At the Tokyo Olympics, Australia’s women’s 4x100m freestyle relay team didn’t just win gold they set a new world record, writes Geoff Clarke, chief operating officer, IPG Mediabrands.
The quartet of Bronte Campbell, Meg Harris, Emma McKeon and Cate Campbell touched the wall in 3:29.69, nearly three seconds ahead of their closest competitors. They are all individually brilliant, but what set them apart, in a race that has the best of the best from every country? Each transition was executed with millisecond precision, gaining precious fractions over their competitors.
They turned ‘exchange zone’ excellence into a competitive advantage, obsessing over their transitions, knowing that a perfect exchange can gain up to 0.3 seconds while a poor one risks disqualification. In a sport where gold medals are decided by hundredths of seconds, transitions often determine who stands on top of the dais.
Meanwhile, in our industry, we’re experiencing our own dramatic compression of time. Monthly output is now required in weeks, weekly output in days, the pace of change relentless and showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, ‘Technology Convergence’ is only going to compress work product timelines further.
So, what can media agencies learn from our swimming elite? I would suggest, quite a lot.
The Australian relay team is a team of specialists. When the starters gun fires, there is no discussion about who does what or what level of performance is needed, they simply deliver their very best. There is only flawless, rehearsed, and precisely coordinated execution. It is the ultimate example of ‘Extreme Ownership’.
Swimming at their very best, is table stakes, every team has that KPI, the magic, the difference between winning and losing happens in the exchange zone that critical moment when one swimmer finishes and another begins.
This concept of ‘exchange zone excellence’ offers a powerful metaphor for media operations. How often have we seen brilliant individual work diluted by poor workflow handoffs? The relay model teaches us the highest leverage points in any operational system are not individual performances that is table stakes. The transition between craft specialists are the difference between good and great output.
In my 30 plus years in this industry, I’ve observed the highest-performing teams aren’t necessarily those with the most talent, but those with the clearest understanding of what their individual contribution needs to look like and what they need to do to set up their teammates for success.
This is why operation workflow frameworks like R.A.S.C.I mapping aren’t just administrative exercises they are the foundation of operational excellence. They traffic light our version of a perfect relay exchange zone.
As Cate Campbell once explained: “We practice these changeovers relentlessly. It’s about trust knowing exactly when your teammate will touch so you can time your dive perfectly. Too early and you’re disqualified; too late and you lose precious time. It’s a high wire act we perform together.”
In media operations, we need similar practices around critical handoff points. When a brief moves from client service to strategy, when a plan transitions from investment to activation, when optimisation insights flow back to planning these exchanges should follow consistent well practiced protocols that everyone understands and trusts.
A business must understand that workflow transition points offer the greatest opportunity for both competitive advantage and catastrophic failure. In our rush to develop individual specialist skills, we have largely neglected the critical handoff moments. The most successful media operations invest as much in perfecting workflow transitions as they do in developing individual capabilities.
In media operations, we often focus on big, transformative changes while overlooking the power of incremental improvement, the 1%ers. What if we applied the marginal gains mindset, practiced by an Olympic swim team, to our workflows, such as slightly more efficient briefing template, or a marginally better handover process, or just a small improvement in resource allocation. None of these changes will revolutionise a business overnight, but their compound effect will separate high-performance operations from the merely adequate.
The Australian swimming program uses sophisticated technology to perfect their exchanges pressure sensitive starting blocks, underwater cameras, and frame by frame video analysis. But importantly, this technology elevates human performance rather than replacing it. The technology provides insights, but it’s the swimmers who must execute.
This symbiotic relationship between technology and talent offers another powerful lesson for the media industry. In our rush to automate and digitise, we are at risk of forgetting that technology should enhance human capability, not replace it.
So how do we translate these lessons?
First, develop detailed exchange protocols for core workflows, ensuring everyone understands exactly how handoffs should occur. Second, closely monitor the critical moments when work moves between specialists, removing bottlenecks and duplication. Third, pursue marginal gains by continuously refining these exchanges, creating a mechanism for teams to suggest small improvements that compound value over time.
Finally, allocate time for teams to discuss and rehearse critical handoffs outside of live client work ironically, the hardest to implement due to time pressures.
The media landscape will only continue to accelerate, technology will compress workflows further, resulting in rising client expectations. The question isn’t whether we’ll need to operate with Olympic relay like efficiency it’s whether we’re preparing for that reality now.
The teams that thrive will be those that embrace operational excellence not as a nice to have, but as the fundamental platform upon which all strategic and creative success is built. They’ll understand that in a business increasingly defined by speed, the exchange zone advantage will be the difference.
