A new concept is making its way into day-to-day business: #AgilesReporting. Agile reporting is first of all a new, universally adaptable and automatable form of reporting. It supports continuously changing questions and decisions of any stakeholder in marketing and communication departments. Its basis is completely standardized KPI and content tags. The path to agile reporting begins with a simple question.What decisions do you actually want to support?
Decisions in marketing and communications departments relate to highly differently organized companies and functional areas. What all differences have in common are the more or less similar hierarchical levels. Management level and operational level are found in every company.
The management level sets goals and organizes.
The operational level executes and optimizes.
If both levels have incompatible reporting systems, goals are not implemented and/or resources are "optimized" according to criteria other than corporate goals - as is the case in every media silo today.
What decisions does agile reporting support at the executive level?
The management level makes non-operational decisions about goals and organization. They need 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).
In regular operations, these impact data are typically reported at longer time intervals (e.g., semi-annually). If the reports inform about missing or reaching targets, organizational changes are decided or targets are reset. If impact data move within a corridor of expectations (forecasts), a decision is made to continue the measures.
- Impact data is also requested after projects (campaigns, events) have been completed. The goal is to evaluate these projects in a final report based on a cost-benefit analysis (ROI). Due to strongly varying project variables, a transfer of learnings from final reports to other projects is hardly possible. Therefore, project reports usually remain inconsequential unless the company operates a fully standardized and automated analysis landscape.
- In a well-positioned communication, leadership 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 value creation (impact), but only necessary precursors of impact. In addition, such performance data originates from non-verifiable 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 decisive than the content. What counts here is the fact that the operational level must report monthly and monitor itself. This effect makes even unread monthly reports an effective management tool. Monthly reports only trigger questions or decisions when major deviations or irregularities are noticed. This is usually not the case.
- Newsrooms and teams do not use monthly reports for their own operational decisions . Instead, they use daily or weekly reports with widely varying analysis perspectives. Or they go straight to the dashboard for interactive in-depth analyses of specific issues. The goal of such reports is always to support internal team decisions. They concern the selection and optimization of content topics, content formats, creation, and media buying - and that in a wealth of channel and A/B variants.
- The diverse 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. As a result, "analytics" is almost inevitably disconnected from any management.
The symptoms:
1. the team "reports" to itself
2. exorbitant analytics costs in the absence of benefits (which can be seen in non-use in the organization)
3. the amount of data-based information is almost unmanageable at the operational level.
4. data-based decisions promote the interests of isolated media silos like Facebook, Linked In or website - but not communication goals and messaging of the organization. - Effective countermeasures are:
1. integrating statements about impact goals into all operational reports on media performance, including those from 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 goals of the management level. For this purpose, uniform KPIs and content tags (for evaluation by topics and campaigns) are indispensable across all channels.
If this unification starts at the lowest level of individual posts, then agile reporting begins, as supported by our Content.ONE system.
Then reports can effectively support all organizational levels because they can quickly and effortlessly adapt to any use case. With unified data, you can aggregate and filter freely. By country, or business unit; by topic or campaign; from the highest index value to the best posts in those channels by any selectable 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 comparable 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 analog media relations.
- Agile reporting uses omnichannel KPIs that work across ALL channels and levels and can therefore fully align with WHAT (organization, goals, projects) you want to manage and support with data.
- Agile reporting adapts to constantly changing structures, goals and projects with little effort and high speed.
- Agile reporting is the basis for #DataDriven, but requires centralized analytics services in companies and, not least, a cultural shift towards agile methods.
And the future? Communication will become similarly "data-driven" as so-called performance marketing is today. There, MarTech combines placement costs and click numbers in the KPI "Cost per Click" and automatically optimizes them for a clear goal: short-term promotion success.
Now, two decades later, communication is embarking on a similar path, albeit geared to long-term brand development, with CommTech. This tech stack includes both operational and analytical components, such as our Content.ONE reporting service.
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 delivers reliable efficiency analyses, and makes recommendations for channels, topics, and formats that support communication in an optimal, effective, and cost-effective way.