Marketing operations and governance: running integrated marketing as a system

Integrated campaigns depend on things the audience never sees: who briefs whom, which version of the logo is current, who signs off a claim, where the data lives and whether the tools talk to each other. Marketing operations is the function that runs that system; governance is the set of rules it runs on.

• What marketing operations covers Forrester describes the job of a marketing operations leader as increasing marketing's business contribution by operationalising and optimising strategy, processes, data, technology and measurement³.
• Technology is underused Gartner found marketing leaders using only 33% of their martech stack's capabilities in 2023, down from 42% in 2022 and 58% in 2020⁵.
• Brand governance keeps the brand's distinctive assets, guidelines and approved versions in one governed place^10, 11.
• Decision rights A RACI chart names one accountable person per task⁷; stage gates decide when work moves on⁹.
• Compliance is a planned step with its own lead time, not a last-minute check^12, 13.
• Over-process is a real risk: inflexible governance was among the main obstacles to using martech that Gartner's respondents named⁵.

Forrester's Marketing Operations Range of Responsibilities model sets out the scope of a marketing operations team and tiers each responsibility from strategic to tactical¹; a B2C version followed in April 2025². Its role profile for a vice president or director of marketing operations notes that the role may be a peer to the CMO's chief of staff, or evolve into it³, and its profile of a marketing operations data analyst centres on maintaining the quality of account and contact data⁴. The ANA's marketing operations work includes a survey of its members' pain points⁶. See the role hub for marketing operations.

Technology is where the gap between investment and use shows most clearly. In Gartner's survey of 405 marketing leaders in May and June 2023, average use of the stack's capabilities fell to 33%; technology took 25.4% of 2023 marketing budgets; and respondents named the complexity of the ecosystem, customer data challenges and inflexible governance as the main obstacles to using more of what they had bought⁵.

The typical roles, which in a small team may be one or two people:

• Marketing operations lead owns the system, the calendar and the service levels.
• Campaign or project manager moves each campaign through its stages and chases approvals.
• Martech and automation specialist configures the tools and integrations (see marketing automation).
• Data and analytics data quality, consent management and reporting.
• Brand and asset manager guidelines, templates and the asset library.
• Legal and compliance partner claims, disclosures and data protection; usually outside marketing, with a named contact.

Guidelines say how the brand looks and sounds: the logo and its versions, colours, typography, imagery, tone of voice, the message house, accessibility rules, and how each element adapts to languages and scripts (see brand platform and message house and consistency and adaptation). Their most important job is to protect the brand's distinctive assets. Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute wrote Building Distinctive Brand Assets (Oxford University Press, 2018) to help brands build a long-term strategy for these assets and protect them, including anyone considering a change of logo, font or colour¹¹.

Digital asset management (DAM) keeps the approved versions. Gartner describes a DAM's primary purpose as governing digital assets and making them available and useful, so that the brand stays consistent across the organisation, and notes that DAM platforms serve sales, HR and legal as well as marketing and can give external partners portal access¹⁰. In practice the library should record, for each asset, the approved version, the languages it exists in, the usage rights (photography, music, talent) and when they expire, and who owns it. An expired licence found after launch is a governance failure, not bad luck.

Approvals should follow risk, not habit:

A RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) is one form of the responsibility assignment matrix used in project management; its discipline is that each task has exactly one accountable person⁷. Analyst firms publish RACI tools for marketing teams; Forrester has one for its portfolio marketing model⁸. An illustrative RACI for one integrated campaign:

The value is less in the letters than in the conversation that produces them: who can say no, who must be asked, who only needs to know. Draw one per campaign type rather than per campaign, and keep it in the brief. Build yours with the integration RACI; see also organising for IMC.

Robert Cooper's Stage-Gate model, published in Business Horizons in 1990 as a tool for managing new products, divides the work into stages separated by gates at which managers decide whether the project goes on⁹. The idea transfers to campaigns, with lighter gates:

A gate is useful only if it can stop something. Write its criteria in advance, give each gate one decision-maker, and agree a service level for reviewers so that a gate cannot turn into a queue.

Legal review protects the brand from claims it cannot support and from rules it did not know. The global reference is the International Chamber of Commerce's Advertising and Marketing Communications Code. Its 11th edition, released in September 2024, sets out advertisers' responsibility for what algorithms and AI tools produce, gives particular attention to influencer marketing, requires environmental claims to be specific, transparent and backed by evidence, and strengthens the provisions on children and young people¹². National codes and laws add to it (see influencer disclosure and greenwashing).

Platforms and broadcasters add their own checks. Meta reviews ads before they run and may review them again once they are live¹³. In the UK, TV advertising is cleared in advance by Clearcast, which publishes service levels for scripts and finished ads¹⁴. Plan these reviews in the calendar like any other task (see campaign planning and calendars). This is general information, not legal advice.

Keep a short claims register: each claim the brand makes, the evidence behind it, who approved it and when it should be checked again. It turns legal review from a debate about every piece into a check against what is already approved. Prepare the response side as well, with the crisis communications checklist and a crisis plan.

Governance exists to protect quality, consistency and the right to be trusted. It fails in two directions: too little, and the brand fragments; too much, and nothing ships on time. Gartner's respondents named inflexible governance among the main obstacles to getting value from their technology⁵. The WFA's 2023 study of effectiveness culture scored the "process" pillar lowest, at 5.7 out of 10 against an overall 6.5, and found too much weight on activation and tactical delivery and too little on defining the business challenge and building a measurement framework¹⁵.

The lesson is not to remove process but to point it at what matters: more care in the brief and the measurement plan, less in routine sign-offs. Practical guards:

• Measure the process how long each approval takes, and how often a gate actually stops anything.
• Pre-approve templates, claims and asset kits so that routine work needs no review.
• Retire steps that never change the outcome.
• One voice per function in reviews: consolidated comments, not a thread of opinions.

An illustrative example, not a real company: a regional retailer finds that a routine promotional email needs sign-off from five people and takes two weeks, while a new health claim in the same email goes through the same queue as a change of image. The fix is not a new tool. Routine emails move onto a pre-approved template, self-serve with spot checks; anything with a new claim goes to legal, with an agreed turnaround; brand comments are consolidated in one reviewer; and approval times are recorded every month. Scrutiny moves to where the risk is, and routine work ships faster.

1. Name an owner of marketing operations, and write down what the role owns: process, tools, data, calendar.
2. Audit the stack: which tools are used, by whom and for what; fix or remove before you add.
3. Put guidelines and approved assets in one library, with rights and expiry dates recorded.
4. Draw a RACI per campaign type, with one accountable person per task.
5. Set five gates with written criteria and a service level for reviewers.
6. Start a claims register, and route reviews by risk.
7. Every quarter, measure approval times and cut one step that adds delay without reducing risk.

• Forrester's marketing operations models^1, 2 and role profiles^3, 4.
• Gartner on martech utilisation⁵.
• Romaniuk on distinctive brand assets¹¹.
• Cooper's Stage-Gate article⁹ and the RACI convention⁷.
• The ICC Code, 2024 edition¹².
• The WFA's study of effectiveness culture¹⁵.
• On IMC Report: organising for IMC, consistency and adaptation and making the business case.