Insights from 2024's most creative marketers

As the marketing sector gets ready to close off 2024 and begin 2025 with a bang, they will hopefully find time to spend reflecting and planning for what is set to come, with much already in place.

From navigating AI to news of two agency network giants merging, supply chain issues, and the need to keep abreast of new trends - marketers are constantly trying to keep up with culture and society. Whether it is getting the right balance for on their media and creative outputs, to managing efficiency or meeting customers where they’re at in the cost-of-living crisis, they can only expect more of the same in 2025.

News that the UK economy may lag behind expectations will keep even the most optimistic of marketers exercising caution and hoping to get the biggest bang for their buck. With that in mind, to get the strategic and creative juices flowing Creative Salon rounds up insights from the UK’s top marketers.

Embracing 'a culture of creativity'

Tui marketing director Toby Horry argues that every touchpoint is an opportunity to take an innovative approach: “Creativity, when it works best, is looking at all different touchpoints and aspects of the customer journey. All the way from the big TV ads to a treat when someone has come back from holiday – there's still something creative you can do at that point."

For John Lewis CMO Charlotte Lock inspiring the right creativity is “all about finding the truth in the brand, understanding what the problem is to solve, not hiding from difficult problems, and gravitating towards the good stuff. It’s really about finding the right problem to solve. And then also; writing great briefs”

Meanwhile, Xbox director of global integrated marketing Michael Flatt, whose experience behind the scenes of Xbox’s Titanium Lion award-winning campaign “The Everyday Tactician” helped him to realise the importance of staying energised (whether that’s in the form of writing a brief or finding other ways to stay creatively inspired) sums it up: “If the advertising isn't noticed, everything else is academic… and I've had that in the back of my head constantly. You've got to go out there now and just be noticed and be talked about and engaged with and thought of, and all of that only comes from creativity. If you haven't got that you're screwed."

Navigating deliverables in a complex marketplace

Johnnie Walker CMO, Jennifer English underscores the importance of brands and agencies working together to make sure they understand what makes the consumer tick: “A good creative agency partner strives to understand our business and offers a robust creative strategy to deliver our objectives. They challenge us with surprising and distinctive creative work where each idea outshines the last. They remain committed to creativity through highs and lows. In a great relationship, we innovate and succeed together.”

Elsewhere, Zurich Insurance's group chief customer officer Conny Kalcher says that the best agency partners are: “very good at strategic thinking and challenging the client. Taking the client to the next level."

Horry highlights the complexity of making an impact across different markets: “We have to consider the use of humour in advertising in different markets and how that it received; it doesn't always play out with different audiences. Trying to find universal insights that play in different markets is not easy, even when it comes to Christmas, there are so many market-specific traditions”

“If you can't land it practically in store, especially in the FMCG world, you really are not going to be successful as a marketeer, as far as I'm concerned,” believes Becky Verano, global VP of creativity and capabilities at Reckitt Benckiser.

Seizing the right moment

“If we’d come out of the blocks with firework advertising at a time when people were still quite nervous about travel, and not sure whether they wanted to go away, I’m not sure that would have played particularly well,” Horry reflects, commenting on the legacy of the pandemic and getting the moment right.

English adds that spending in the right places is key: “A huge proportion of media spend has also shifted to social media culture and PR and all those spaces where the beginning middle and end is a bit more difficult to land. Therefore, the whole brand needs to ooze progress with an optimistic take on tomorrow being better than today” 

Lock highlights the importance of investing in insight: “The reason John Lewis is good at storytelling is that we invest a lot in insight, so we try to stay close to our customers, and what they're thinking and feeling, and connect with them emotionally.” She adds that the main learning this year was that customers are using Black Friday as an opportunity to get hold of Christmas gifts early: “And we saw that customers were really thinking about Christmas much earlier, and that actually most Black Friday purchases are now gifts. It used to be that people would be out there on Black Friday in a slightly unseemly scramble to bag a big TV.”

Likewise, Deliveroo's former chief global marketing and product officer Adam Bishop says the business’s growth since he joined mid-pandemic has been in large part due to a deep understanding of the marketplace: “We have a complete line of sight between all the great insight and data we have on our consumers, how we think about the positioning of our brand and our business and how we talk to consumers about that, how we brand build, how we think about our brand comms, and then the gorgeous experience and product that we serve up for them.”

Leveraging AI in the correct way

Marketers won’t be able to escape AI in 2025 (social too is up, Meta's global income from advertising soared to £30bn earlier this year): “In a world where the creative floor is rising thanks to technology, you need to be able to make distinctive decisions and briefs to get to a more interesting future. And they need to be things that you can't just put in a prompt and get a response for. They need to be things that have a deep, meaningful resonance and are really creatively brought to life in a new, fresh way, rather than derivative of the past,” says English.

“We're all doing the rewriting based on the same principles across the organisation and with the help of AI, it goes faster,” explains Kalcher of Zurich's approach. “I don't want us to be a machine company. We need to be a human company with human values, and human contact but when it makes sense then AI can speed things up, and that's a good thing.”