Creativity: Agencies still don't get it

I have always held the view that ad agencies should be in an enviable position. Should be. No other industry is structured with such a unique mix of creative, planning and business talent. People who sit together all day, day after day, and create. They have the knowledge to draw on the past and the ability to look into the future. No other industry I can think of has the same broad mix of skill, knowledge and expertise. No media company, PR company, branding company, and certainly no client.

So why the constant complaint that clients don’t treat agencies with respect, don’t value their opinions, are treated as suppliers, the cheaper the better, and so on. And yes, are kept in the dark. Not true for every agency of course. There are shops that are truly valued, constantly prove their worth and are well rewarded, but they are not the rule.

The reason, looking in from a wintery Suffolk cottage, seems obvious. Agencies put their unique structure to work creating ads—whether traditional or digital, they’re still ads. They also spend an inordinate amount of time talking about money and how to justify retainers, rate cards and margins.

The focus and talk should all be around creativity. It is without doubt the most important currency in business today. A dollar in creativity is worth far more than a dollar in cash.

Let’s step back a few years to the economic disaster of 2008. Unfortunately, investment wasn’t the only casualty, creativity lost a lot of ground. It should have been a ripe time for thinkers and innovators, but during this particular recession, the cost-cutters rose to the top.

Cost-cutters are not thinkers and innovators. Look at the options. Cut travel, cut lunches, cut hiring, cut increases, cut bonuses, cut stationary, cut wine. The fact is, there are no innovative ways to cut costs. You don’t need leaders to cut costs. You don’t need ideas to cut costs. You just cut.

Previous recessions on the other hand, were breeding grounds for creativity. It’s extraordinary how many businesses were started during those times. Procter & Gamble, Disney, Alcoa, McDonald's, General Electric and Johnson & Johnson. Hyatt, CNN, FedEx, Microsoft, Sports Illustrated, MTV and Hewlett-Packard were also born during the worst of economic times. GE started during the panic of 1873, Disney started during the recession of 1923-24, HP began during the Great Depression.

Where do agencies and clients fall short in creative thinking? Paddy Rangappa, senior director, marketing, AMEA, McDonald's Where do they fall short in creative thinking? “In many places” is the right answer, but I’d like to focus on two, one related to each party. One big reason is that the client does not take responsibility for the quality of the creative. If asked who—client or agency—is responsible for poor creative, many clients would unhesitatingly say the agency (and perhaps add: “Duh!”). Others may say it’s a shared responsibility, a two-member team effort (“Unless both parties play well, the team can’t score”). This is true, but who is the captain of the team? Who needs to ensure the team plays well and scores? But even when viewed as a joint effort, I’ve found that it’s the client who lets down the team. Poor creative is mostly a direct result of poor client behaviour: inadequate (or in some cases, non-existent) briefs; poor judgement of creative ideas; unwillingness to take risks; second-guessing management; browbeating the agency… I could go on but you get the idea. Empirical evidence would suggest I’m right: it is quite common to find that the agency producing poor quality work for one client is winning awards for other work. Marketing people, or clients, need to take responsibility—I mean 100 per cent responsibility—for the quality of creative work they approve. And their careers should depend on it: performance reviews should assess the quality of creative work they produce. The second reason is not as big but is often a roadblock to getting great work. Agency creative people do not acknowledge that anyone can get a creative idea, even—God forbid—the client. Don’t get me wrong: nothing is worse than the client who expects the agency to come for meetings with nothing but notepad and pencil to write down the script he or she dictates. (Clients who do this fall in the first category.) But in guarding against this type of client, many creative people demonstrate unwavering bull-headedness to any idea that comes from anyone without ‘creative’ in their job title. With a polite rebuff (“That’s an interesting idea, but…”), they reject every idea—and often refuse to listen to potentially intriguing twists to their own ideas—from the client. When this happens, good ideas sometimes get strewn on the wayside of the creative road, which is a pity. But worse, it undermines the team dynamic, and therefore affects future work.

From 1973-1975, a time when the United States had an unpopular president, was in the midst of the Watergate scandal and was at the tail end of an extremely costly and controversial war, when consumer confidence dropped to an all-time low, who would have thought about starting a business?

Supercuts, Chilis, Cablevision, Industrial Light & Magic, Oakley and, oh, yes, a small company called Microsoft, that’s who.

The individuals that started each of these corporations had an idea. CNN didn’t start as a business, it started as an idea. Microsoft started as an idea. GE was started by one of the biggest innovators of all time—Edison.

Tough economies should spawn new ways of thinking and new ways of doing business.

When you take the power of creativity and layer it with technology, there are probably more ways to make money now than ever before. I still hear people say ‘we’re in the ad business’. At some point we need to realise that the success of our business is entirely based on the success of our clients’ business. Entirely.

If we at least begin to accept that, then we should be developing ideas, not just ads, that help strengthen the spreadsheets of our clients. We need to become, you guessed it, thinkers and innovators.

Businesses need to be more creative now than ever, not more conservative. They need new ways to stimulate people, whether it be through product development, packaging innovation, new distribution channels. People do not need more of the same, they need difference in their lives. Agencies have everything at their disposal to supply it.

While we are in an ongoing economic pickle, we are in the best time we could possibly be to think and innovate ourselves out of it. Clients are the left brain, agencies should be their right brain and together at least there’s one whole brain devoted to solving problems. Not ad problems, but business issues.

In writing this, I found no shortage of quotes on creativity. Einstein, Jobs, Picasso, Gates, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Ray Bradbury, William Shatner all talk about it in a way perfectly summed up by Edward de Bono. “Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.”

If it’s good enough for them, surely it’s good enough for agencies and their networks to start thinking in different ways.

The sooner agencies stop trying to justify what they do and start earning their keep by applying their unique structures, skills, talent and knowledge to helping their clients break out of their established patterns and look for growth in different ways, they will have respect, be treated as a partner and will face less pressure on costs.

Most of us would have seen the now famous Ted talk by Sir Ken Robinson on how schools kill creativity. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a look. But it doesn’t stop at schools. Once you grow up you realise that business can also kill creativity. It’s the job of agencies to foster a different attitude and approach to business. It won’t happen through ads, but in time it can happen by applying skills to helping clients appreciate and understand the invaluable contribution creativity can make to their business.

To do that of course, agencies, especially creative teams, need to show a real interest in their clients’ business, every aspect of it. Don’t just sit at a trendy coffee shop and chat amongst yourselves, insist on talking to the people who design and make what you are meant to sell. Learn to understand and appreciate the pressures your clients face. Walk their offices and factory floors. Imagine you’re working for that company, because in reality, you are.

So what can clients do? Embrace creativity and not fear it for a start. Hire a CMO who gets it and knows how to work with agencies. Preferably someone who is looking for that bit of fame. The CEO should get involved, completely involved, it’s too important not to. Make your agency your partner. Get them immersed with R&D, product development, internal marketing meetings.

Sir Ken Robinson said that creativity is as important in education as literacy, and should be treated with same status.

It’s as important in business as numbers and should be treated with the same obsession.