FCB’s commitment to creativity pays off with double-digit revenue growth

FCB cleaned up at Cannes last year, winning Network of the Year, while its Chicago office topped all U.S. shops in the Agency of the Festival rankings. But executives at the Interpublic Group of Cos.-owned agency are not fixated on the Lions scoreboard. “We stopped talking about winning at Cannes about five years ago,” said Susan Credle, FCB’s global chair and global chief creative officer. Instead, the agency started focusing on work that drives client revenue. “We like to say at FCB that creative is the business, so if we are not growing business with our creative product, then it’s not worth doing,” she said. See all of Ad Age's A-List 2022 winners here. By that score, the agency had a banner year in 2021. FCB grew business with existing clients such as Walmart, Kimberly-Clark and Unilever, while winning new accounts including Spotify, Netflix, Groupon and Hoka as it got through the year without losing a single big client. Agency revenue surged 16.1% in the U.S. as global revenue jumped 15%, coming off prior-year growth of 16.3% and 10%, respectively. As other agencies struggled to draw new talent, FCB hired 1,896 employees, including for FCB Health. Hires included luring Jordan Doucette from Toronto indie agency No Fixed Address to serve as chief creative officer of FCB West. Credle—whose FCB leadership duties recently expanded with the addition of the global chair title—traced the agency's rise to a decision made eight years ago that she described as “a universal company commitment to creativity that was going to be the driving force of the turnaround.” As a result, all decisions are made “with creativity as the core,” she said. Buy your ticket for the Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards Gala at AdAge.com/ACGala. Under Credle, who joined FCB in 2015, the agency has instituted a rigorous internal creative scoring system in which work is given a score of 1-6 with 4s considered “proactive,” 5s for work that creates behavior and 6s reserved for a “never finished idea”—meaning it establishes a platform that can be built on. “It’s hard, but on our best days when we do 4, 5, 6 work we experience retention of talent, we attract new clients and we see organic growth—and we see the industry paying attention,” Credle said. Attention-grabbing work in 2021 included “Bedtime Stories'' for Walmart. The campaign involved prison inmates making audio recordings of children’s books that were converted into an augmented reality experience for their children via an app allowing them to cue their parent’s voice on each page. FCB also added to Michelob Ultra’s ongoing “Contract for Change” campaign that has plugged the brand’s organic Pure Gold variety beer by supporting barley farmers who transition to organic production. The effort—which began in 2019 and won a Cannes Lions Grand Prix for PR last year—will continue this year with a global rollout. Some 175 farmers are now part of the contract, with 104,000 acres in transition, according to FCB. FCB was also behind a 2021 Super Bowl ad for Michelob Ultra Organic Seltzer that featured celebrity lookalikes, including of Sylvester Stallone, Serena Williams and Don Cheadle. The “Contract for Change” campaign, which came from FCB Chicago and New York, is an example of how the agency is collaborating more across offices. Such teamwork is a major priority of Tyler Turnbull, who assumed the North America CEO role in 2019 and was recently promoted to global CEO, replacing the outgoing Carter Murray. “When one FCB office wins a new piece of business, the value of everyone’s business card goes up. And we needed a model and a system and an operational approach that I think reflected that more,” Turnbull said. He pointed to a decision in 2021 to expand the agency's production offerings—which had been run in Chicago—across North America under the leadership of Kerry Hill, executive VP and director of production for North America. FCB also made strides in positioning its CRM, technology consulting and analytics services as a more integrated offering for all clients. FCB/Six—which had handled those services as a standalone agency—was consolidated within the FCB network after leaders of FCB/Six left the agency in mid-2021 to helm a new IPG agency called Performance Art. FCB/Six is now led by Tina Allan, FCB’s global head of connections and data, who joined the agency last year from BBDO New York. FCB/Six is “showing up for every pitch, every client,” Allan said, noting that clients are struggling to balance brand marketing with performance marketing. “We are like the enemy is ‘or’—we do both,” she said, pointing to the rise in the need to find creative ways to collect first-party data. Moving ‘Upstream’ FCB’s diversity efforts include a pledge to include at least two women and two people of color in every candidate hiring pool. The agency says it is now 62% female—including senior management at 50%—with 34% of employees identifying as people of color, including 17% in senior management. FCB in 2021 began helping clients create more inclusive cultures and marketing via a new program called Upstream Inclusion. The goal is to “upstream” the process of creating work that appeals to diverse audiences in recognition that there is no longer a “general market.” “This idea of a general market, or dominant market, is now dead, that is just so passé,” said Vita Harris, FCB’s global chief strategy officer. “Really what we are talking about is ‘diverse mass’ and how do we start to reach the diverse mass?” “Historically, dealing with underrepresented groups has happened on the back end, you come up with a dominant culture insight/strategy and then you work [diversity] through on the back end … We are saying, ‘Nope, we are not doing that,’” she said. William White, U.S. chief marketing officer for Walmart, said in a statement that FCB’s upstream inclusion approach has “fueled our ability to more authentically tell the stories of all our customers across the 4,700 communities Walmart serves and helped further solidify our shared commitment to diverse customer-centricty and intentional inclusion.” FCB has trained clients on so-called WOW (watch out words) meant as a way to flag work that could be damaging before it gets to the market. “We are exploring things like is it appropriation or is it appreciation … is this objectifying anyone or any culture?” Harris said. See all of Ad Age's A-List 2022 winners here. Executives point to Walmart’s “Bedtime Stories” campaign as an example of the process in action. “I don’t think we would have even gotten there if we hadn’t been thinking about Upstream Inclusion,” Credle said. The effort looked at the incarcerated “not as prisoners, not as criminals—but as human beings, fathers, grandfathers, moms.”

FCB’s commitment to creativity pays off with double-digit revenue growth

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