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VB Live

Why Garmin gave creative a seat at the marketing table (VB Live)

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The heart of your campaigns is effective creative — but are your campaigns being stunted by siloed departments? Learn more about how personal tech leader Garmin reshaped their marketing department to gain huge marketing wins in our latest VB Live event.

Register here for free.

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During her three years as global digital advertising and social media manager at personal tech giant Garmin, the biggest step for Carla Meyer was breaking down the walls between her department, marketing and creative.

“Garmin had a good creative department, but they weren’t using it for marketingdigital and social,” Meyer explains. “Now we’re able not just to take the TV commercial or print ad and repurpose it; we’re actually able to get custom assets for whatever platform or medium we’re looking at.”

And bringing creative to the table is a strategy that’s paying off significantly. In a recent product launch campaign, the marketing and creative departments worked together to nail down the target audience and develop compelling, precisely targeted content that engaged their audience to the tune of a 9.7x return on ad spend.

Communication, Meyer says, is the simple foundation of their success. “I really think it’s that easy,” she says. “Communication and getting people involved really early on. Bringing creative to the table so they can understand how to apply our media strategy to their creative to get the best product.”

The destruction of silos is the only way to evolve and to stay competitive, Meyers says, as the amount and types of data expands, channels evolve, and customers get more sophisticated.

“People are realizing that creative, media strategy. and data, they all have to be working together,” she says. “At Garmin, we’re definitely all getting on the same page, we’re not working in silos. Now everyone’s at the table — creative, strategy, planning, our buyers, our media partners. We’re all working together to accomplish our goal, and everyone’s communicating and understanding what we’re going for.”

To tackle 2017 campaign planning, she brought together the creative directors, media buyer, and strategy department for a think session with one goal: Here’s what we’re hoping to accomplish from a media strategy perspective based on our marketing goals.

From creative insights to media placement and targeting on their ad platforms, with everyone involved in the planning, the eternal game of Interdepartmental Telephone is eliminated.

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“It’s not just one person shuffling a message around to everybody — it’s all the stakeholders actually at the table, creating this campaign together,” she explains, “so we can get to this place where we’re serving really good creative with really strong strategy and really good media placement.”

“That’s how I want to drive evolution this year at Garmin,” she adds. “We’ve come a long way, but we’re always getting better.”

For more on how to drive cross-departmental insight and develop powerful, creative-driven campaigns, join GPS technology giant Garmin and advertising technology leader Undertone in our latest interactive VB Live event!


Don’t miss out!

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Register here for free.


In this webinar you’ll learn how to:

  • Find your customers online and how to reach them
  • Refine targeting and creative with data
  • Leverage creative as the key variable in digital marketing
  • Reach out to influencers, the new gatekeepers

Speakers:

  • Carla Meyer, Global Digital Advertising and Social Media Manager, Garmin
  • Eric Franchi, Co-founder and SVP Business Development, Undertone

Moderator:

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  • Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat

This VB Live event is sponsored by Undertone.