reporting service Content.ONE.
The first newsrooms are already using agile reports that put their own publication performance in relation to the impact achieved. It is only a matter of time before CommTech calculates correlations between owned, paid and earned, automatically provides reliable efficiency analyses and makes recommendations: for channels, topics and formats that support communication in an optimal, effective and cost-effective way.