How to sell creative ideas to risk-averse clients

Creative is not an easy sell. It never was and it never will be. Many marketers have become particularly cautious and risk-averse, whether to hit financial targets, avoid controversy or both. So it has become harder than ever to persuade clients to put money behind campaign ideas, according to more than a dozen people, including chief creative officers, other agency leaders, consultants and marketers, interviewed by Ad Age. See Ad Age’s 2024 Breakout Brand Leaders and Work here 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. Also read: How CMOs can gain influence in the C-suite 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. “Creating inspiring moments is key,” Lloyd wrote. “Performance marketing is essential, but it can’t be the only tool for growth or ROI.” Nike, where Elliott Hill is returning from retirement to become president and CEO, did not return a request for comment. Nike’s longtime agency of record, Wieden+Kennedy, declined comment.More from Ad Age: How marketing could fuel Nike’s comeback The need for balance As Deezer’s Garrido said, marketers need to balance art and science to paint a full picture. “For us, it’s all about really thinking about today’s best brands, balancing short-term growth and short-term brand sales” with “long-term brand building,” said Jaime Robinson, co-founder and chief creative officer of independent agency Joan. Robinson said from the onset of a relationship, Joan “plots out what the marketer needs to accomplish to achieve their KPIs in the immediate term” and then answers: “How do we build the brand for the long term? It allows us to roll these efforts together,” she said. If you are someone who wants to do “creativity for the sake of fun, or art or whatever, then go be an artist,” Robinson added. “Advertising is about listening and understanding and applying creativity to a problem.”Recent news: The top 5 creative campaigns to know about right now In some ways, Meghan Mullen, managing director of Zulu Alpha Kilo New York, said creatives should blame themselves for the over-emphasis on performance marketing because several years ago there were a lot of PR stunts designed to produce shock headlines that didn’t necessarily work to build a brand or drive sales. Creative risks should only be taken when it makes sense and shops should never do “cool shit for the sake of doing cool shit,” she said. Marketers must also take some of the blame for the PR stunt work, said Michael Miller, founder of marketing consultancy Consiglieri and former VP of creative, experience and social for T-Mobile. “Creatives need guardrails,” he said. “If you give them an open sheet of paper and say, ‘Come up with something amazing,’ they will struggle. There is no worse brief than something that says ‘just make something cool.’ That’s the worst brief ever.” “There has to be direction and deadlines and structure and operational rigor. Brands sometimes struggle with giving concise, well-thought-out briefs. Because of that, creatives think that the playing field is open. So, it’s on both sides, right? It’s hard to say exactly how you get to a certain place in an industry,” Miller said. Data being misused While more marketers are using data to fuel their creative, not many fully understand the insights they’re being fed and it’s resulting in confusion, some people interviewed said. Oftentimes when clients are trying to use data to inform creative, it’s being misused or it’s being used as “CYA [cover your ass]. It is CYA for marketers when their idea doesn’t hit,” said Geletka, who said he still hasn’t seen a ton of marketers knowing how to adequately use data for creative purposes. When it comes to cultural insights, Dawn Wade, managing partner and chief strategy officer of independent agency Nimbus added that she sees some CMOs not keeping up with “what is happening in culture, so the ideas don’t resonate when presented by the agency. Culture moves quickly, and if the marketing team is not comprised of individuals with different interests and backgrounds, it will be harder to get ideas approved that the client feels is worth the investment.” “Many brands don’t truly understand their audiences and their interests,” Wade said. “They often think their customer base looks different than it does and don’t understand how multifaceted it is in today’s world. So, it’s hard to convince them that certain ideas will resonate with the customer, and they question the risk.” Look back: The ad world is clashing over culture More cooks in the kitchen Some people said the most frustrating element in all of this is that clients are much more willing to cancel a creative campaign much later in the production process, after agencies have already invested time and money. A second longtime creative freelancer said he’s experienced projects getting “yanked” later in the process, even after they’ve gone to production, which he attributed to both advertisers and marketers allowing more people to have an opinion on the campaign. “There’s a lot more letting people weigh into things that didn’t happen” 10 years ago, this creative freelancer said. “Hierarchies have fallen by the wayside. Someone very junior weighs in on something and everyone is like, ‘Yeah great idea.’ I’m not sure if that’s always good. It’s muddied up the selling work part of it. There’s always been a lot of cooks in the kitchen; now we’re veering off on this tangent.” Pereira O’Dell’s Gonzalez said selling creative ideas “does take significantly more thinking and perspectives than it used to,” but that can be used to the agency’s advantage when everyone is aligned. “[Selling an idea] takes simply but brilliantly laying out a solid business case for why the investment is worth the squeeze,” she said. “It takes a spidey-sense understanding of the internal wars the clients are battling, whether they voice them or not. And it takes the ability to build trust with the most skeptical person in the room. Selling creative is a team sport now more than it ever has been.” Protecting the creative idea Mullen said protecting creative ideas throughout the production process is sometimes harder and more critical than selling them. She said that’s gotten tougher to do in recent years. Depending on the client, Mullen said creative is being reviewed by various other stakeholders and agency partners for approval. “There’s putting it in front of consumers and validating the work, and we bring in production partners or legal; you name it,” she said, adding that she has had to focus on unselling a creative idea before because it had gotten too far from the original idea. “Selling the work isn’t the hardest part,” Mullen said, “the hardest thing is protecting the integrity of the idea once it’s sold.” Mullen said she is happy that more stakeholders have a voice in marketing decisions and that it’s not like it was 10 or 15 years ago when “a creative director’s opinions ruled the world. Obviously different perspectives can also make the work better. It’s a little give and a little take. We’re much more accommodating as an industry these days.” Still, some people said today’s red tape is affecting the quality of the work. “I’d love to see better work,” Miller said. “It is kind of a bummer, some of the things that we’re seeing right now,” adding, “You can even get a sense when you watch something, you’re like, ‘Oh, I see what this was supposed to be and this is now what it looks like because it got watered down in like 14 meetings that led up to the review.’ It is a hard time to be daring, but I still think we have to try.”Tracking ad agency account reviews Social media provides opportunity for risk Social has become a playground for marketers to take risks because brands can run slightly different iterations of creative and easily test them at a lower cost. “Where [brands are] experimenting are in places that maybe don’t have the high stakes of, say, a national TV buy,” Robinson said. “They’re experimenting in social, they’re experimenting in content, they’re experimenting in promotions. And, to me, there’s tons of creative opportunity there. How do you make something in social that is different than the standard sponsored post for a product?” She advised creatives to “bring your biggest, baddest creative ideas to that. Social, in general, is low stakes because it’s not as expensive so if it doesn’t land, it’s no sweat. But if it does, wow, you become a hero.” Social is also a great medium for “entertainment, engagements, deep storytelling,” she said, and pointed to Joan London’s “Vulva Therapy” campaign for body-care startup Luna Daily that had an out-of-home element but was primarily deployed on social. Created in November 2023, it featured bold ads with the word “VULVA” in all caps and directed anyone made uncomfortable by the word to call a “therapy hotline” to try to get more comfortable with it. Robinson said the ad got 1 million impressions from organic social in two weeks (the word “vulva” is normally banned by Meta, so the agency couldn’t use paid) and that type of risky creative wouldn’t work in broadcast. “People are used to brands pushing the limits in” social media,” she said. Miller said he often used social to test creative at T-Mobile and advises his clients to do the same. “You have much better tracking data and much better engagement data in social channels,” he said, which highlights the tension that exists between creatives not wanting to rely on data but also needing it in certain scenarios. “We always look at it as social has to be the backbone of what your campaigns are doing. It’s the place where customers are more open to your ideas. … The ability to target on social obviously is a big deal, as well.” He advises clients to invest in testing different ideas on social to see what resonates before committing big money to a big branding campaign. Use data to your advantage Although some agency executives cited data as a pain point for them in effectively getting creative off the ground, some said it can be used to their advantage. Geletka, for example, said he will push back on a client who is feeding his agency data that is geared toward steering the direction of a campaign. “I’m always very skeptical of the data because I know how to manipulate data very well,” he said. “The dark side of me is like, if I want a piece of creative to sell through, I can get that data [to sell it]. I can engineer my own research. I can engineer it in a very polite way. I can engineer a focus group to like my idea and bring it to the market. I can engineer a survey to get closer to what I want. That’s the dark side.” Right or wrong, “sometimes it’s the thing to do,” Geletka said, speaking from personal experience. “Because the data that’s there may just be dead wrong and we know that this creative is going to work and resonate and you just have to take a risk sometimes.” Research can be an agency’s best friend. Merry said he always tries to show clients examples of similar work the agency has done before. “That’s important as reassurance,” he said. Merry said he’s also found it helpful to give clients several ideas: “What they expected, what they thought they were going to get, and then also something that they did not see coming.” He said they are much more “comfortable” and open to ideas in that scenario. “Quicker, more insightful data can give a competitive edge and is a huge help to gaining the confidence of clients,” said Nate Swift, CMO of BarkleyOKRP. “But the key notion is confidence. Data helps, but more than anything the client and their counterparts need to feel like they’re in good hands with an agency. If they feel that you get their business—the nuts and bolts of how it operates—their priorities and their sensibilities, they’re much more likely to take a leap of faith with your big idea.” Relationships matter Trust and relationships are always key, and several people interviewed said they’re more important than any data. Merry said having a good relationship with a client, in which you are talking to them continuously and not just “springing this amazing idea on them” is critical. He said agencies should also know their clients and shouldn’t expect a brand that has never taken a creative risk in the past to suddenly want to do that now. In those instances, Merry advises to ask: “Is that going to change right now? … You have that conversation early on to try and sniff that kind of stuff out. Everyone says they want to do disruptive work, but it’s actually pretty hard to do.” Holly Willis, CEO and founder of independent agency Magic Camp, said it’s important to have “extensive conversations” with clients on “their business goals and pressures, budget allocations and how to spend” early on, so everyone is generally on the same page about the types of creative ideas that will work and be approved. Then, Willis said, agencies can use “data as a guide, not a rulebook. At the end of the day, data should support creative ideas, not limit them.”

How to sell creative ideas to risk-averse clients

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