Speaking at Advertising Week APAC, Supermassive co-founder and former Host/Havas CEO Laura Aldington, said that the difference between good and bad marketing was solely how creativity was applied.

Lead image L-R: Toby Hemming, APAC MD, LBB Online; Hamish Stewart, national executive creative director – experience, CHEP Network; Laura Aldington, co-founder, Supermassive; Katie Rigg-Smith, chief strategy officer, WPP.

Of course, as the co-founder of an indie creative agency, Aldington has a fairly sizeable stake in suggesting that creativity is the most important part of any campaign.

Hamish Stewart, national executive creative director – experience at CHEP Network, added that the debate around the role of creativity in advertising has evolved.

“There’s a more shared understanding now between clients and agencies around the role of creativity,” he explained.

“I credit the Byron Sharps and the Mark Ritsons and the System1s that have looked at the data behind it and every single one of them agrees… that big, impactful, culturally resonant ideas have huge value and that’s what we should be chasing. There’s not necessarily a battle between agencies and clients about whether things should be creative… it’s about whether it’s relevant to their business and their audience. The debate now is about the quality of creativity, which I think is a really healthy place to be.”

However, Katie Rigg-Smith, chief strategy officer at WPP, explained that while CMOs “get it” the agency world needed to move on from vanity metrics and start expressing real tangible results.

Stewart added that the understanding of marketing and creativity at board level was “quite varied.”

“The CFO of P&G came out and said that ‘As we move into recessionary times, we’re going to go heavy on brand’ because he understood the value of it.”

But with creativity and the agency model as it currently exists comes the pitching process.

“It’s the elephant in the room, isn’t it?” said Aldington.

“Certainly it doesn’t help us in terms of the value of what we do that we give [work] away for free. I can’t think of another professional service that would do that, give away their best IP for nothing.”

Despite the problems caused by the pitching model and that Aldington said she had started to see some change, she didn’t think an alternative would appear any time soon.

“There is starting to become a better understanding that pitch processes need to be fairer, it is possible to select an agency based on chemistry, relationships, capabilities, case studies and that we don’t need to do full pitches all of the time. If agencies were just more willing to say no collectively, then that behaviour would change.”

In fact, Aldington said that pitching and the process took so much out of agencies’ bottom lines that it made training, development and diversity initiatives far harder.

“It’s about making sure that the ask is commensurate with the prize. There are some prizes that are absolutely massive and there would always be significant work in tendering for huge pieces of business,” she explained.

“But for a smaller project, agencies are getting better at saying no, or we’ll do a project or whatever it might be. If you want to to work with an agency, you can test them out on a brief. You’ll know pretty quickly whether they’re the right partner for you.”

A couple of days ago, Supermassive announced its first big client win — a creative repositioning and rebranding of P&O Cruises. The agency would not comment on whether the win followed a pitching process.

Aldington did reveal that while Supermassive was not working on an output-based pricing model at the moment, it was having “very good conversations” with clients on the topic.

“The argument to them [clients] is that you shouldn’t have to pay more because we’re slow and inefficient and you shouldn’t have to worry about how we get the stuff done. You should worry that we’re going to get it done.”

Rigg-Smith, meanwhile, made it clear that agencies need to get better at linking strategy, creative and brand together to show that agencies are not a cost centre but a growth driver.

“When you put it all together and you can show a client that by investing in brand, particularly during an economic downturn, you’re going to get a bigger share and end up in a better place. It’s all quantifiable,” she said.

Stewart was also clear that creativity was fundamental to the success of businesses.

“You look at the biggest organisations in the world, P&G embraces creativity, Apple embraces creativity, Google embraces creativity but we’re still having to say ‘it’s valuable!'”

Perhaps change for the creative industries is coming — Aldington said that she hadn’t done a timesheet since she started Supermassive — but from the panel, it was clear that there is still some way to go.