Creatives and media teams at agencies across the world are as “hopeless” and as “implausible” today as each other because they are incapable of collaboration
That’s the thoughts of marketing agent provocateur Tom Goodwin. Opining on the fortunes of brands and agencies in the modern world, Goodwin said that the industry’s division between creative and media; brand and performance were not only old hat but were simply laughable in the face of the all-encompassing digital media.
“We have two completely different mindsets. One that completely ignores the fact that all matters can’t be measured and has an obsession with everything digital,” he told the crowd at ADMA’s Global Forum event in Sydney.
“And we have a whole team of people that are increasingly sounding like a religious cult and going around saying, ‘Just believe me, this is wonderful, my husband loves it and at some point in 25 years, someone might buy a BMW because of it.
“Both of those teams are as implausible and as wrong and as hopeless as each other now. The only way people can deal with this is by having a CMO-type who splits their brain in half and having some things that you can put on paper to justify to your CEO, sit in a quarterly meeting and defend until the death, even if you don’t think it works. And then taking the other half of your brain and spending on things that you know in your heart works and will have long-term success and you know will make a difference.”
This difference in outlook, according to Goodwin, is attributable to two things. First, the marketing industries (along with many others, to be sure) have become “obsessed” with taking credit for metric improvements, rather than celebrating broader success.
“[We should] have proper discussions about which metrics actually matter, which metrics we should optimise against, which we should use for diagnosis and which we should ignore,” he added.
“We should have an honest conversation about urgency and evidence. We are in this sort of weird industry where no one really understands how it works. No one really understands the magic of it. We’ve got half of the industry sort of living in this world of mystery and half denying that mystery.”
His evidence? The complete divergence between digital advertising and advertising in traditional media.
Pointing to the much-lauded OOH assets British Airways’ “A British Original” campaign, he said that it was an ad created for people who like ads. It would be impossible for this campaign to be attributable to any hard metrics.
The second reason was that much digital advertising — the medium that commands most spend around the world — simply doesn’t function beyond being a surface to drive clicks. He pointed to a succession of digital adverts that were poorly targeted, created with no love or craft but were, presumably, quite good at creating trackable, measurable last-click attribution.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he felt that Apple’s digital ads were a relatively happy middle path — able to drive the high-level brand recognition and recall that creatives crave but also being measurable and trackable in the ways that media suits adore.
In many ways, Goodwin pointed to the divide that was highlighted by last week’s This Way Up festival, put on by the Advertising Council. There, Mim Haysom, CMO of Suncorp, issued a call to arms for marketers to embrace creativity and big ideas as a source for growth.
“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.
“How do I use the great work Leos [Leo Burnett, Suncorp’s creative agency] 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.”
The session at This Way Up was certainly inspiring and affirming for creatives. However, for Goodwin, teams need to find a better way of communicating their respective value to each other.
“A lot of brand building is built by wastage. A lot of activity that we do today may pay off after you’ve left your job and three other people have done your job in 20 years’ time” Goodwin said.
“We have to get comfortable with the wastage that’s out there. We need to find common ground.
“We need to spot these false binaries. We make a lot of assumptions. We assume that unless activity happens straight away, it doesn’t matter. We assume that performance advertising can’t build brands. We assume that brand advertising can’t perform. We need to get much more comfortable with a sort of nuanced experience.”
However, for Goodwin, the industry’s obsession with newness and ‘business’ — something that afflicts both creatives and media types equally, in his mind — means that it is blinded to what really works. What works in 2024, might be what worked in “1908”.
Perhaps then, the Mad Men aren’t dead yet, they just haven’t spoken to the suits enough. And vice-versa.
