Suncorp’s marketing boss Mim Haysom has issued creatives and marketers with a fiery call to arms, telling the industry that they should not take creative ideas to any other part of the company for approval.
Instead, the creation, development and ultimate approval of any creative marketing idea should be a two-way process between the CMO and their agency head.
“I feel quite strongly about this. First of all, I don’t take creative ideas anywhere else for approval. I firmly believe that if you’re the CMO, you are the chief marketing officer and you are accountable for your brand and your creative,” she said, speaking on a mammoth CMO/CCO panel at the This Way Up conference in Sydney.
“Amen!” Brent Smart, CMO of Telstra, also a panellist, added.
Haysom added that she “absolutely” has to get budget approval from her C-suite beancounter counterparts.
“But we don’t share creative with the execs, the C-suite, the board. Andy [Fergusson, chief creative officer, Leo Burnett] knows when he comes into the room with me that I’m the decision maker and that’s how it should be.
“How do I use the great work Leos does? We do PIRs [post-interaction reports], we build business cases to get more money to do more great things. I don’t think it’s fair grabbing chief creative officers and shoving them in front of a board who might not necessarily like [the idea] and asking them to dance. It’s terrible and I think that organisations doing that need to stop.”
Cue applause.
Leos and Suncorp of course, have produced some exceptional work together. The much-lauded and Lion-winning “One House To Save Many” campaign from 2022 being one such example.
When asked by moderator Liana Dubois, CMO of Nine, both Fergusson and Haysom said it was their favourite piece of work that they’d created together.
Fergusson, meanwhile, said that “One House” was a crystalising moment in Leos’ relationship with Suncorp — one which started back in 2017.
“When we first started ‘One House’ back in 2020, about two months later COVID hit and everything was going to be built around this thing and it was a real defining moment in our relationship,” he said.
“It was like, are we going to hold hands and see if this can land and still work regardless of what’s going on in the world or are we going to put it on the back burner? I was so impressed when Mim said ‘Let’s see if we can work this out.’ It set the tone going forward. Instead of blaming each other when things go wrong, we were in this together with shared ownership and shared responsibility. That goes all the way through.
“Even in recent presentations, we had a meeting the other day with some of Mim’s team. We presented one idea that we thought was right and one of Mim’s team said, ‘Ah, I don’t think it’s quite right’ and we came out of it with a completely different idea that we’re all really aligned with and excited. There was no ‘Why did you present that?’ or ‘Why wait like this?’ it was just let’s workshop this.”
The panel, which also featured Uber’s Lucinda Barlow and her agency counterpart, Special’s Tom Martin, and Smart accompanied by longstanding agency partner Micah Walker of Bear Meets Eagle on Fire, was quite the love-in, though it didn’t leave a particularly sickly taste.
Barlow hailed “Get Almost, Almost Anything” created as the tricky second album to follow the uber-successful (sorry) “Tonight, I’ll Be Eating…” brand platform as a “fundamental shift” for the brand.
She also said thanked Martin and the rest of Special for giving Uber the “conviction” to be confident in its product efficiency and double down on its self-deprecating tone.
Smart, meanwhile, said that Telstra’s “Better On A Better Network” was his favourite piece of work. Walker, on the other hand, said “the next thing” was the best. So stay tuned for that one.
Following the conference, Anna Fawcett, Scott Nowell and Justin Drape were inducted into the AWARD Hall of Fame.
