Australian Venue Co.

Australian Venue Co (AVC) is a hospitality business that owns and operates over 60 restaurants across Australia. We chatted to Joe MacLeod, AVC’s Marketing Manager, to see what challenges prompted the implementation of admation and how the tool has been beneficial to the business.

Before AVC implemented admation, its creative teams were managing approval workflow via email which meant going back and forth with feedback and approvals. This process was manageable while the business was small. As it began to scale up, email approvals were not an effective way to manage the increase in marketing projects. AVC went in search for approval workflow software that could help the marketing department streamline their project work.

In June 2016, AVC implemented admation to provide its marketing teams with an
organisational tool that offered greater transparency over its approvals and an audit
trail of marketing work.

“Admation has been the organisational tool that we use to keep everything in one place
and plan things before we even get started,” says Joe. “It forces our marketing
managers to actually envision the campaign before they get it going, rather than fire it out.”

Joe oversees the marketing division at AVC and has six marketing managers that report to
him. Each marketing manager has one designer and one digital marketing manager
under them.

“We use admation in our creative department in our social media, advertising and
planning,” says Joe. “So all our graphic designers upload their content which goes through
various stages of approval and eventually to our marketing.”

Marketing managers also use admation to brief in projects as well as allocate resources and tasks. Joe says that the tool ensures that each administrator allocates tasks to the right resources.

Joe says that the level of transparency that admation offers is great, especially in his more senior role where all he needs to do is login to ascertain where projects are at. He also sees many benefits from admation’s automatic audit trail.

“The audit trail’s fantastic,” says Joe. “It’s great to be able to go back and bring
people on and move people around when we need to.”

As a result of implementing admation, Joe says that their marketing projects are more
streamlined and organised.

“It keeps everything organised. When you have 62-odd venues and marketing
managers are looking after 12 or 13 venues each, it’s very easy to miss things or for things
to fall off or become unnecessarily convoluted.”

Joe says that admation also allows them to better manage deadlines better making it very clear
when an item is approved or not with different coloured icons. It’s also an easy tool to
understand which makes it easy when onboarding new users.

“From my personal experience, it is great for getting feedback on projects,” says Joe. “The
markup tool’s fantastic. I do like that it’s in your face for people that are assigned
deliverables. It’s very cut and dry and so you know you’re either on your deadline or you’ve
missed your deadline. And it sends reminders.”

“Anything that decreases emails back and forth, as far as I’m concerned, is a useful tool,” says
Joe. “Every new email is a chance for somebody to misinterpret something, so tools like
admation are great for that. And I feel like a broken record, but it comes down to organisation.
The key, especially when you’re scaling up a business, is keeping things as efficient and
organised as possible. So anything that can eliminate the possibility for misinterpretation, for
disorganisation, is a useful tool to me. We wouldn’t have been able to stay as organised as we
currently are without admation.”