Independent brand strategist and consultant Eugene Healey has said that the creative and brand teams responsible for brands around the world are in a “fundamental crisis of structure” thanks to outdated top-down hierarchies and a failure to adapt to today’s cultural and media landscapes.
Opening the proceedings at the Content Summit Australia conference in Brisbane, Healey delivered a punchy talk where he issued the damning indictment of the industry’s reluctance to change operating structures.
“I want to talk about [what] I think is the single greatest challenge… the way we have built brands structurally, organised our brand teams and organised the skill sets within them is not fit for the current tech, media or cultural environment,” he said.
Healey, who boasts some 350,000 Instagram and 200,000 TikTok followers and has worked on clients including AGL, Wesfarmers, Coles and Asahi, explained that most marketing organisations can visualise their operations with two shapes: a left-to-right facing arrow and a triangle. The former demonstrates the traditional linear campaign structure of plan, create, track, repeat.
Strategy and planning complete their work before handing off to creative and production to execute, who then hand over to media teams to make sure the work gets seen and then, “if we were lucky,” there was tracking and measurement at the end.
“Then we have the approvals and governance process. This is what I like to call the ‘Sovereign Military Models of Approvals in Governance’. Anyone who has ever managed a brand strategy or creative campaign or an idea will tell you that most of the work is getting the work approved,” Healey said.
While the work is mainly managed by senior and mid-level staff, sending marketing campaigns up the chain for approval is a process fraught with danger.
“It’s a political process of massaging stakeholders further and further up the organisation… It takes a really long time because it acknowledges that a brand is something that everyone feels they have ownership over. I often say that a brand is the sum total of associations of an entity. If someone feels that they contribute to those associations, they feel they have ownership over the brand,” he said.
“We have a situation where anyone can kill a campaign. Not just the CMO, not even just the CEO, [but] the CFO, the legal team or ops. If they wake up on the bad side of bed, guess what? That campaign’s getting pulled.”
Healey’s zeal for tearing down overly hierarchical brand management structures is nothing new. Last year, he described Australian company boards as being “as close to a theocracy as we’re going to get”.
“It’s a cabal of a very narrow set of older, established voices that very, very rarely let people into the tent,” Healey added.
New media necessitate new processes
Fixing the structural problem, according to Healey, does not simply require rethinking the approvals process or even migrating to an ‘always-on’ campaign model.
Instead, creative teams need to adapt their organisational structures to match how consumers interact with their brands.
“These rules worked for a specific set of circumstances in the media environment that held true for quite a long time. But they are now starting to fall apart,” said Healey.
“The first was the idea of the monolithic media environment. That is to say, a media environment in which we all saw or experienced the same things. We tuned into the same TV channels at the same time each night, watched Blue Heelers and then we had the water cooler moment the next day. This gave marketers a single, cultural lingua franca to work from.
“Secondly, everyone was there which meant that budgets could be centralisesd, which meant that we could afford to spend an enormous amount of time on a single piece of creative, literally the ‘Big Ad’ because we knew no matter how much time and suffering went into that process, it was going to pay off because everybody was going to see that piece of creative.”
The ‘Big Ad’, which Healey displayed behind him during the talk, was released in 2005 and produced by George Patterson Y&R Melbourne. Interestingly, much subsequent discussion about the ad focuses on its early digital virality.
“At the time it was taking off virally, people were telling Ant and I how many thousands of shares it had. That seemed nice, but to be honest, we were too busy writing ‘Barry the Cougar Dawson’ for Cougar Bourbon to take any real notice. That dawned a bit later,” Grant Rutherford, the campaign’s art director, told Campaign Brief last year.
“You have to remember, YouTube had only just come out and hadn’t caught on. The ad instead was put out on another now extinct video platform – you actually had to click a button and accept a download to watch it, but at least it played big on your screen, which YouTube didn’t. That’s why, to this day, it doesn’t have many YouTube hits,” added writer Ant Keogh.
More than two decades on from the ‘Big Ad’, nearly all Australians watch YouTube. However, we are not watching the same things on YouTube. Nor any of the myriad streaming platforms available. Nor are the same audio platforms. The list goes on. Even significant cultural moments are less permanent than previously, with Healey pointing to Bad Bunny’s half-time Super Bowl performance earlier this year.
“There’s no single moment that is big enough to create creative momentum. Effectively, we need massive sustained output over time. Attention itself is no longer linear. Part of the campaign model assumed a certain level of linearity, not just in the way that we produce things but in the way that we distribute things,” said Healey.
“With algorithmic distribution, we don’t determine the sequence in which messaging appears… At any point, we may just arrive in a user’s feed, any piece of creative, any influencer… there’s no order to it because that’s how algorithms function. They are not about sequencing.”
Nowadays, brands are experienced as an “accumulation of a plethora of hyper-fragmented moments,” according to Healey.
This has made traditional brand stories, manifestos and so on, irrelevant in Healey’s mind.
“It doesn’t register to the consumer as a story any more. It doesn’t even register as a series of messages. It actually registers as an energy, a vibe. The strongest brands are the brands that emit the strongest vibes… It’s like observing a really frantic Twitch chat; you can’t digest any individual message, but you can make sense of broader sentiment. That is the goal of a strong brand today,” he said.
Relinquish control to regain sanity
Brand messaging is now presented in an unlinear fashion, across more channels than ever, and often refracted through influencers, community events and more. Exercising direct, hierarchical control over this is a fool’s errand, according to Healey.
“We are moving from what I would call a master-slave relationship, one of total ownership and control [of our brands], to a parent-teenager relationship. We are now the key influencers of our brand, but not necessarily the owners of a brand,” said Healey.
Instead, you relinquish total control and “build to a consistent cultural signal” in the hope that through familiarity in myriad low-attention media environments, consumers can start to recognise the vibe of the brand.
The new, though still work in progress, operating principles for a new “orchestrated brand” are: polysemantic brand ideas, creating new distinctive brand assets and the need for judgement at all organisational levels.
Polysemantic brand ideas need to be applicable across a range of channels and make sense in a variety of environments, many of which are decontextualised. Instead, there needs to be “as little scope for the pattern to be broken, for things to go wrong”.
Distinctive brand assets are nothing new. There are the Golden Arches, the Bunnings jingle and so on. But this needs to change, according to Healey.
“There are other forms of distinctive assets that we need to think about creating as well that are not just the literal assets themselves,” he said. These include content formats, visual universes and more, pointing to TikTok channel Subway Takes and sunscreen brand Vacation.
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Finally, the need for judgment is paramount at all levels.
“We used to operate in environments where it was only really senior leadership that needed to exercise judgment because junior and mid-levels were responsible for production and execution. But new technologies are flattening the process. Production is becoming commodified; however, we are producing a fuckload more creative assets. We cannot expect senior leadership to be the only ones that are approving all of the creative; it will drive them absolutely mental,” Healey said.
Everyone needs to be capable of making judgment calls on the correctness of creative work, turning the triangle into a square.
“The new role of the orchestrator is not understanding the story, the guidelines, because, frankly, the static brand guidelines document, in my opinion, is dead… Now you have ot understand the underlying pattern, the gravitational pull that we are trying to train,” he said.
Of course, whether senior leaders within businesses will truly be able to let go of their brands remains to be seen. It would take a bold brand manager or marketing director to propose it. But perhaps by then, it will all be too late.
B&T travelled to Content Summit Australia as a guest of The Content Division.
