Agencies need to creatively solve bigger business issues for their clients

To solve marketing’s persistent value problem, you need to apply your greatest creativity to the 95% of the CMO’s job that’s beyond creative content and media.

Through five days of conversations with CMOs in Cannes, there was a lot of talk about intensifying fights with finance over the value of marketing and the increasingly complex non-creative elements of the job.

That honesty between the lines of a creative celebration points to the real innovation the industry needs right now. It’s new, more effective, more unified approaches to the 95% of clients’ jobs—new markets, distribution, product, packaging, pricing, distribution, ecommerce and customer service—that cement brands in people’s lives.

This is the next dividing line and rallying cry for CMOs and agencies alike. To get on the right side of it, you need to make fundamental changes in thinking, practices and relationships.

Think brand over brand marketing

You must prioritize the business of the brand vs. the brand of the business. Instead of communication as content to attract attention, you need to approach communication as everything that informs a customer experience. What you sell, how you price and how you deliver are the bedrock creative of a brand.

Focus the best 5% on the 95%

The same creativity that generates compelling ads needs to apply to everything about the brand. That includes defining systems that work. Give agencies business problems to solve, not simply marketing strategies to activate.

Marketing organizations and agencies can solve much bigger problems for the business by addressing the totality of how products and services get delivered. In the process, they can train talent to see and think systemically and reverse the short-term preoccupation in the C-suite.

Create transformational relationships

CMOs want business transformation. To get it, they need transformation partners with the freedom to reassess and redesign all components of the customer experience.

Stop hiring agencies to execute what you’ve decided to do and start hiring them to find new opportunities. Let them develop the business briefs focusing on complete product and channel management, not just the creative briefs. Many agencies work with startups this way already, designing the business of the brand to give people a specific, holistic experience.

Expand scope

That can’t happen if agency contracts are confined to isolated pieces of brand marketing (e.g., creative or ecommerce for the product line).

When Covid-19 lockdowns threw clients into uncertainty, many invited agencies to solve their broader strategic problems and adjusted scopes of work to assure the right resources could be brought to bear. More recently agencies have returned to internally generated marketing briefs, which focus on the best price-value for commoditized services. You need to scope for business strategy, not just efficient delivery.

Get under the hood

Agencies need to push deeper than the audience, market and budget, to define the infrastructure of a client’s problems.

If the stated need is to get a product in front of enterprise buyers more reliably, what’s the cause? Is it too few salespeople, fulfillment issues or competitive underbidding? For clients, this means digging for precise causes and honestly exposing them.

Put entrepreneurs on the business

Independent agency owners are creative businesspeople. They’re focused on creating new markets, not simply engineering media and production efficiencies. They manage change and innovation every day, so they supply a context that’s missing in younger client staff charged with getting incremental results. Rather than optimizing organizations to deliver shareholder value, indie owners enjoy the freedom to focus on delivering client value.

Titanium Lions jury president David Droga said this year’s winners show advertising’s way forward because they solved bigger commercial, physical and government problems. To his thinking, these ideas are sustainable rather than disposable.

Tackling bigger stories in ads is just the beginning, though. You must go much deeper than that. Marketing will become a recognized growth driver again when you harness creativity to make a better business for customers.

Famed director Spike Lee put it this way to the Black at Cannes group: “Your job is to sell soap, soup, fast food, electronics. The priority is to make as much money [for brands] as [you] can.”

Agencies’ greatest value is creative thinking. And the creativity that will count the most is reinvigorating the business of the brand, not just spicing up brand marketing. When agencies are free to do this, they can restore the power of marketing altogether.

Here’s to the 95%. 

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