What you need to know:

• A new research study conducted across Australia, the UK and US by the BetterBriefs team across 1,000-plus industry professionals has found half of marketers and three quarters of agencies feel their creative work is not improving over time.
• This is despite majority of both senior marketers and creative agency professionals agreeing strong creative ideas are essential to the overall success of an organisation’s marketing effectiveness.
• A big problem is personal opinion and insufficient guardrails for assessing ideas: Only 30 per cent of agencies receive clear and constructive feedback from clients. Commonly, they find the approval process painful, slow, subjective and inconsistent, leading to only 10 per cent evaluating creative ideas against clearly defined criteria.
• Another gap is the lack of using the brief to guide decisions: 77 per cent of agencies say the brief is not always being used when evaluating ideas
• As a result, 70 per cent of agencies don’t trust the creative judgment of marketers they work with and two thirds of marketers are not proud of their work – a figure that rises to 74 per cent across agencies.
• The commercial impact is worrying. It’s now taking an average of five rounds to get to a green light on an idea, up from 3 rounds in a 2007 IPA UK report.

Unlike their first report on the $200bn wasted by marketers through dire briefing processes with agencies, there’s no single dollar figure in the new BetterIdeas Project research to scare the pants off marketers and agencies about their poor performance when realising ideas.

But the stark findings around creative process are just as much a sign of the broken, disconnected, often unstrategic practices in place between agency and marketing. It’s costing time, energy, pride and trust on both sides – along with marketing effectiveness – say BetterBriefs co-founders and report instigators, Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler.

The BetterIdeas Project comes four years after BetterBriefs’ first groundbreaking research project found marketers are wasting one-third of budgets by giving agencies crap briefs, commonly as a result of poor strategic process and thought. The follow-up was prompted by concerns about the steps that come immediately after a brief is received: Generating and evaluating creative ideas.

As in the first report, incongruence between how marketers and agencies view the creative evaluation process is obvious. But they are aligned on the upshot: Half of marketers feel the quality of creative work is not improving over time, for example. Only 24 per cent of agencies think it’s getting better. 

In addition, 75 per cent of agencies and 54 per cent of marketers agree most creative work doesn’t stand out. Vanilla, sea of sameness is a problem when attention is harder than ever to command.

That could be connected to the next problem: Unsustainable rounds of creative reworking is another glaring finding and one that makes the impact of poor ideas management commercially acute. It also incentivises agencies to deliver safer work that requires fewer costly revisions.

The research found it’s taking five rounds on average across B2C (4.8) and B2B (5.1) organisations to get to a signed-off idea. Australia fared fractionally better (4.6) than the UK (4.9) and US (4.8). But it’s a concerning situation given agencies are often wearing the cost of this additional labour – and facing more project-based work and shorter agency tenure with clients. Notably, this number is higher than the three rounds IPA UK research recorded in 2007 – despite all the tools, models and data insights at the industry’s beck and call today.

“The result – no less than five rounds of rework, according to this dataset – is in nobody’s interest,” comments IPA director of effectiveness, Laurence Green, in the report. “It’s inefficient, obviously, but militates against effectiveness also. As the great DDB/Avis creative contract taught us: Conviction, not compromise, must carry the day.”

As Davies and von Weiler put it, the industry is spending 40 per cent more time than it used to, only to deliver less impactful ideas.

“The real conversation should be: Why is the vast majority of this stuff we make completely ignored? That’s a hard conversation for a marketing leader. When you embrace that thought, you start to think completely differently,” Davies and von Weiler tell Mi3. “Okay, if I don’t earn people’s attention, I won’t impact behaviour and I won’t impact the bottom line. So I need to think completely differently to earn people’s attention. I need different work out there. I need to stay away from very safe ideas, because the safe idea is actually dangerous. A safe idea might be easy to get approval on by the business, but it’s almost a guarantee for setting money on fire. That’s the conversation we need to have.”

A lack of pride leads to mistrust

Dwindling pride in work is inevitable and BetterBriefs’ research shows it. Only 26 per cent of creative agencies, and 36 per cent of marketers, are proud of the creative work they have been involved with over their careers. Being an in-house agency doesn’t help either: Fewer than one-third (32 per cent) of in-house agency respondents put kudos on their work.

This is despite consensus around how important creative ideas are. Three in four marketers and 91 per cent of agencies agree ‘Strong creative ideas are essential to the overall success of an organisation’s marketing effort’.

Worryingly, seven in 10 creative agencies don’t trust the creative judgment of the marketers they’re working with. That’s because 89 per cent of agencies and 84 per cent of marketers agree personal opinion is having a big impact on decision-making. No wonder: 43 per cent of agencies and 62 per cent of marketers agree the right people are signing off on creative ideas. Fewer than a quarter of agencies and half of marketers agree the current approval process works well as a result. And it’s leaving more than two-thirds of agencies believing marketers just aren’t inspiring them to do their best work.

Also commonly mentioned by respondents are idea feedback loops that are “inconsistent, slow, subjective and painful”.

“It is very easy in our industry to have an opinion on ideas. That doesn’t mean that opinion, or feedback, is constructive, informed and professional,” Davies and von Weiler comment.

There is recognition of a lack of capability and process around ideas evaluation by agency and marketer alike, to slightly varying degrees. More than seven in 10 agencies and 64 per cent of marketers find evaluating ideas to be hard. It’s no wonder given only 30 per cent of agencies and 27 per cent of marketers admit to being trained in evaluating ideas.

The brief beef

The other conspicuous omission is the brief itself. Having largely all agreed briefs are crucial to getting to better creative outcomes, only one in 10 respondents revealed ideas are always being evaluated against clearly defined criteria in their organisations.

“A brief is a contract for change, and the idea is how the change is brought to life. What we’re seeing here is a shocking stat, absolutely shocking, that the brief doesn’t play a key role, or people forget about using the brief when they’re evaluating ideas,” say Davies and von Weiler.

“It can be a challenge indeed to make the approval process disciplined and not led by each individual’s subjectivity, at all levels of management,” says Pascal Perrochon, head of creative impact for Pernod Ricard, in the report. “Being disciplined starts with linking the creative work assessment and approval back to the initial brief, which supposes this brief has been signed off by all stakeholders involved later in the approval process. We should avoid the approval/non-approval to be led by someone who has not been exposed to the initial brief and to be based on his/her personal judgement.”

AMV BBDO chief strategy officer, Jo Arden, was more blunt. “Creativity dies in committees. In the agency and with the client, we need to accept that, after views have been heard, we need a clear decision. Trying to accommodate the peccadillos and preferences of everyone in the room slows things down and makes for worse work.”

There are rare examples of stellar ideas evaluation processes and tools upheld by the likes of Diageo, Specsavers, Procter & Gamble and Heineken out there. But they’re clearly far and few between. So how to make it better? The answer is simple for von Weiler and Davies and funnily enough, for many respondents: Refer back to the brief and respect the craft.

“The data confirms something we have felt. Earlier in our careers, there was more time for creative development, there was more time and energy invested in training. And there was more time invested between clients and agencies in how they work together, so not just come together when there was a screaming deadline on a brief,” the pair say.

“If you do want to talk about creativity, then creativity needs a language, some guardrails. Creativity needs to be discussed when there’s not a screaming deadline, when there’s not a brief on the table, and what sort of idea is right for our brand. Not enough brands have thought that through.”

Telstra CMO Brent Smart made a similar point while on a panel with Sir John Hegarty last week, stressing the importance of building creative muscle that’s as strong as digital or performance marketing capability.

“We should be training marketers, coaching marketers, teaching what great looks like. The creative capability is the most important capability in any marketing department. But we don’t treat it as such, and I think that’s part of the problem,” Smart said.

In the BetterBriefs report, top ranked criteria for improving ideation include ‘making it engaging for the target audience’, being on brief, focusing on something that will earn people’s attention, and ensuring it’s well-branded.

BetterBriefs conducted the latest research in partnership with the World Federation of Advertisers and The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising plus research agency, Flood + Partners. It canvasses 1034 marketers and creative representatives across 54 countries including nearly 300 in Australia, with more than half of boasting at least 15 years’ experience in the industry.

Lack of strategy and poor briefing leads to broken creative evaluation

The latest work on how ideas are managed comes four years after von Weiler and Davies kicked off their global-first Better Briefs project and research spanning 1,700 marketers and agencies across 60 countries. Their initial grim read backed Mark Ritson’s proclamations to the hilt: 90 per cent of marketers fail to brief agencies effectively, a situation exacerbated by their lack of strategy. Such bad briefing sees a third of ad budgets being wasted, equating to more than $200bn in ad spend, or a $5bn+ black hole in Australia.

What was striking in that research – and comes through this latest tranche – is the whopping disconnect between how marketers and agencies perceive their ability to create and harness a brief. While 80 per cent of marketers believed their briefs are good, just one in 10 agencies agreed, the 2021 research found. What’s more, while 83 per cent of marketers think their briefs are written clearly and concisely, only 7 per cent of agencies concurred. Other major gripes from creative agencies include marketers being unclear (79 per cent), dullness in briefing (65 per cent), a thoughtless approach (44 per cent), and simply shoddy briefing (39 per cent).

A lack of training is one reason why briefing is poor, but the arguably more dangerous culprit is a lack of strategy. Six out of 10 marketers admitted they’re using the creative process to crystallise the strategy, meaning they’re relying on agencies to do it.

As a final comment, Davies and Von Weiler note the only way to find alignment is if both parties recognise their accountability in building capabilities that enable it.

“Marketers believe they are empowering their agencies to do their best work, but agencies don’t agree with that exact same statement. Both parties have a responsibility here,” the pair say. “Agencies need to stand up and voice how they can be empowered to deliver better work, and marketers shouldn’t assume, they should check in and ask: How do we set you up for more success?

“If agencies feel inspired, then marketers are three times more likely to feel proud of the work they make. So again, it’s having those creative conversations, inspiring each other, showing each other what good looks like and what your ambition is creatively. That really goes a long way to making work that we’re proud of.

BetterBriefs is an advisory and training company that lists global brands including AT&T, Lego, IBM, Dow Jones, LinkedIn and Danone as clients.