An over-reliance on performance marketing—an advertising investment that can be directly tied to a revenue gain—is killing creativity, said some agency executives frustrated at brands becoming even more risk averse than usual. They said brands over the last year have placed more of their budgets into this type of sales-driving marketing and away from disruptive, big-budget brand campaigns. As a result, brands have become more skittish with approvals, requiring agencies to back up every idea with research and that red tape is smothering ideas as departments, including financial, impede marketing decisions.
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Some agency executives also said a greater focus on reaching younger generations, including Gen Z, has led some chief marketing officers to seek validation of creative ideas from more people, including junior employees, muddying the pitch process.
These executives say this timidity and consensus building too often results in a final campaign that has been stretched unrecognizably far from the original idea. Projects are even being canceled when a new insight emerges from the client that somehow calls the creative idea into question, according to some people interviewed.
And while none of this is new, these combined factors are starting to come to a head, some agency execs said.
“We’ve seen [marketing] get so performance-based and so much into the data that it’s really hard to get any of the bigger, fun ideas sold through,” said Brian Pettigrew, president of digital-focused performance creative agency TVGla, which prompted his agency to introduce new capabilities such as social media and performance marketing. “There’s so much data that it can create a bit of a paralysis. There’s so much attention on the sales right now, especially the public companies. Everything’s driven by quarter-to-quarter numbers. It’s really hard to take a chance on something that isn’t driving the performance.”
Of course, marketers have good reason to tread cautiously, especially in an election year and given that social media has provided consumers with a megaphone to air their grievances on campaigns, some people said. Creatives, meanwhile, are sometimes guilty of going too far when left with no direction, and can get so caught up in an idea that they forget that they are in service of their clients’ businesses.
“I’ve never been in a time where it’s been easy to sell creative work,” said Al Merry, founder and chief creative officer of independent agency Flower Shop. “It’s our fault in a way. We give clients things that are uncomfortable and difficult to buy. Like, ‘Here, spend your entire annual marketing budget on a gorilla playing the drums. It’ll be great.’ Maybe there are more challenges now than there were before, but I still think that we do present work that’s not easy to buy.”
In defense of marketers
Nick Primola, group executive VP for the Global CMO Growth Council at the Association of National Advertisers, disagrees that marketers are too cautious.
CMOs are “as bullish as ever when it comes to trying innovative and disruptive ideas,” he said. However, those ideas just might look different than a big-budget TV campaign, he said.
“Disruption is a team sport,” Primola said. “Recognize that marketing is now highly interconnected throughout the company. Therefore, disruptive ideas will have implications for multiple stakeholders in the enterprise including sales teams, service centers, front-line employees, IT, franchisees, HR, supply chain, pricing, communications and so on. This means there is a more complex dynamic of decision-making for greenlighting new ideas. Agencies that are able to help their clients navigate this become more valued partners to their clients.”
He said disruptive creativity can take “on many forms.”
“If disruption helps bring the brands closer to the customer, CMOs are all in. Often, these types of disruption are not necessarily the most visible or obvious,” Primola said. “Many CMOs have made it a priority to disrupt their own internal operations to accelerate cycle times that help to reach more consumers, more efficiently.”
Vineet Mehra, CMO of financial technology company Chime, argued that “there’s no such thing as being too focused on data or performance.”
“All marketing should drive business results,” Mehra said. “I actually dislike the term ‘performance’ marketing for this reason and prefer ‘direct response’ marketing instead. Rather than separating ‘brand’ and ‘direct response’ marketing, we need a unified, full-funnel approach. I call this ‘performance storytelling’—a blend that tells a compelling brand story while delivering measurable results at every stage of the funnel to achieve both short- and long-term business goals.”
“Agencies aiming to sell disruptive creative work must understand their clients’ full-funnel strategy and clearly connect how top-of-funnel creative impacts bottom-of-funnel metrics, like reducing customer acquisition cost,” he added. “When agencies do this well, clients are more open to taking big creative risks.”
Over-reliance on data and performance
Still, some agency executives said brands are too determined to prove out every possible creative idea with data points. CMOs themselves are pressured by their CEOs’ focus on performance marketing. Maria Garrido, CMO of online music streamer Deezer, who has felt this pressure, told Ad Age that “the pendulum” was too much on the art side in the early days of marketing, and now it’s swung too far to science and data. “I’m hoping it starts to come down the middle,” she said.
One freelance executive creative director who works with major brands said most marketers that used to do risky creative “aren’t interested in doing anything other than [improving] the bottom line. They’re not interested in boosting the brand image. They’ve lost the plot.”
This freelancer also said he’s seen projects die later in the creative process than they used to. “Last-minute data and research will come in” from the client that refutes the idea or suggests “we should be talking to a different demographic” and it’s not even clear where this data came from, this person said.
“In perfect conditions, great ideas sell themselves,” said Mona Munayyer Gonzalez, chief growth officer at Pereira O’Dell. “The slides that come before or after them play a role, but are ultimately inconsequential because the idea is that insightful, that breakthrough, that [it’s easy to think] ‘How has no one done this before?’ But perfect conditions rarely exist.
“You have clients walking into a room after receiving soft quarterly results, CMOs that are under immense pressure to show ROI and general pressure that you must do more with less. It’s enough of a pressure cooker to make the most ambitious, strategic clients insecure. And with insecurity comes fear, and making creative decisions out of fear never turns out well,” she said.
Some question what the long-term impact will be on brands focusing too heavily on performance marketing and not enough on branding and disruptive creative.
If a client is hyper-focused on performance marketing, it’s “ultimately a race to the bottom,” said John Geletka, founder of independent agency Geletka+.
“You go to performance marketing as almost a last-ditch effort to move the needle,” he said. “You lose margin, you lose brand loyalty. Performance marketing is just a short-term revenue generator.”
Several people interviewed pointed to Nike as a prime example of a marketer long hailed in the industry for its creativity—with campaigns such as “Is it the shoes?” with Michael Jordan and Spike Lee—that has lost its way by over-emphasizing performance marketing and, as such, has seen mass layoffs and sales declines.
Nike’s recent marketing decisions have sparked a debate in the creative industry with executives voicing their opinions on social platforms. One executive, Peter Lloyd, global CMO of Caribbean mobile phone network Digicel Group, wrote on LinkedIn that in recent years he’s preferred clothing brands such as OnCloud, New Balance, Alo, Lululemon and Hoka over Nike due to its lack of impactful marketing.