pica9
Providing Marketers more Freedom, within Brand Boundaries

The business world is experiencing a seismic shift. Customer demands, business needs, and technology all have a new face, and so does the marketing landscape, where the tempo of change is rapidly increasing. CIOs and CMOs today are grappling with how to make their marketing more effective, efficient, and accountable. “Marketing officers are under mounting pressure to justify the investments they make in different kinds of creative marketing, including photos, print advertising, and email campaigns,” says Kevin Groome, Founder and CEO of Pica9. “Pica9 was founded to help business executives prove the value of their high-value creative assets and ensure their marketing organizations are brand-compliant.” With New York based Pica9 in the picture, CMOs can easily assess the creative assets that are used by marketers in the field. The company’s CampaignDrive platform empowers brand marketers to improve brand integrity, accelerate time-to-market and decrease marketing production costs – all while demonstrating return on marketing investment.

With Campaign Drive, organizations can upload all their brand assets— logos, layouts, and content—and transform them into dynamic marketing templates. The intuitive web-interface lets local marketers customize these templates using brand-approved messaging, offers, and imagery. With extensions to print-on-demand, email delivery, web publishing, and other downstream fulfillment channels, CampaignDrive makes the entire marketing production cycle manageable. “The brand-defined workflows allow brand and regional managers to orchestrate the activity of their marketing partners as required,” says Groome. CampaignDrive makes all of this possible at a savings of up to 95 percent compared to conventional marketing production techniques— giving brands more freedom in their budgets for marketing innovation.

The CampaignDrive marketing toolkit simplifies the process of local marketing and reduces the typical turnaround time to create marketing collateral from days to minutes. It minimizes the possibility for error and allows marketers to leverage the creative and media planning expertise of the brand. “Our platform enables organizations to make optimal use of their co-op or Marketing Development Funds (MDF), and achieve better brand exposure,” says Groome. CampaignDrive offers a highly configurable interface and unique tools that save time and money such as batch document generation, multi-vendor ordering, brand-defined layouts and more.

Various organizations have used CampaignDrive to improve brand consistency and drive enterprise-wide marketing goals. Marriott, the global leader in hospitality, relies on Pica9’s local marketing automation system to seamlessly manage over 5,000 properties across 16 brands in over 120 countries. This hospitality conglomerate uses the system to enable the rapid, low-cost creation of marketing materials-from menus to online banners in 30 different languages. Approval workflows that span continents and are fully configured to the brand’s need ensure that the Marriott brand voice always meets design standards. Since the launch of the system, Marriott has seen a 600 percent growth in the creation and re-use of brand assets with a total of 180,000 templates, images, and other highly valuable brand assets in the system today.

Pica9 is constantly innovating to improve marketing efficiency and enhance the user experience in their marketing automation system. “In the past 12 months, we have released more than 120 updates to our core CampaignDrive platform,” remarks Groome on the company’s efforts to deliver an excellent product. With this rapid development, CampaignDrive is cementing its roots within the Marketing Resource Management (MRM) landscape and exploring new frontiers in the enablement of local marketing. In the months to come, the Pica9 roadmap is chock full of revolutionary new features such as Adaptive Print with Programmatic Buying, Automated production of Native Advertising, and Automated Catalogue Production (Print and Digital)—leaving no stone unturned till the company attains preeminence.