Agile and Scalable Reporting in Marketing Services Agencies
The Brandsmith Agency
- Marketing Services, Research
💡 About The Company
The Brandsmith, LLC is a strategic marketing services agency based in Southern California, with clients ranging from Fortune 100-adjacent mid-market firms to global manufacturers, retail brands, and higher education institutions.
Founded by Michael Smith, The Brandsmith brings over two decades of brand strategy, marketing, and creative execution to help organizations build impactful customer relationships and scale their communications.
But The Brandsmith isn’t just a branding firm—it’s an extension of its clients’ operations, often handling strategic assessments, CRM customization, and data-driven reporting that must be accurate, fast, and visually compelling.
In recent years, The Brandsmith found itself increasingly tasked with delivering complex, recurring reports for clients who needed high-volume, high-frequency insights—but lacked the infrastructure or budget to maintain such high-frequency customizations in enterprise-grade reporting systems like Tableau or Power BI.
That’s when The Brandsmith discovered INSYNCR—a tool that transformed how they build and scale presentation-based reports.
🔥 Challenges Faced
Data Complexity, Tight Deadlines, and Repetitive Manual Reporting
Whether it’s helping a market research firm report brand sentiment across 40+ global markets, or enabling staffing firms (MSPs) to deliver monthly updates to enterprise clients, The Brandsmith faced a familiar set of hurdles:
- Too much manual work: Repetitive copy-pasting from Excel into PowerPoint across hundreds of slides and for multiple cases.
- High stakes for quality and clarity: Reports were going straight to C-suite leadership at global companies.
- Frequent reporting cycles: Monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting across dozens of clients.
- Cost barriers to enterprise tools: Many clients couldn’t justify expensive analytics platforms for their report delivery needs.
- Inconsistencies and rework: Manual updates led to formatting errors, outdated data, and wasted time.
“This is the definition of madness, right?
Touching the same chart every quarter.
We absolutely needed to automate this.”
Mike Smith
The Brandsmith needed a scalable, affordable solution that integrated directly with Microsoft Office workflows, and could dynamically populate complex PowerPoint presentations—without re-engineering their clients’ tech stacks, but rather extending them.
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🌟 Implemented Solution:
INSYNCR for Automated, Scalable, and Visually Rich Reporting
INSYNCR became the backbone of The Brandsmith’s reporting automation across three distinct workflows with several client-types:
Use Case 1: Global Market Research Reporting
- Client: Market research firm conducting consumer brand sentiment analysis for major companies.
- Challenge:
– Large scope: 40+ international markets, 45+ research variables, quarterly reporting.
– Slides with up to 1000+ charts updating all at once, localized competitors per market, and multi-factor comparisons. - Workflow and Solution:
– Data collected via a proprietary assessment model.
– Analyzed in R, then exported to Excel.
– Linked to PowerPoint dashboards built by The Brandsmith via INSYNCR. - Result: A repeatable process saving hundreds of hours each quarter while delivering rich, data-driven leadership presentations.
Use Case 2: Monthly Client Review Reporting
- Client: An MSP managing multiple staffing firms for enterprise clients.
- Challenge: Costly enterprise tools like Tableau were overkill for smaller clients that require periodic, customized reporting per client, for an ever-growing client database.
- Workflow and Solution:
– The Brandsmith created monthly report templates linked via INSYNCR.
– PMOs at the end customer can now simply update and refresh their reports, to distribute them internally and to clients.
– Supports white-labeled reports—branded either for the MSP or its clients. - Result: A cost-effective, scalable solution to deliver custom reports with minimal effort—Every. Single. Month.
Use Case 3: Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) Across Departments
- Context: Internal business units in large enterprises must deliver quarterly/annual reports to their own clients and leadership.
- Challenge:
– BI teams spent 4–10 hours manually updating each report, while this is not their core focus but comes on top of regular day-to-day tasks. - INSYNCR x The Brandsmith Collaboration Impact:
– Reduced reporting time by at least 25% and up to 50%, reducing efforts by 2–3 business days per QBR (multiplied by 50+ clients per quarter).
– Made it possible for individual teams to create outputs on their own.
– Enabled departments to customize visuals without overloading the BI team.
– Dynamic charts, tables, and NPS meters—all generated from Excel.
“We just ran our first pilot,
and we’re already anticipating a 50% reduction in report prep time.
That’s massive.”
Mike Smith
🚀 Resulting Impact
From Tedious Templates to Scalable Report Engines
INSYNCR is now embedded in The Brandsmith’s core service offering, helping their clients deliver timely, visually compelling reports without technical friction or bloated software stacks.
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⚡️ Key Takeways
Key Takeaways for the Marketing and Services Industry
- Microsoft-first integration = low friction adoption: Most companies already use Microsoft 365. Instead of forcing new and costly software adoption and habit-changes, INSYNCR integrates into existing workflows and enhances what they already use.
- High impact for reporting-heavy organizations: Whether you’re serving 20+ global markets or 50+ quarterly clients, INSYNCR cuts preparation- and delivery-time drastically.
- Customization without complexity: Templates created by marketing services companies are flexible, can be adapted to be white-labeled, and can be reused across campaigns and departments. INSYNCR strengthens the value of collaborating with Marketing Services companies for end clients and enables the latter to serve more clients, without increased overhead.
- Data storytelling made simple: Complex dashboards and multi-source insights, all presented in PowerPoint, providing you in full control of your delivery—no intermediate or third-party developer needed.
Key Takeaways for Any Business Needing Better Reports
INSYNCR was built for exactly this: organizations managing lots of structured data, needing to present it often.
- If your data is in Excel or can be exported to Excel, you’re already ready. Let’s face it. However much we all talk about moving to other data-structuring platforms, Excel remains our number 1 go-to when we need to manipulate our data to be formatted in different ways, quickly. While INSYNCR can enable integrations with numerous data sources, Excel is most likely to be your first and most-common connection to your dynamic report. If you have a database in Excel you think is fit for automation, you can instantly try populating your report with INSYNCR.
- Low cost, high impact. INSYNCR’s pricing model makes it ideal for clients who can’t justify a full BI implementation, but still need high-frequency, customisable, and professional reporting.
- Design + Data = Strategic Advantage. With The Brandsmith’s multi-perspective creative expertise and INSYNCR’s automation, data becomes a tool for engagement—not a formatting chore.
