What you need to know:

• During last week’s Ad Council breakfast to profile Effie winning entries from Arnott’s Group / Publicis Groupe, Aldi / BMF and Uber / Special, all heroed alignment of agency and client-side marketing teams as one of the most important ingredients in achieving modern creative effectiveness.
• Brand and agencies alike were touting how much more of a safe space and strategic relationship they’d been able to create by adopting a ‘village’ mentality between in-house marketing team and external agency. All agreed this fosters more trust and therefore more appetite for creative risk-tasking.
• What’s more, it encourages more respect for the skills of contributors from across the ecosystem, adding to the power of creative ideas and ensures successfully distributed in market and across channels with more impact.
• All agreed having strategic, trusted relationships also enables teams to go from advertising to marketing and from vanity metrics to business outcomes.
• A commitment to longterm brand building and iterating rather than reinventing the creative idea was also recommended by the combination of brands and agencies on the stage at the event.

Debate rages around how much work is going in-house agencies at the expense of external agency relationships. In House Agency Council numbers suggest as much as 70 per cent of advertising work has landed in the hands of internal teams. These have been hotly refuted by several agency shops and pitch consultants.

But with client-side marketers squeezed to trim costs and optimise output, agency partnerships are always under scrutiny. A strong need for more agility and iterative capability in marketing operating models in the face of channel fragmentation and fickle consumers has also lifted the appeal of in-house models for many brands.

Yet at last week’s Ad Council Effectiveness breakfast, it was the commitment to internal and external teams working together that Arnott’s Group, Aldi and Uber heralded as a crucial ingredient for advertising effectiveness on an Effies scale.

Brands and agencies alike were touting how much more of a safe space and strategic relationship they’d been able to create by adopting a ‘village’ mentality between in-house marketing team and external agency. All agreed this fosters more trust and therefore more appetite for creative risk-tasking. In addition, it drives more respect for the skills of contributors from across ecosystems, building stronger commercial and strategic muscle across cross-functional teams as a result.

Arnott’s and The Neighbourhood

In the case of Arnott’s Group, this juxtaposition of internal and agency comes in the form of The Neighbourhood with Publicis Groupe, what’s described as a ‘Power of One’ solution encompassing talent from Saatchi and Saatchi, Spark Foundry, Herd MSL, Digitas, Arc and Prodigious.

Speaking firstly on its award-winning ‘Moments’ campaign then on a panel at the Ad Council event, Arnott’s Group business director of treating, Ranita Cowled, highlighted alignment of internal and external teams as underpinning Effies success. It was also why the FMCG giant was able to realise a master brand strategy and create the ‘Moments’ campaign from planning to live debut in 13 weeks, she said.

The ‘Life’s Little Moments’ campaign centres on creative highlighting familiar life moments where sweet and savoury Arnott’s products provide an additive indulgence, including dipping a Tim Tam into a hot drink, making Vita-Wheat ‘worms’, licking cream off a Monte Carlo, sharing a box of TeeVee snacks while watching TV with mates and cracking into a Cruskits cracker while on a video call. The campaign won the Grand Effie at the Australian Effie Awards and took home Gold in the Food & Beverage category and Silver for ROI. Arnott’s has seen 1.9 per cent volume growth, the first positive growth in 10 years; 8.6 per cent revenue growth and 1.6pp market share growth off the back of its Masterbrand plan.

Agency day

With lots of people boasting different capabilities across agencies and in-house team, there’s bound to be tension points and differences in prioritisation and opinion. A very practical step the teams therefore take is making every Tuesday agency day.

“It means you have decision makers, access to senior people who may not be in the day to day, and we can have those corridor conversations,” Cowled told attendees. “It makes it easy, simple and effective to have the chat…. That’s a ritual for us and it’s a really powerful part of The Neighbourhood relationship.”

This also changes the nature of how the brand gauges ‘success’ with its agency. Arnott’s and The Neighbourhood have a KPI structure that’s upfront, clear and mutually beneficial, Cowled said.

“It’s an important alignment piece: Arnott’s are very clear upfront on what they expect the work to achieve, so that’s baked into the brief; they’re also pretty generous with remuneration that comes with that,” Saatchi & Saatchi chief client officer, Toby Aldred, said. “Those two pieces are interlocked – there’s commerciality to creativity we shouldn’t be ashamed of and the job there is to make a brand more effective.”

It does take years to build trust, and Cowled agreed the intrinsically nature of how The Neighbourhood and Arnott’s teams work is hard to calibrate into an ROI. But a commitment to embedding more external benchmarking, and working with third parties to take out gut feel around whether it’s “doing ok”, has helped. Arnott’s works with Analytic Partners on its modelling and analytics efforts.

“It puts us against what’s best-in-class within media, creative and gives us the bar we’re trying to reach collectively,” Cowled said. “The conversations we have with our external benchmarking partners are not tense, they’re open and honest, and lead us to conversations about how we incrementally make improvements together. We celebrate those results a quarter later.”

Healthy tension

Spark Foundry CEO, Imogen Hewitt, said having such an entwined model “allows you to have firsthand knowledge of component parts that help The Neighbourhood do its best work”.

“There’s a real culture of mutual respect. Of course there’s always rub and you wouldn’t want there not to be. Often, it’s in those moments where you say ‘actually, I think this will work better’. It’s when you have to work through those things and find the best outcome for everyone’s discipline, which is ultimately in service of the business objective we’re working towards for Arnott’s, that you find your way through,” she said.

“Things are often better when you get comfortable with tension, have the debate and on you go. It’s definitely about developing muscle and understanding that everyone’s contribution makes everyone else’s contribution better. It’s not a win-lose but a win-win situation.”

Another outcome Hewitt sees from The Neighbourhood is agency staff gaining a sharper understanding of the business challenges Arnott’s faces: I.e. they think less about advertising and more about sales-driven marketing.

“It’s better for their careers and they work out pretty quickly that being able to be fluent in business, media, data, analytics, creativity and all the things we’re exposed to all the time makes you a better practitioner,” Hewitt said.  

Problem solving through creativity: Special and Uber

Special Group Australia claims a similar relationship with the team at Uber and was behind its Grand Effie win in 2022 and bronze award in 2023. Special partner and chief creative officer, Julian Schreiber, said as creatives, the ambition is to approach the craft from a problem-solving perspective rather than in terms of ‘trying to be creative’. 

“This puts you in the right axis to be effective because you’re judging the work by whether it’s actually answering the business problem put in front of you,” he said. “We try to encourage and teach creatives to speak more like engineers than artists about ideas. It’s really important to embrace the fact modern marketing and effectiveness is a huge amount about collaboration and bringing in different skillsets. The only way you can do that is if you understand ideas as more than just being intuitively good, and can instead discuss the mechanics of how an idea works and why it’s doing the right thing, why it needs to be adjusted, as well as what other people can bring to it to make it work.”

In the Uber example, this mentality, coupled with a close working relationship between agency and brand, has fostered an ability to build out a long-term idea plus have the time to fine-tune and tinker to make it ever better according to Schreiber.

“You get the ability of essentially being ruthlessly consistent over time, which has a compound effect, because people know what you’re doing and you get to play creatively,” he said.

For Schreiber, at the heart of every successful relationship is a commitment to being brutally honest and respectful.

“Everything needs to be laid out on table,” he said. With Uber, Special has a quarterly business review where it discusses every project and what went right – as well as what went wrong.

“That’s more an exercise in maintaining truth and making sure we’re being honest with each other,” he said. “It trickles down to a day-to-day basis, so everyone learns it’s ok to be that way. We gain more truth in other meetings as a result.”

Efficiency over time: Aldi and BMF

Over at Aldi, a 23-year-old relationship remains in place with BMF and was behind the successful and distinctive brand idea, ‘Good. Different’.  Now over seven years old, it’s had a halo effect over all subsequent marketing efforts and helped Aldi build more than 10 per cent market share in Australia.

Aldi and BMF won four awards – two Silver and two Bronze – at the 2023 Effies. The pair pegged ‘alignment’ as the first the four letters in an Aldi acrostic reflecting how they’re building sustained effectiveness. The others are long-term thinking, dedication to customers and industrious creativity.

“We have shared beliefs in brand building, the long and short of it, business results and great creative – we are very aligned in how we take things to market,” said Aldi marketing director, Jenny Melhuish. “This builds confidence in our shared ability to get successful outcomes and continue to build the business. But it goes deeper into our core values and company values as well.”

Aldi is “exceptionally efficient”, Melhuish continued, and said it won’t sacrifice that in any form. “BMF prides itself as the home of the long idea,” she said. “If you put those two core beliefs together, that’s our core definition of creative success, which is efficiency over time.”

Company values underpin that, which for Aldi are consistency, simplicity and responsibility. “BMF brings something different – the agency brings cheeky, gutsy and humble. This makes sure we complement each other and thrive in all the right places,” Melhuish said.

“We love the values aren’t the same – as put together, we can make the best work possible. We have proved this case out.”

BMF head of effectiveness, Hannah McHard, has seen the longstanding relationship delivering a better understanding of what can be measured and what success looks like.

“Because you have a much deeper understanding not just of immediate success but also what success means for the business and what it’s heading towards, it gives you almost a second nature understanding of what will make this effective and therefore what are the things I need to be looking out for to say that has delivered,” she said. “That closeness becomes symbiotic – you don’t necessarily have to express fully what are the points you’re looking for.”

McHard also believes spending so much time together and talking constantly gives the necessary space – and trust – to reflect on how things have gone, both right or wrong.

“You don’t have the same fear of bringing results to someone and what’s going to happen,” she said.  

Effort versus impact

Every Wednesday, which is Aldi’s full agency day, the first item on the agenda is business performance and how the supermarket is tracking, Melhuish said.  

“We’re big believers that every single thing can [in theory] be optimised – yet you can’t optimise every single thing, because you don’t have the time. It’s effort versus impact and I think we’re good at that,” she said. “We’re also good at aligning on a rating system – we’ll say that’s a solid seven out of 10, and that’s fantastic as it’s what we need right now as we need to get into market fast and get it done. Whereas this one is a nine and performing really well, what do we do next? We’re not looking for 10 of 10 every time, it’s not realistic.”

Being able to pause to look at what’s happened is nevertheless critical. “You have to be able to say are we still on track, and is this where we should be. So building that into the relationship is critical as well,” Melhuish added.