Report finds the Business Case for MRM has Become Clearer as Marketing Leaders are Challenged to Manage More Resources from Content and Brand Assets to Talent, Costs and Project Workflows

Lytho, a creative operations platform, providing tools including creative workflow and digital asset management (DAM) to brand and creative teams, announced it was named a “leader” in a new report by the technology analyst firm Research in Action GmbH. The report, titled “Vendor Selection Matrix ™ – Marketing Resource Management” assesses the strategy and execution of the top 15 global brands that compete in the MRM space.

Peter O‘Neill, a research director at Research in Action, describes MRM as software systems that “help to collect and share marketing assets, execute on campaigns, and track marketing assets across print and digital channels.” The purpose is to provide “a single unified system for all marketing material, which in turn ensures consistency of branding and messaging. It also enables marketers to create workflows and processes to streamline marketing operations.”

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“The focus of marketing has moved from the simple realization of new business leads to a more engaging and relationship model,” says Mr. O‘Neill in the report. “That raises challenges for marketing executives about the management of all the resources they are now responsible for: digital such as content and brand assets; as well as other components such as people (talent), costs and project workflows.”

The report is partly based on a survey of 1,179 “marketing and business managers with budget responsibility” and some 1,500 interviews the analyst firm conducted. The findings show the most prominent drivers for procuring and implementing MRM solutions include the following:

• “Demonstrate our overall marketing ROI” (37.7%);
• “Reduce overall marketing operation costs” (34.6%);
• “Increase brand consistency” (25.9%);
• “Empower our local marketing stakeholders” (21.7%); and
• “Reduce marketing production bottlenecks” (18.8%).

“The need for MRM is perhaps clearer, but the modern marketing executive wants more than just an asset management system,” added Mr. O’Neill. “They need a more dynamic solution that enables them to forecast, measure, model, analyze and even predict all their business numbers – to be fully empowered with control over their marketing processes and outcomes.”

From its own perspective, Lytho is different from other solutions on the market because it’s uniquely designed to meet the needs of in-house brand and creative teams. To that end, the company formally introduced resource management – as a collection of features added to its platform – in March of 2022. However, these features were developed over the course of a year, including multiple beta tests, iterative software releases and involved more than 50 enterprise customers in the process.

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According to Lytho research – the 2022 Q2 Creative Management Report – 38% of in-house creative teams experienced growth over the past twelve months and about the same expect similar growth over the coming year. Further, the study identified the top challenges facing creatives as tight deadlines (48%), unclear or incomplete project requests (40%) and unexpected changes to projects that are almost complete (38%). Lytho believes the growth in the size of these teams and their associated process challenges are directly related to resource management.

“These in-house agencies have experienced significant growth in recent years, which naturally adds complexity to creative operations and MRM can help them to tame the chaos,” says Lytho Chief Marketing Officer Russ Somers. “We are honored that Lytho was named a leader by Research in Action in this report, which does well to identify the business case for MRM software that brand and creative teams will find helpful.”