What Makes A Creative Marketer

Creative Salon believes in the transformational power of creativity to build brands and drive sales- creativity in thinking, media strategy and buying, campaign creation and, of course, in marketing. It's a belief that is enjoying renewed attention in the industry, with more energy and determination being invested both in diversity of talent and an environment that accelerates original thinking.

But effective commercial creativity requires partnership: a trusted partnership between a creatively ambitious and confident marketing team and their agencies. So we've identified the UK's most creative marketers, those marketing leaders who make bold bets on innovation and new routes to customers’ hearts and minds. Over the coming weeks we'll be talking to these marketers about their creative pursuits, principles and inspiration and how this has contributed to the growth of their brands.

But what is it exactly that makes a great creative marketer? How does that impact the nature of the agency relationship and do high levels of creativity truly drive business growth? We spoke to agency partners to get some answers.

What qualities make for a great creative marketer?

For Vicki Maguire, the chief creative officer of Havas London, it’s a role that “requires equal parts empathy and chutzpa. A successful and creative marketer is someone who thinks and feels.”

Karen Martin, the chief executive of Bartle Bogle Hegarty London, says: “This sounds familiar but it’s guts. Clients know their brands and their objectives, but sometimes all of that kind of brilliant logic, which of course is important, you have to put on one side and go ‘how does this piece of work make me feel?’ You have to go with your gut because too many decisions are made with too much detail, which doesn’t always result in the most exciting of work.”

Sheryl Marjoram, the chief executive of McCann London, has compiled a list of qualities that make up the best of the best in a creative marketer: “A desire to solve problems with truth, curiosity, empathy, energy and humility; someone who understands the power of telling a great story; are aware they are only renting the brand on behalf of the next generation; a total and deep faith in humans, partnership and expertise; patience and pace in equal measure but never together; an understanding that the brand needs to be meaningful in its audience’s lives; and someone who gets ‘Yes, and’ gets you further than ‘No, but’.”

Gareth Mercer, founding partner of Pablo London, believes confidence is a key asset in the creative client’s makeup: “When it comes to the willingness to take the risks that great creativity always brings, you can’t research for it or measure it ,you have to trust the process, the people and your own judgment and then be able to inspire and sell within your own organisation, because behind every client that says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ there’s a whole bunch of other people who need taking along the journey as well. Don’t underestimate this last point, it’s the companies that pay the bills not the creative marketers.”

Andrew Stephens, the co-founder of Goodstuff, adds: “Genuine creativity, the stuff we all get out of bed for, isn’t easy to brief, evidence, buy or implement. So a great creative marketer is someone who understands this and subscribes to the view that ‘good isn’t easy’. They know they have a crucial role to play within their own organisation to champion and fight for great ideas, and then invest in measurement to evidence success. Really great creative marketers also understand that creativity doesn’t just reside in the ‘creative’ agency and they build a culture of creative collaboration with all agency partners.”

It is a sentiment that echoes with Jon Goulding, the chief executive of Atomic London, who asserts that today’s great creative marketer thinks more broadly across the communications landscape: “Someone who realises that being horizontally creative is more important than just being vertically creative. It’s not just about cracking big conceptual creative ideas but how you apply creativity differently and appropriately across every channel and touchpoint.”

Does it really matter if a senior marketer values creativity, can’t they leave the responsibility to their team and agency partners?

Creative best practice and effectiveness matter in equal measure, says Maguire. "The boldest, bravest and most successful marketers I've worked with have never seen creativity and effectiveness as a trade-off. Paul Smith once told me that he was an ‘okay designer and an okay businessman’. He felt being strong in just one area wasn't enough to drive his business, and I’ve never forgotten that. It’s hard to believe that any leader in business, never mind in marketing, can't see the value of creativity."

But in a world, where marketers continue to try make some sense of data and tech, where does that leave creativity? Stephens has this to say: “If a marketer doesn’t value creativity, they are in the wrong job. Where I've seen great marketers it’s when they are able to create a ‘comfortably uncomfortable’ relationship with the C-Suite. A relationship that is built on experience, trust and measurement but that also tests the ambition of the board and the potential of the brand. Put simply, if the finance director isn’t a little nervous of a new campaign, the marketer hasn’t been creative enough.”

Goulding makes the point that this is hard to deliver – high levels of creativity push people as well as budgets:

But then we come to the thorny issue of marketing effectiveness and delivering business growth.

Does genuinely creative advertising and communications really make a significant difference?

Marjoram argues that business impact is a given for anyone in the marketing world. “The metrics used by creative marketers are just richer if not, at times, softer: creating positive sentiment; optimising share of voice by being something people want to talk about and share; being interesting enough to increase onsite/page dwell; and looking to culture for social and user engagement so that repeat interactions and increased subscription and followers come on board.”

She cites McCann London’s campaigns for Just Eat, featuring Snoop Dogg, and its work on the Xbox Generations programme as examples of effective work driven by exceptional creativity.

There are other recent cases too. BBH London’s IPA Effectiveness-winning activity for Audi and Tesco, Goodstuff’s media thinking delivering demonstrable sales increases for DuneIm and Hiscox, and Atomic London’s client at Homebase, head of marketing Lisa Tickle, overseeing a turn-around plan involving e-commerce, content, social and advertising.

Mercer cites client Deliveroo, and Thea Rogers, its VP of communications, as an example of how much impact a strong creative approach can provide in a short space of time – the brand “looking and feeling different and bringing in hundreds of thousands of customers into the brand a week.”

In terms of delivering a tangible business impact, he adds: “The most effective work naturally generates conversation because it is different, it is provocative, it is polarising. That whole term gets labelled ‘risky’ or ‘brave’ when maybe it should be labelled ‘smart’ because creativity at its heart creates conversation.”

Maguire agrees. "The brands bossing it at the moment know their voice and aren’t afraid to flex it." And that can only be good for both the brand and the business.

Her view is supported by Kantar analysis, which shows creative work that elicits emotion generates more impact, and is more likely to drive short-term sales and long-term brand equity growth. She also highlights Kantar’s COVID barometer reports, which demonstrate that, since the pandemic hit, people have been looking to brands to guide the changes they want to see in society.

Meanwhile, there's an ongoing debate about declining creative effectiveness due to the over-reliance of modern communications on short-term tactics.

Are we all busy pursuing short-term activation-focused creativity?

Martin doesn't think it is a case of “either/or” in terms of long-term or short-term: “Not every brief has to be a huge brand platform for the next 20 years, that’s when you end up boiling the ocean or presenting back a whole load of effort that nobody wanted in the first place. With Burger King we really are focused on the short-term, which is fine, but when you’re doing something new and launching for start-ups you do have to ask those questions – ‘well, what does five years look like? Versus I only care about the first year’ If you only care about the first year? Grand, but we’ll be thinking about these things in the background as well.”

In terms of the recent thinking on creative effectiveness, Mercer recommends Orlando Wood’s IPA study, Lemon. Wood’s argument is that the longer-term decline in creative effectiveness (since around mid-2000s) is driven not only by decreased budgets and focus on short-term activation, but a fall in the quality of the work itself. Mercer explains: “His hypothesis is that ‘left brain” thinking as he terms it - focus on productivity/standardisation, avoidance of risk, being self-conscious, analytical tendencies, losing sense of community - has impacted creative effectiveness directly by producing advertising that has lost features that contribute to effectiveness. Think characters, sense of place, dialogue, accents, play on words. That kind of thing.”

Some believe that the impact of the pandemic has accelerated this move to “left brain” thinking and brought on a crisis for creativity. "And I don’t just mean creative advertising but creativity in decision making. We’ve witnessed, first-hand, clients opting for safe over good. Rearranging the network agency deckchairs rather than embracing creative ways of working." according to Stephens. "I genuinely hope that, as growth returns, clients not only buy stronger work from their agencies, but they also think more creatively about how they work with agency partners.”

There’s optimism that this will ultimately prove to be the case. Martin is of the view that that bond of trust (between clients and agencies) is stronger now than it has ever been before.

Maguire believes that this will be case for only those brands led by exceptional creative marketers: “As a creative who has spent a couple of decades in this industry, I've felt a seismic shift in how creativity is used and valued at a brand, client and cultural level. I think the last few months have proved the best way to navigate through the turbulent times we find ourselves in is to throw out the old road maps and get creative.”