Starcom is entwining digital automation with culture under chief operating officer Louise Romeo.
Romeo was elevated into the newly created role three months ago and since has focused on fostering a culture of creative thinking for media solutions and embracing automation to streamline workflow.
Research says the skills we have today won't be the skills we need in the future - so Romeo is ensuring her agency’s culture is adapting to the future.
“It's not one or the other, [technology and humans] are complementary and both will help us the market, our clients business, how we structure our agency, and then hopefully deliver positive results,” Romeo told AdNews.
“We are trying to encourage our teams to work more intelligently with technology.”
Unlike most COO roles, Romeo’s role encompasses investment and operations.
“My role is to guide staff collaboration and productivity, but at the same time have one finger on what the market is doing and where we can extract value,” Romeo said.
“Interestingly, investment is much more than trading now, it's very much data driven, focused on audience insights and extracting value.”
Louise Romeo with Starcom team at AdNews agency of the Year Awards.
Now three months in Romeo has integrated paid & direct media teams, implemented training and introduced more data-led campaigns.
“We’ve already got integrated client teams in the business which brings all the specialists together, but seamless integration of paid and direct media is one of our top priorities,” Romeo said.
“Afterall clients’ business and the customer journey are not just focused on payment anymore; it's much more complex.
“A traditional agency model has been very much siloed in the past in the organisational design, so our focus is really about continuing to have those cross functional teams.
“We've also invested in a lot of training and upskilling for our team which is not just about technical skills, it's also around softer skills such as high performance, agility and other things that we need when we're looking at the business more broadly.
“We've also built a product acceleration roadmap which helps us identify which core areas - such as capabilities, data, technology, processes and how we work with partners in the market - we want to focus on moving into next year.”
As the market becomes more digitally mature, Starcom is too by delivering more data led campaign work.
“We've also started [experimenting] with new and emerging technology and buying models - specifically we’ve been focusing on identity solutions, accelerating our E-commerce roadmap, but also more recently we've been doing some work in omni-channel.
“Having the structure and support in place when it comes to streamlining our processes for analyzation of technology, but also empowering our teams to think more critically and innovate and push the boundaries.”
Despite introducing lots of changes with the agency, Starcom staff are more encouraged now to come into office with the new and improved ways of doing things.
“Let’s get the technology to take all of that heavy lifting off us and allow our teams to have the time to flourish in one their day careers and two in their learning & development,” Romeo said.
“And three allows our teams to spend time on more valuable tasks with clients, understanding their business challenges, thinking about creative media solutions, rather than being focused on low value high touch admin repetitive tasks.”
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