Building a stronger Marketing foundation: How The Associated Press modernised ROI reporting, preferences, and lead management

When a global organisation like The Associated Press (TAP) wants to modernise its Marketing Operations, the goal isn’t just new tools, it’s creating clarity, compliance, and consistency that scale.

Before partnering with Sojourn, TAP’s marketing processes were functional but fragmented. Reporting on marketing ROI required manual effort and offered only partial visibility into which campaigns were driving meaningful outcomes. The existing Email Preference Centre was outdated, creating both compliance concerns and a less-than-ideal experience for subscribers. And when it came to lead management, there was no clear structure for routing, field values, or campaign attribution. A challenge made even trickier by the need to align with TAP’s new preference centre design.

Sojourn worked with TAP to build a connected, transparent foundation for modern marketing.

We started by tackling the visibility gap. Our team built new ROI reporting capabilities that allowed TAP to connect marketing activity directly to business impact. Leadership could finally see which campaigns were performing, and make investment decisions backed by real data, not spreadsheets.

Next, we turned our focus to compliance and customer experience. We designed and delivered a new Email Preference Centre, built from the ground up to meet TAP’s internal requirements, whilst providing a cleaner, more intuitive experience for users. The process was collaborative and iterative, with demos, revisions, and full stakeholder sign-off ahead of the September go-live.

Finally, we addressed one of the most critical, yet often overlooked, elements of scalable Marketing Operations: Lead Management. We created a detailed design model that defined routing logic, field values, and process documentation, ensuring the marketing and sales systems could work together seamlessly. Everything was captured in actionable, accessible documentation so TAP’s internal teams could confidently own and evolve the framework going forward.

The result is a more modern, compliant, and data-driven marketing ecosystem. All three core deliverables, ROI reporting, the Preference Centre, and the Lead Management design, were delivered on time and within scope, giving TAP a clear foundation for its next phase of growth.

Today, leadership has full attribution visibility, marketing teams have a centralised way to manage subscriptions and preferences, and both Sojourn and TAP have a shared blueprint for how their Marketing Operations will scale into the future.

This wasn’t a flashy technology project, it was about getting the fundamentals right. By bringing structure, transparency, and alignment to TAP’s marketing systems, Sojourn helped transform a complex operational environment into one that’s simple, compliant, and built to last.