Marketing and Procurement teams are stretched today. And most of that time is not being spent on strategic elements of brand/campaign delivery but instead of managing a growing list of suppliers with inefficient and/or old tools (e.g., email, Excel files, network shares, etc.). Add in high turn-over rates, decreasing budgets and growing number of channels to deliver against and you have real trouble . . . Shortlist is about reducing the friction of finding, connecting and engaging with specialist marketing providers. They’re focused on helping marketing, procurement and agencies have better relationships and do this through a set of tools, data & services. In a matter of a few minutes, you can set up a new account, add your team, invite your suppliers, create marketing briefs and send them out for review and response. If needed, you can search and find other suppliers who compliment those you already have and in one click add them into your shortlist. Marketing and procurement simply spend too much time doing ‘adminstrativia’ that isn’t adding value or solving the key challenges brands are facing today. At the same time, there are more and more and more agencies wanting to help them. Shortlist is meeting them in this intersection with a simply elegant, not over bloated, app/data/services solution set.
Co-founder Martin Konrad has more than 15 years of experience working in the digital creative space. In 2006 he co-founded Design Royale, which became a leading digital creative agency prior to it being acquired by Edelman Group. During his time building and running the agency he realised that finding and collaborating with customers wasn’t as efficient as it should have been. The challenges he faced led him to want to create a new way for creative companies and their clients to collaborate.
Co-founder Joey Frasier has spent the last 15 years building global teams capable of rapidly solving complex business problems leveraging the latest technology while ensuring non-tech savvy users and executives feel comfortable throughout the journey. His passion is the intersection of great people, technology and ideas – coming together to solve big problems. For the past five years he has been helping some of the world’s largest brands across multiple sectors improve the efficiency of their marketing supply chain. He joined Shortlist because he believed it should be easier for brands to connect to the best creative service providers in the world in turn helping them run more effective campaigns.
Shortlist targets marketing and procurement teams, technology enthusiasts, and startup fans – in the US, Europe, and Asia. And they have three revenue streams: SaaS – Freemium, Enterprise, and Premium features based upon data, analytics and proactive/interactive features; Partner/Supplier Fees – many directories that exist today could link to Shortlist to allow their clients and agencies ‘get to work’ rather than just email, also revenue from Supplier premium listings; Services – the SaaS platform can be used as a way to engage clients for services in 3 key areas (ABC): Audit, Brand, Concierge. There are a few ‘agency finder sites’ that do part of what Shortlist does, such as: Crew.co, Sortlist, VendorDB, AgencySpotter, and Clutch.co. There are then a set of people focused on doing specialist high-end RFP management like: Noosh,Allocadia, Decideware, and ScoutRFP. And then of course they have potential for competition from agencies & specialist production agencies like WPP and HH Worldwide.
