Kimberly-Clark global marketing boss attacks “flawed” ad process
Kimberly-Clark’s worldwide chief marketing officer Tony Palmer has attacked the system of ad agencies creative ideas coming before channel planning as “flawed”.
“The marketing system is broken and needs re-inventing,” he said. In Sydney for the FMCG giant’s global university training scheme, Palmer argued that media channeling needs to come before creative development and lastly execution.
Australian-born Palmer said: "The idea of an advertising agency being a manufacturer of a 30 sec ad is flawed. We believe that system is flawed and you need to re-sequence what we are doing.”
The Kimberly-Clark marketing chief suggested companies instead look first at building a task profile rather than an receiving a creative idea from an ad agency, then going to channel planners, followed by creative development and lastly execution: “The opportunity to create big ideas is vested in the strategy.”
However, he added that “a good idea can come from anywhere and that’s why we have an innovation fund of $37m available for our different teams to bid for based on their ideas.”
He also argued that marketing departments should be not be kept in isolation from the other aspects of the company such as finance, research, innovation and sales. The company’s global university, his reason for visiting Australia, teaches marketers about other part of the business, “so that they are all speaking the same language”.
