3 TIPS TO UNCOVER

HIDDEN SPENDMaximize the penetration of your MSP

in the creative & marketing category

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THE CURRENT LANDSCAPEOur survey illuminates several key trends and lessons learned in using a !exible workforce:

Flexible workforce solutions are a critical part of successful marketing and creative organizations

Gaps in capacity and technical expertise drive outsourcing

Many hiring managers react to, instead of plan for, additional sta"ng needs

Managers continue to shoulder a large workload

Proactive workforce management practices pay o#

Let’s examine each one more closely.

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FOR YOUR MSP TO SUCCEED WITH CONTINGENT WORKFORCE CLIENTS, YOU’VE GOT TO ACCOMPLISH TWO KEY GOALS: ! MAXIMIZE PENETRATION OF THE PROGRAM! INCREASE THE SPEND UNDER MANAGEMENT

One of the best ways to accomplish both is to partner with specialty staffing suppliers, who live and breathe the unique challenges that o!ten cause end users to look for ways around your MSP program. Solving those challenges can keep cus-tomers happy and bring more end users into the program.

As a specialty sta"ng supplier to large multinational corpora-tions, Aquent has developed a deep understanding of the unique challenges facing digital, creative, and marketing organizations. We have also worked with many MSPs to deliver value for our mutual clients. Our complete dedication to learning about—and serving the needs of—both our clients and the MSP community has helped us develop three tips to creating a successful partner-ship, which we share in this whitepaper.

TIP #!: Capture the hidden digital, creative, and marketing spend within your program

TIP #": Accommodate for unique ful#llment requirements

TIP ##: Identify suppliers invested in your program

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THE CHALLENGE FACING MARKETING & CREATIVE ORGANIZATIONSAquent has been sta"ng the largest marketing and creative organizations in the world for more than 26 years and we’ve developed a deep understanding of the unique challenges facing these groups. Simply stated, digital, creative, and marketing organizations are:

Struggling to #nd the right mix of internal and external resources

Stretched incredibly thin

Ruled by constant changes in technology

Case in point: According to a recent Aquent | American Marketing Association Survey, many marketing professionals feel understa$ed and unequipped to handle new trends and technologies.

Marketing strategy will positively impact organization financially in 2013.

Have the people needed on my team to meet organization’s marketing objectives.

Marketing team is well equipped to handle new trends and technologies.

Disagree (0-6) Somewhat Agree (7-8) Strongly Agree

0% 50% 100%

17%29%54%

22%25%53%

37%34%30%

For most creative and marketing organizations, overcoming the challenges they’re facing means using a combination of external resources to get work done. For MSPs, and their specialty suppliers, this means vast opportunity. However, for your program to succeed with contingent workforce clients in the marketing and creative category, it is critical to follow these three tips.

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TIP 1CAPTURE THE HIDDEN DIGITAL, CREATIVE, AND MARKETING SPEND WITHIN YOUR PROGRAMIn 2012, Aquent commissioned a survey of 580 marketing, creative, and digital hiring managers to uncover !lexible workforce trends in their departments. The average organizational allocation of marketing & creative work* was:

In-house employees (72% of respondents)

Independent contractors (10% of respondents)

Ad agencies (8% of respondents)

Sta"ng #rm employees (7% of respondents)

Outsourced project teams (2% of respondents)

*Note: percentages may not add to 100 due to rounding

For many hiring managers, it’s di"cult to de-termine the most e$ective use of the resources listed above. To help our clients determine how best to allocate resources, we like to ask two questions:

How much control do you want to have over the daily work?

How much do you need to be able to scale up and down with changes in your business?

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Many marketing and creative organizations work with a single full-service agency or sometimes even multiple boutique agencies on campaigns ranging from traditional (print, TV) to digital (mobile, social, search). This can add up to big dollars.

Marketing and creative sta"ng providers typically provide temporary and contract-to-hire talent to bring expertise and/or increase the bandwidth of their client’s in-house team.

Here are broad categories of digital, marketing, and creative talent provided by these niche sta"ng providers:

User Experience

Digital and Graphic Design

Online, Social and Integrated Marketing

Research and Analysis and Product Management

Writing and Content

Project Management, Producers, and Creative Management

Web and Mobile

Design and Front End Development

The use of a contingent workforce is still a new business approach in marketing and creative. Hiring managers tend to think in terms of adding internal sta$ or using their own network of independent contractors rather than identifying ways to harness the power of a contingent workforce. As marketing channels continue to proliferate, creative and marketing organizations can shi% that spend to a highly scalable, &exible workforce that can work on mission-critical projects (i.e., projects that require a high degree of control) on a contract basis.

Recently, our Client Services

Team at PG&E became aware

that Aquent could provide

resources that fall into the

crossover areas of Marketing/

Design and IT/Technical. As a

result, more opportunities on

the IT/Technical side are be-

ing made available to Aquent.

—Maggie Laster, Supplier En-

gagement Manager, Agile 1

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As MSPs onboard new suppliers, a typical mistake encountered is the mis-catego-rization of these new niche partners (Not exposing the niche supplier to crossover verticals in which they can help #nd the contingent sta$ your client requires).

Identifying and capturing these crossover areas is critical to ful#lling orders quickly—a key di$erentiator for the success of your program. Therefore, some key questions to ask yourself are:

1. Are your suppliers scope of services correctly aligned in your tool?

2. Can you create a separate category within the system to allow for “category unique” visibility?

In considering the answers to these two questions, MSPs must take deliber-ate and speci#c action to ensure they completely understand their specialty suppliers’ capabilities by engaging them in an analysis of where the sup-pliers have strongest and proven ful#llment capabilities. We suggest both #eld and executive involvement to validate scope of services (current client references coupled with a strong scope-of-services outline are a great begin-ning). Once capabilities are understood, your program management team can easily categorize suppliers into crossover verticals and maximize their e$ectiveness in your program.

Additionally, category visibility becomes key in your long-term strategies to have only the most quali#ed providers in your supplier community. Creating a segregated and unique category for each niche supplier vertical (e.g., cre-ative, marketing, and digital) will allow for a clear understanding of perfor-mance of each supplier within the particular vertical, citing ful#llment-spe-ci#c KPI and SLA data which can be easily identi#ed and validated.

MOBILE APPDEVELOPERS

UX DESIGNERS

FRONT ENDDEVELOPERSCR

OSS

OVE

R DE

PART

MEN

TS CREATIVEENGINEERINGITMARKETING OPSPRODUCT GROUPSPRODUCT MARKETINGR & DUSER EXPERIENCE

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JOB TYPE* WHAT DO THEY DO? CROSSOVER DEPARTMENTS

Mobile App Developers Understand the complex re-quirements of developing for a wide variety of platforms and screen sizes to make sure end users have an excep-tional experience with their favorite mobile apps.

Creative Development/Engineering IT Marketing Operations Product Groups Product Marketing Research and Development

User Experience (UX) Designers

Generate interactive expe-riences to satisfy audiences. They know the importance of a user’s vision, and know exactly how to take an inter-active project from soup (user analysis) to nuts (personas, site maps, taxonomies, and wireframes).

Creative Development/Engineering IT Marketing Operations Product Groups Product Marketing Research and Development User Experience

Front End Developers Utilize the latest web devel-

opment standards and solid

hands-on technical skills to cre-

ate sites that function properly

across a variety of browsers and

platforms. They share a brain

with Quality Control to ensure

&awless execution.

Creative

Development/Engineering

IT

Marketing Operations

Product Marketing

Product Groups

Research and Development

User Experience

*Although the job types in this chart are focused on creative roles, marketing roles are o!ten mis-categorized into “professional services.” Separating marketing into its own distinct category can give more visibility into this specialized area and will allow you, and your niche suppliers, to serve your clients better.

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TIP 2ACCOMMODATE FOR UNIQUE FULFILLMENT REQUIREMENTSAs mentioned previously, the use of a contingent workforce is still a new business ap-proach in marketing and creative. Reasons for this vary, but typically it’s because the fast-paced and deadline-driven culture in marketing and creative means hiring managers require a higher than usual comfort level with the skills, experience, and design aesthetic of the candidates.

This cultural reality o%en means marketing and creative professionals will tap their own network to source candidates for project-based work. Given everything marketing and creative leaders must juggle on a daily basis, building and maintaining a personal network of talent can be a daunting task. Continuously networking with professionals (particularly for in-demand roles) can be particularly time-consuming.

Educating the end user on how working within your client’s MSP program can help source candidates with the right skills, experience, and design aesthetic is important; how-ever, your program must accommodate for the unique ful#llment requirements of market-ing and creative departments such as:

For marketing and creative talent, “showcasing” (an in depth pro#le) will allow your program to highlight the candidate’s most noteworthy accom-plishments, skills or abilities to an end user.

At Aquent, we’ve found candidate showcasing, particularly via email, to be a very e$ective way to grab end-user a'ention and quickly #ll an order.

HOW TO ACCOMMODATE

UNIQUE REQUIREMENT

Candidate Showcasing

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Particularly for digital creative positions, it’s critical for your program to provide a place to communicate a technical skill rating to end users.

At Aquent, we’ve developed assessments for digital/creative including: HTML4, HTML5, CSS2, CSS3, JavaScript, JQuery, WordPress, Web Design, and Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, etc.)

For websites, it’s not enough to just look nice. Poorly coded websites can mean a bad user experience and lower search engine rankings.

At Aquent, we have expert interviewers provide a thorough code review of a candidate’s actual project, and talk through the strategic considerations and thought process behind the code. Summaries, available to clients, create a detailed and well thought-out strategic picture of the talent’s strengths, and where they’d #t best.

Technical Skills Ratings

Expert Technical Interviews

There are a number of ways ways in which marketing, creative, and digital hiring managers evaluate creative work. Most importantly, they want to see visuals, so it is important for your program to allow an end user to see samples of work.

At Aquent, we’ve developed “talent pro#les” that highlight our talent’s best work so hiring managers can determine how successful the designer was at taking a piece from concept to completion.

Portfolio Reviews

HOW TO ACCOMMODATE

UNIQUE REQUIREMENT

Removing a “one-size-#ts-all” mentality in terms of ful#lment requirements will give marketing and creative end users the comfort level they require and allow for broader adoption of the program within this category.

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TIP 3IDENTIFY SUPPLIERS INVESTED IN YOUR PROGRAMOur partnerships with MSPs reinforce the complementary relationship between specialty supplier and MSP. Our ultimate goal is the same—to quickly #nd the right people to help clients accomplish their goals. Unfortunately, there are still sta"ng suppliers that hold the perception that MSP programs are speci#cally designed to prevent suppliers from soliciting feedback directly from the end-user community of the client. In speaking with leadership in virtually every MSP within the sta"ng industry, we know that this is not the case, and we are doing our part to change this perception among suppliers.

Simply stated, the end user community does not what their time wasted on sales pitches and endless phone calls. They would rather be educating the supply base on what they need in a candidate and provide feedback on the candidates they are considering. In the end, most MSPs that we have spoken with want the time they spend with sta"ng companies to be about what they do best: #lling the current order, not the next one. That job should be le% up to the MSP.

At the end of the day, the client end user, MSP program management, and supplier recruit-ment sta$ all want to create a relationship based on trust. At Aquent, we’ve found that the key is complete honesty about our specialties, capabilities, and limitations. This helps us to avoid over-commi'ing and under-delivering.

Truly invested suppliers should be willing to commit to:

Internal sta$ training on the VMS tool

Early involvement in implementation and adoption initiatives

Educating the end user on MSP value and process

You engage suppliers to #ll gaps in the supply chain. Using an incumbent supplier is the easiest route, though prior engagements are no guarantee of future success. Ultimately, the success of your program at the end user level requires you to have reliable and trusted suppliers.

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THE CURRENT LANDSCAPEOur survey illuminates several key trends and lessons learned in using a !exible workforce:

Flexible workforce solutions are a critical part of successful marketing and creative organizations

Gaps in capacity and technical expertise drive outsourcing

Many hiring managers react to, instead of plan for, additional sta"ng needs

Managers continue to shoulder a large workload

Proactive workforce management practices pay o#

Let’s examine each one more closely.

Uncover H

idden Spend

11

It can be di"cult for an MSP to #nd quali#ed suppliers to help serve the need of the client while being a trusted resource to facilitate long-term growth strategies. Suppliers that can prove that they are truly invested in your program can assist in moving spend under management, ensure the proper integration and adoption of the tools and processes, and help communicate the value of an MSP program.

RELIABLE

TRUSTEDINVESTED

THE IDEAL SUPPLIER QUALITIES

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THE CURRENT LANDSCAPEOur survey illuminates several key trends and lessons learned in using a &exible workforce:

Flexible workforce solutions are a critical part of successful marketing and creative organizations

Gaps in capacity and technical expertise drive outsourcing

Many hiring managers react to, instead of plan for, additional sta"ng needs

Managers continue to shoulder a large workload

Proactive workforce management practices pay o$

Let’s examine each one more closely.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT AQUENT AND OUR MSP PROGRAM, PLEASE CONTACT:

711 Boylston St. Boston, MA 02116 USA 617 535 5000

Paul Petersen Vice President, MSP Channel Partnerships

ppetersen@aquent.com 248 430 4622

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