Multi award-winning marketing and production consultancy Murphy Cobb Associates [MCA] launches Control Room Invest [CRI], a platform that transforms the way advertisers manage their production investments at scale. As a global group of production consultants, MCA are perfectly positioned with over 15 years of global experience and intelligence, to launch an attribution platform. Recognising that brands are increasingly required to rationalise and attribute their production investment across growing consumer touchpoints and conversion journeys, the platform was created to provide unprecedented visibility and financial control that will combat some of the toughest challenges marketers face today.
By aggregating metadata on spend across all of an advertiser’s partners/vendors in multiple markets, categories and deliverables, Control Room Invest provides spend visibility and investment management in a live and easy to digest format. In doing so, the software also delivers a greater certainty of the outcome of spend through attribution. Eventually, users will be able to predict production and media investment outcomes, when the platform’s metadata is built into a prediction.
In one click, advertisers can see live insights into where their spend is going and where it can be re-attributed in order to increase effectiveness. In short, CRI delivers instant visibility on how much has been spent, on what, where. Users can see how much they have left to spend and where else any excess budget can best be repurposed for different campaigns and projects. With increasing pressures on budgets and attribution, CRI supports marketers, finance and procurement professionals to stay flexible and focused on the most efficient use of their marketing investments.
Features of the software include:
- Campaigns By Division Report. The report offers clarity on the remaining budget and actual savings by division. Knowing what you have spent and what you have left means you can repurpose what you have available and avoid unspent budgets disappearing.
- Cumulative Spend Report. The report shows users how much budget has been committed at any point in a financial year. View all estimates by approval status, compare month by month and know your busiest times when a production can be scheduled.
- Regions Report. The report compares spend across global regions, comparing spend country by country and users can drill down to understand exactly which deliverables are being produced in each campaign, in each country.
- Cost Category Report. The report shows the cost drivers of production. Users can see spend by category, and drill down to see specific spend in cost categories and their sub-categories.
- Campaigns by Category Report The report shows estimate vs actualised costs, for each campaign. Users can see where they have made savings, or run over budget, in different campaigns.
- Deliverables Report: Moving from key production categories to include every global deliverable, brands will have far more granularity on what they’re paying for different deliverables, across campaign, countries and regions.
- Upcoming: Divisional Budget Feature: Transforming CRI from an investment visibility platform to a budget management platform, this feature will deliver a regional dashboard that will allow local regional client/agency teams to allocate their budget to campaigns, and nimbly repurpose budget where savings are made, or campaigns are over budget/require more deliverables.
Founder and CEO at Murphy Cobb Associates, Pat Murphy says: “We have created this product specifically for marketing and procurement teams who want clarity and control over their budgets. We’ve been helping brands understand their budgets and spend on world-class advertising for the past 16 years but recently the proliferation of media channels has made it nigh on impossible for global advertisers to track their spend, as they’ll often work with hundreds of partners and suppliers at any one time. All of these suppliers report back differently and there is no way this can be consolidated at their level. We want to give brands back that visibility at the click of a button.”
Global Head Of Technology Janet Inglis comments: “Having worked both agency and brand side for many years, I couldn’t be more excited about the possibilities Control Room Invest will give brands. We have built this product with global clients, ensuring that every part of the software is fit for purpose and scalable. Brands have had to juggle multiple reporting platforms and formats from multiple partners and vendors for too long; they don’t have clear visibility on where they’re in budget or over-spending – time and again brands and agencies say they use CRI to quickly see where they’ve got surplus budget, to be able invest in further campaigns and deliverables – CRI delivers this clarity. Our aim is that by the end of 2022 Control Room Invest will be an end-to-end investment and attribution platform.”
MCA was founded in 2006 to support advertisers around the world gain maximum value from their marketing and communications investments and has consulted on some of the world’s most creatively awarded advertising including Cadbury “Gorilla”, T-Mobile “Flashmob”, Emirates “Hello Tomorrow”, BT “Sports Heroes”, Pepsico “UEFA Champions” and IKEA “Beds”. Led by experienced ex-heads of production, TV, marketing, print, digital and integrated production, Control Room Invest is the next innovative string to the company’s bow.
For more information about Control Room Invest click here.
