Verizon released first-year results of its Responsible Marketing Action Plan DE&I initiative, where it spent 65% of its video budget with diverse-owned video production companies and 49% of its video productions used diverse directors. The action plan encompasses data from Verizon's internal marketing team and in-house agency, including its roster of 12 external agency partners McCann, Momentum, MRM, Madwell, R/GA, The Community and VMI among others. Verizon also spent 46% of its experiential budget with diverse-owned experiential production companies and 45% of its print budget with diverse-owned print production companies.
All of these production usage statistics are collected, aggregated, tracked and analyzed monthly using Prodigy, the cloud-based production data storytelling platform with AI technology. The Verizon Marketing Effectiveness team were instrumental in helping to design Prodigy's features and capabilities starting back in 2019 through a product incubation process via their production consultant PostAds Group. One of the unique features of Prodigy critical to Verizon was eliminating manual data entry burdens on the part of marketing and agency stakeholders, a time-consuming process inherent in using previous SaaS (Software as a Service) products. The PostAds Group product incubation team created the industry's first SaaMS (Software as a Managed Service) using AI technology, machine learning and SaaMS production data curation to offer an "all of your production data, none of the data entry" solution that is now Prodigy's game-changing differentiator utilized by 75 brands and 35 ad agencies worldwide.
By freeing up the Marketing Effectiveness team's time from manual data entry, time is now spent on managing data models, designing data visualizations for analysis, developing strategic insights and implementing best practice action plans toward achievement of KPI goals. The Responsible Marketing Action Plan is one example of how becoming more sophisticated in automating data collection and reporting can dramatically impact corporate effectiveness.
Prodigy product innovations driven by Verizon Marketing Effectiveness continue to expand in 2022, with new features such as Production Calendars for visibility into upcoming projects and Budget Companion for faster review, approval and funding of new productions.
Read the full Verizon DE&I Results report at https://adage.com/article/agency-news/verizon-reveals-dei-initiatives-first-year-results/2419106
