Hi Charlie, I agree with what you are saying. I think there a few macro trends that has resulted in this. 1) In many businesses 50%+ of the marketing budget is now spent on performance marketing that historically would have been designated 'trade marketing' or sales support. And so in real terms 'creative' driven marketing budgets are much smaller 2) Whilst data/ analytics are critical and has fuelled a revolution in marketing, there is a risk that it has led to 'marketing by numbers' which deadens creativity and can feed an ever more onerous task of justifying every penny marketing spend which demoralises the team 3) The fragmentation of media and the declining power of mass media events has taken away the very public area to deliver a high impact brand building action that everyone in the company will see. Great Brands are built by being very clearly defined and consistently executed over time and all touch points - plus high impact creativity that gives a memorable hook for the target audience.
I’m genuinely worried about something I have been noticing in the marketing and communications industry landscape recently. We meet A LOT of brands on a daily basis, and to me there seems to have been a concerning pattern emerging in the last few years that is now peaking – that marketing teams on the whole are less curious, less connected, less knowledgeable, less searching and (one might argue) less creatively ambitious than I personally have ever seen before. It’s driven of course by the combined pressures of the modern world: less resource, less time, less money, less investment in capability building, less daily interaction with the industry…less joy. No one is denying that. But it’s also really quite troubling to me that many of the industry’s best and brightest marketing leaders don’t seem to be finding a route through this. Because in our view at Creativebrief, there is a clear causal link between more inward-looking teams and weaker, less impactful work which perpetuates a crisis in creative effectiveness. There are, as ever, a handful who are building smart, curious, outward-looking marketing cultures that absolutely buck this trend – but there are many more who sadly aren’t. Is anyone else seeing this pattern? I’m interested in views, because it feels like an increasingly meaty industry-wide issue that needs tackling pretty damn quick.
