Marketing Project Management Blog

The Simple blog covers the tools and processes that keep marketing teams moving — from managing creative workflows and approval processes to online proofing, marketing compliance, and digital asset management. Whether you’re evaluating software or tightening up how your team operates, you’ll find practical guides and best practices here.

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The Key to Managing Operational Change in Marketing

“Most people don’t like change,” according to leadership guru John Maxwell. “They revolt against it unless they can clearly see the advantage it brings. “For that reason, when good leaders prepare to take action or make changes, they take people through a process to get them ready for it.” Change is a constant in marketing today, according to Norma Abeyasekera, co-founder and principal of transformation consultancy Abey Abey Consulting, who quoted Maxwell in a presentation about managing operational transformation in marketing at Simple’s panel discussion, “Delivering Value in a Disrupted Marketing World”.

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5 Signs Your Marketing Planning Process Needs an Update

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” That’s the claim of time management guru Alan Lakein. So why don’t more marketers look forward to planning with a sense of anticipation rather than a sense of dread?

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5 Reasons to Restructure Marketing into Cross-Functional Teams This Year

Is your marketing department organised in cross-functional teams focused on customer segments and journeys? Or do your marketers work in functional silos with all the digital marketers together, separate brand and data teams, a content marketing silo, and so on?

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4 Ways AI Will Make Creative Briefs Better

Ad man David Ogilvy once famously said: “Give me the freedom of a tight brief.” A tight creative brief to agency creative teams eliminates time-wasters and tangential information, making it faster and easier to get from the starting point to an effective creative idea. So does a tight marketing brief from marketing teams to agencies.Rightly or wrongly, for many marketers, the task of writing the brief is often perceived as being time-consuming, repetitive and overly administrative — in short, it feels a long way from being the conduit to creativity it should be. In fact, it’s one area of marketing calling out for the elimination of the unnecessary to unleash the extraordinary.

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4 Things We Learned About Implementing Agile Marketing

There’s no doubt agile marketing is a hot topic in marketing circles, and it’s easy to see why. In a world that’s moving faster, agile marketing helps build nimbleness and adaptability into marketing teams so they can do things faster, control risk and take into account available data to make better decisions, and ultimately build better value for customers.

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4 Sure-Fire Ways to Improve Your Agency Relationships

Looking for better work from your creative agency? This can lead marketing teams to those all-consuming, headline-grabbing agency pitches that end up being expensive, time-consuming and inherently risky beauty pageants. Enlightened pitch consultants will say they should be avoided if possible. But that means learning how to work better with your agencies in the first place.

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4 Higher Education Marketing Technology Trends

“There’s a tsunami coming.” So said John Hennessy, President of Stanford University in a now-famous interview withThe New Yorkerin 2012. He was referring to how technology was about to radically change higher educationdelivery. But he could equally have been talking about the impending shifts in higher education marketing.

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4 Key Issues for Marketers Managing the Customer Experience

It was exciting to get the results from Simple’s recent research study,Marketing Operations in the Age of Intelligence— and have it confirmed that in many cases, marketers are now becoming the custodian of customer experiences rather than just brand communications. With almost 2 in 3 chief marketing officers and marketing teams taking on responsibility for managing the customer experience, it’s more than a nascent trend – and fast becoming business as usual. But what does that mean for marketing teams already overwhelmed by a mountain of processes, data, content and competition? From my discussions with busy CMOs, it adds up to 4 things:

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3 Tips for Retail Marketing Success From ex-Swisse CEO Radek Sali

Radek Sali, the former chief executive of Swisse, gave a great presentation in Melbourne at a recent retail event about how applying the wellness message to his own corporate culture, as well as the Swisse brand, paid dividends.

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3 Mistakes to Avoid at Your In-House Agency

As big brands like Optus and CUB embrace the concept of bringing creative work in-house, the discussion around the rise of in-house studios and internal agencies becomes a hot topic once again. It’s a hard-fought battleground: on one side are the independent creative agency staffers and freelancers, decrying the drop in creative standards they say will inevitably result; on the other, the smart marketers who know that in this day and age, they really don’t need to pay $100 to have a word in the headline of an ad changed, and they don’t need to wait 3 days to get it done.

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10 Steps to Refreshing Your Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines are the cornerstone of any successful brand. For any marketing team — especially as your company grows — it would be impossible to build a consistent brand without them. And without documented, accessible and well-communicated brand guidelines, your marketing team, internal creative agency and external agency partners will struggle with the look and feel of every new project.

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Why Martech Must Play Nicely in a Complex World

Every year when Scott Brinker’s infamousMarketing Technology Landscape Supergraphicis published, the marketing technology industry scrambles to apprise itself of the updated number of martech solutions available to marketers.

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5 Reasons to Consider Creating An In-house Agency Now

You might remember the controversialPepsi ad featuring Kendall Jennerthat was pulled by the soft drink maker shortly after it first went to air in 2017, effectively for trivialising serious social problems by positioning Pepsi as the solution.The ad caused an immediate and intense global backlash for Pepsi along with marketers, researchers and Jenner herself. And as it was created by Pepsi’s in-house agency Creators League studio, in-house creative agencies also copped a battering as a result. Fast-forward 18 months and the impact this controversy has had on in-house agencies is apparent: absolutely none.

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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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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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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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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.