Navigating creativity in an age of risk

With macroeconomic pressures forcing an industry obsession with ROI—and with chief marketing officers’ tenure growing ever shorter—innovative, risk-taking marketing campaigns are usually the first symptoms of tightened budgets. But the risk-versus-reward calculations of such campaigns can generate trepidation among brand leaders, and for good reason. The reality of virtually any industry is heavily influenced by the state of the economy overall. When interest rates and customer spending are trending positively, it’s reflected in the microbusiness environment, but marketing and advertising may be the most vulnerable to economic fragility. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs The issue of risk-taking in campaigns was first raised by members of The List, a select group of advertising, marketing and media insiders selected by Ad Age in partnership with Meta, in the inaugural article of “The Modern CMO Playbook,” a thought leadership series aimed at tackling the biggest industry challenges and showing how creativity can drive brands’ growth, even in a risk-averse environment. The challenge: overcoming the fear among many CMOs of how to make an impact on the culture—and achieve business results—without being accused of performative activism. List members Ellie Bamford, chief strategy officer at Wunderman Thompson; Obele Brown-West, president of Tracer; Jenn Renoe, director, Partner Direct, at Publicis Health Media; and Matt Withington, senior director of marketing at The Boston Beer Company, spoke about the main themes of the thought leadership series on an Advertising Week New York panel at The Female Quotient’s Equality Lounge called “The Modern CMO Playbook: Navigating the Age of Disruption,” moderated by Sylvia Zhou, head of global industry marketing at Meta. (Watch video below.) A new tipping point We’re emerging from a period where business leaders leveraged vanity metrics to justify increased investment and, at times, unchecked marketing spend. Simultaneously amid the growing pains of racial, ethnic, identity-based and political turmoil, social unrest became a theme of everyday life. Now, things have come to a tipping point as corporations face a consumer market demanding consideration for the increasingly diverse ways they desire to be engaged. After the pandemic subsided, common sense says that brands should expect to spend as much time righting the ship as they spent leaning into impractical investment and spending, unchecked for alignment with bottom-line impact or longer viability. Yet, risk-taking can present an alluring idea, in particular when striving for short-term results. “With the average tenure of a CMO resting at 39 months, planning for long-term viability may feel counterintuitive,” said List member Brown-West. “However, only focusing on short-term performance can have a negative impact on a brand’s long-term viability, while not degrading the effectiveness of short-term performance.” Pitting brand-building and performance marketing against each other in a competition for budget unnecessarily damages the effectiveness of both, she added. A consensus is emerging among List members that CMOs must assess where marketing can make a true impact in driving internal and external engagement, and articulate how that engagement influences cross-functional business outcomes in a risk-averse world. In doing so, CMOs must articulate which business outcomes are beyond their control or influence. Establishing this level of clarity can empower them to collaborate across the C-suite to design intentional systems of integration on how they align, organize, lead and incentivize both internal teams and external partners. This is a task that can require the following for consideration: Setting expectations. Positioning marketing as a cross-functional unification tool, leverageable for aligning short-term performance with long-term viability. Optimizing performance measurement. Evolving from “brand-versus-performance” to “brand performance,” and swapping vanity metrics for valuable engagement. Creativity in an age of fear. Coaching clients, partners and internal teams in dealing with a fear of creative risk. “CMOs can’t control macroeconomics in most cases, but they can control how they navigate uncertainty, and the partnerships and knowledge they cultivate,” said List member W. Joe DeMiero, U.S. CEO of Universal McCann. “This includes putting in place the tools and processes to ensure adaptive capacity to test and learn, and prioritization around experimentation to test new models.” Brand health and revenue are synonymous To be successful, brands must do the work of building community in a market where consumers and talent seek emotional engagement. Customers and employees are essential elements of any organization’s success. This truth directly ties revenue generation to brand health, both internally and externally. A challenge to marketing is that revenue is a short- to midterm priority for CEOs, who are responsible to shareholders first. The main objective is immediate and consistent revenue, which directly impacts expectations for the rest of the organization. While brand health is essential to driving revenue, it is still a long-term investment. Lack of mutual understanding for the role marketing plays in overall corporate strategy creates a divide between CEOs and CMOs, according to a Wall Street Journal article citing new research from McKinsey & Co. and a May report from Forrester: • Nine out of 10 CEOs say that the role marketing plays is clearly defined at their companies, but only 22% of marketing chiefs say their jobs are well defined and understood by other C-suite executives, down from 31% in 2019. • 97% of CEOs think their companies meet customers’ needs, yet only 75% of CMOs agree. • 90% of CEOs say their companies’ strategies are driven by customers, while only 58% of CMOs say that is true. • When asked to name their marketing departments’ primary responsibilities, only 50% of CEOs gave the same answers as their own company’s CMOs. • Only 10% of CEOs at Fortune 250 companies have ever worked in marketing. “It’s time to move away from measuring brand health and brand performance separately,” said DeMiero. “The present and future of business success is in assessing ‘brand performance’ as one unit of measurement.” DeMiero warned that consumers don’t distinguish between their experience with brands and the perception they have of those brands. Performance tactics are now experience tactics. Regardless, being risk-averse is a completely understandable position to take. As one CMO told The List, after taking a highly visible creative risk, their company’s sales dropped almost immediately and the CMO was fired. Despite the fact that this creative risk was undertaken with the full endorsement of the CEO and the board, the CMO was the only person at the brand who was fired. “I was under enormous pressure to deliver revenue growth and business results—as well as take creative risks,” the CMO told The List. Meanwhile, not only were our agency partners not fired; they were celebrated for their ‘highly creative’ work.” Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2023 Ad spending, rankings and analysis for the top 100 advertisers Click here In a risk-averse world, a consensus among List members is that CMOs must position marketing as a cross-functional unification tool to eliminate operational silos, deliver value informed by holistic business needs and facilitate scalable support of short- to midterm business priorities, and long-term brand viability. Brands are beginning to see the light. In recent years, Unilever’s previous chief marketer had eschewed the CMO title altogether. But on Oct. 26, the multinational giant (No. 9 on the Ad Age World's Largest Advertisers 2023 list) named Esi Eggleston Bracey, formerly the brand’s general manager of personal care in North America and head of country for the U.S.—and also a List 2022 member—to the newly created title of chief marketing and growth officer, positioning the role at the intersection of brand purpose, performance and long-term viability. Seeking comparable cross-functional value List member Willie Jackson, executive VP and director at Starcom, emphasized that massive opportunity for cross-functional collaboration exists where disproportionate time is spent on tasks that skirt the boundaries of risk. This can be broken down into the following subsets: • Amount of collaborators. The number of collaborators for a given set of tasks, and the corresponding speed and impact they bring to the task. • Communication and issue-resolution frequency. Are issues taking longer to resolve because the right mix of talent isn’t focused on them? • Task categorization. Considering those tasks that are more aligned to reporting versus tasks intended to grow the business. • Decision making. The time it takes to collect, analyze, report and make decisions about changes to marketing programs. • Effectiveness. How impactful are collaboration, communication, categorization and decision-making processes at incrementally driving business outcomes? “It’s important to note that long-term investments that fall outside the bucket of branding and PR should all have one thing in common: They must align to your company’s strategic goals and investments,” Jackson said. A solution is to bring analytics and measurement partners into the briefing room. Asking analytics partners to define metrics after an idea is considered is counterproductive and inefficient. Integrating analytics into a creative approach from the beginning yields proven results, and helps address the fear of risk in a collaborative way. Many minds can often find a sound way in this fractious social environment. The engagement economy “In an environment where people are exposed to over 10,000 messages a day across a media landscape that is more fragmented than ever, the riskiest thing a brand can do is follow the status quo,” said List member Judith Carr-Rodriguez, CEO and partner at Fig. (Carr-Rodriguez also appeared in a Female Quotient AWNewYork panel, “Rewriting the Rules for RTO So Everyone Wins”; watch the video here.) We are no longer in the attention economy, but rather in the engagement economy. Having access to copious amounts of customer and consumer-audience data means nothing if it can’t be turned into engagement-worthy experience. List member Withington emphasized that paid media merely provides the opportunity to acquire consumer attention. Marketers should consider shifting to a mindset of investing in owned content, garnering earned media, and allowing audience engagement metrics to inform where paid media dollars may deliver the best ROI. Meanwhile, being “on-strategy” and “correct” is not enough, said Withington. You have to be compelling. Does that mean being risky? “The safest ads often go unnoticed, and this is the real, often overlooked risk—that we play it safe, go unnoticed and our resources go to waste,” he said. “Knowing your brand—which you may not if you have only been focused on the short-term versus long-term viability—will allow creativity to come from a place of a firm brand foundation.” Brown-West added that controversy comes when ideas are born away from a brand’s clear purpose and voice. Having a defined brand and filtering all ideas through this brand definition will help remove fear from the creative process, she said. Creativity is still essential Creativity is the undisputed champ of effectiveness, and the most important factor in driving advertising. In fact, creative drives nearly half (49%) of incremental sales and remains the most critical driver of advertising effectiveness by a wide margin. Consolidated perspectives from List members resulted in a checklist of what client and agency teams can do to facilitate productive partnerships in a risky environment: • Bring internal intelligence, analytics and cultural partners into the briefing process to ensure the internal brand ROI and cultural DNA is engrained from the inception of a campaign or initiative. • Agree to one singular overarching objective for the year, with initiatives under a unified success-measurement approach. • Ensure that diverse perspectives are represented to generate and execute ideas that are true to brand DNA while also speaking to a brand’s nuanced audience. • Advocate for ideas you believe in as one team. When you take a big swing, take it together. Today’s CMOs face a true paradigm shift in the value and influence of their role. Marketing leaders can leverage this moment to set their respective companies on course for success in an era of high risk through rigorous expectation setting, optimized performance measurement and fearless creativity. For the latest updates on how members are spreading the message about “The Modern CMO Playbook,” follow The List on Instagram (and Threads), Facebook, LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter). About Meta Founded in 2004, Meta's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Meta's apps and technologies to connect with friends and family, find communities and grow businesses.

Navigating creativity in an age of risk

Featured Stories