You can’t miss John Lewis’ gargantuan Never Knowingly Undersold TV spot created by Saatchi & Saatchi.

First in a three-part series, this year’s effort is set to be significantly bigger than the typical annual much anticipated Christmas tearjerker. It triumphantly celebrates the return of the department store’s beloved price match scheme (which comes after a hard-earned return to profit for the business).

But beneath the glitz of the headline campaign, there’s the much more ordinary and ongoing business of retail marketing – all the halo assets from in-store copy to digital listings must reflect the core branding of the all-encompassing campaign.

This tech-heavy, vital work shapes every shopper’s experience of the powerhouse retail brand.

In recent years, retailers have carried out this operation in-house, outsourced the work to an agency, or off-sourced workers internationally to make it more affordable. All approaches have their merits –  as well as their drawbacks.

Most CMOs have no desire to carry out work that remotely resembles running an agency. External agencies are too expensive. And when you’re a business as sacred to your customer base as John Lewis, offshoring is unlikely to cut it because you rely on your people understanding the market in which you operate.

So then what?

A win-win situation

In order to both have its cake and eat it too, John Lewis has been working with Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). Acting as a halfway point between managing its own team in-house and an external off-premise agency, ITG has been working with the retailer for the past few months.

Employees working with John Lewis are fully imbedded in the organisation, but the win is that they are managed by the tech and AR-driven firm.

“John Lewis gets the benefit of someone sitting in the office who’s fully dedicated to them but is also  part of a larger network where they’re being trained and supported,” explains CEO Andrew Swinand.

“By being part of a larger entity in this way they’re getting the best technology without having to be responsible for managing, training and deploying the newest tech.”

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He adds that the drawback is extra cost because the salaries of offshore workers are significantly less, but says retailers balance what they lose in terms of time control and quality with the price.

“Our original heritage was retail print, but we’ve been able to help retailers solve the challenge of content at scale,” he adds.

He gives the example of a stock keeping unit (a machine-readable inventory of each item of stock). The CMO needs to add thousands to the website on a dwindling budget, Swinand explains.

Traditionally you would have to employ people at each step, to shoot the work, implement the cross-selling and to scale content.

Now ITG is working with John Lewis to free the decks. It uses a platform called Storyteq, which contains a workflow management system and content automation machine.

ITG tackles the approach with four steps. First it captures more images using artificial intelligence or augmented reality. Secondly, it looks at how to make it work in any environment from in-store to CRM and e-commerce. Then how do you transform that asset to work in different regions and locations. Finally, it ensures the assets can be integrated with a platform such as Salesforce or Adobe so that they can continually be reused.

Swinand describes this automation as the “bifurcation of content” –  “For hero campaigns you still need brand ideas from your Saatchi & Saatchi, McCann, BBDO, great identity management. But what we’re talking about is halo content. How do you actually take that idea, repurpose it and re-use it to work on YouTube, e-commerce and Instagram.”

A changing John Lewis: ‘Reinvesting in growth-oriented work’

John Lewis is fairly innovative on the scene when it comes to adopting ITG’s approach Swinand says.

Currys, M&S, Co-op and KFC are among the business’s clients but not at the same scale and its not an approach that’s popular internationally yet.

But perhaps that’s not as surprising as it seems. Whilst the eventual efficiency wins are the stuff of dreams for retailers, it takes time to adapt in such large organisations. And there’s a lot of new processes to learn at first, so Swinand admits there can be initial hesitancy.

Before ITG stepped in, he explains that John Lewis carried out all of these processes manually. But the fact that ITG manages the tech and the training made the proposition a no-brainer at the department store. Precisely because the retailer did not have a lot of its own in-house technology in place, imbedding with John Lewis has been a fairly simple process.

Pressed on the impact of the automation on people’s jobs, Swinand is adamant that it’s not all bleak – “What designer graduates and says if only I could resize banners. It’s not interesting or fun work. Our thing is, let’s simplify the complicated, automate the mundane and create the beautiful. Who doesn’t want to do that?”

Swinand adds that John Lewis in particular is not “cutting people and cutting costs so much as reinvesting in things that are much more growth orientated rather than repetitive tasks that machines can do better.”

ITG’s approach stems from his belief that there is too much interest in generative AI over operational AI. “Machines aren’t good at ideas,” Swinand says. The technology is created so that once set up designers can create master assets that can be automated.

Will this approach take off at more businesses? That remains to be seen, Swinand admits. But the takeaway is that if you do use marketing tech you might as well make sure it’s managed by people that know it back to front. Leave process management to trustworthy experts, and automation needn’t be at the expense of creativity.