Tag: ad

In 2011, Kat Gordon, a Creative Director, got firsthand experience with how women were often left out of pitches and essential meetings — and why it matters. Her agency had an important pitch to Saab. But when they actually went to do the pitch, the team was a wee bit lopsided: 16 men and (just) 1 woman, and — spoiler — they didn’t win the pitch. Wanting to better understand why, Gordon decided to do some research on women in creative leadership at ad agencies. She was dismayed to find only 3% of Creative Directors were women, so she dug a bit deeper to get at why agencies were so woefully short on women in Creative Director roles. Overall, she found that there was a glaring lack of:

  • Motherhood support
  • Female mentorship
  • Women negotiating the salaries they deserved
  • Awareness that a woman’s perspective was critical for connecting with consumers
  • Recognition for women’s work, due to gender bias in awards juries

She wondered if part of this issue had to do with men making the majority of purchases. She kept digging, and it turned out that was not the case. Apart from only three categories where men dominate purchases in the market, women were making the majority of purchasing decisions, effectively making them the superset, not the subset. And with the rate at which women were building wealth and influence in society, Gordon concluded that it was simply myopic to overlook them. Unfortunately, advertising, at least at that point in 2008, had largely been doing exactly that. Case in point: the Saab pitch.

All of this became a rallying call for Gordon to create change in the advertising industry — and so she birthed the 3% Conference with the straightforward goal of growing the number of women in top creative marketing jobs and expanding diversity and inclusivity within the industry (especially since, of that 3% cohort of women Creative Directors, an even smaller percentage were women of color).

How are things for female creatives today?

Flash forward to 2023 — some change has happened, but not as much as you might think. The pandemic created a seismic shift in how and where we work, creating an unintended revolution of more flexible policies that have helped women (and men) juggle their home and work lives. Although conversations around equity, inclusion, and opportunity have grown, the lack of representation of women as creative directors persists. Ironically, women hold the purse strings, making more than 80% of all purchasing decisions — not to mention 60% of social sharing — but the advertising intended to help sway their choices is often not ideated or produced by women.

However, this is not an ad industry-wide issue. Whereas women make up roughly half of the advertising industry’s workforce, as of 2023, women only hold about 12.6% of Creative Director roles in the sector. Even as women have seen their economic impact grow, contributing 37% of the Global GDP, substantial discrepancies abound. Despite women playing an increasingly significant role in driving consumer purchases, they are still conspicuously absent from the command center of creative decision-making.

Why representation matters for your business

Women account for $20 trillion in annual consumer spending, but according to a 2019 study, 66% of women don’t actually connect with what they’re seeing in advertising. Even worse, 60% say that ads have an outdated view of women.

Given that most purchasing decisions are made by women, it is critical to ensure that advertising messaging and storytelling align with their experiences, perspectives, and values. However, when creative leadership lacks adequate gender representation, the risk of producing marketing content that fails to resonate, or worse still, misrepresents women is high — and the ensuing impact on the business’s bottom line can be sizable.

Check out what some key decision-makers in the advertising industry have to say about how women’s desires and needs have shifted in a recent Quantcast article, Why It’s Time to Change the Conversation About Women in Advertising.

“Between 2011 and 2021, the number of women drinking beer has increased 12%, which is four times faster than men. So the idea that women don’t drink beer — those days are over.” Josephine (Fien) Bertrams, Senior Vice President and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Heineken USA.

“According to Statista, two-thirds of women are self-proclaimed sports fans. And you’re seeing them not only as fans, but as engaged participants in sport on social media. And for brands, that’s important – that’s where the audience is. I also found that 80-90% of women sports fans don’t feel like they’re being properly spoken to by brands. This is where the data and AI part comes in. This is an opportunity for us to really personalize and customize messaging. That’s what I’m excited about in this space.” Leah Meranus, North America CEO, dentsu X.

“In the month of January 2023, we had more women betting than in the entire year of 2021. Women are sports fans and sports betting is a form of entertainment. It feels scary at first, but there’s not that barrier that everyone assumes. Being able to do it digitally on your phone has opened it to everybody.” Jennifer Matthews, Vice President of Brand Strategy, FanDuel Group.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Women’s desires are changing in many ways, and these are just some that go up against ingrained ideas of what is “male” territory.

Closing the gender gap

Advertisers need to adjust exactly who is crafting the narratives used to sell products across the board, especially when women are often the main audience marketers are trying to reach. Tone-deaf marketing will continue to haunt brands, effectively sending market share to brands that aim to reach women where they are today and choose to amplify women’s voices through commensurate representation in the creative suite.

To truly address this disparity, agencies need to actively promote women into key creative leadership roles and create environments that foster advancement, growth, and opportunity for women. This means creating dedicated mentorship programs, flexible work policies, and addressing inherent biases in hiring and promotions. What’s more, being intentional about vendor and partner selection that is representative of a brand’s audience can also go a long way in connecting with a brand’s intended audience.

It’s no secret effective communication thrives when diverse voices are behind branding and marketing efforts, and it’s high time women’s influence as high-level creatives mirror their consumer purchasing power. Inclusion, among other things, means producing work that is relevant, authentic, and impactful. It starts from the inside out, not just with a script that pays homage to women in March but forgets them come April.

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Bottomline

The 3% Conference now goes by the name 3% Movement, and its mission to bring the number of female Creative Directors to 50% is well underway. By giving agencies a clear road map on how to champion female talent and leadership — along with annual conferences, a vibrant online community, a student scholarship fund, and so much more — the 3% Movement is helping lead the change for a more inclusive world.

How does your team square up? Are your creative leaders reflecting the purchasing power of women? If your goal is to diversify your team and be more inclusive of different viewpoints, Creative Circle can help you (and your bottom line while we’re at it). Talk to us if you’re ready to ensure your brand is effectively communicating its core values to its core customers.

The advertising world lies largely in the hands of six agency holding companies — Omnicom, Havas, Dentsu, IPG, WPP, and Publicis — which serve as the overarching structures that own and control myriad smaller advertising firms. These agency holding companies all face the same external business challenges — slowing growth, new competition, and the growing need for new skills. But they are taking divergent paths in confronting these struggles.

Historically, holding companies followed the same tried-and-true playbook — growing via acquisition model and accruing clout as they ramped up scale, thereby increasing access to major clients. However, the recent shift driven by digital has rendered scale and buying power less salient than access to the right data.

The Rise of the New — Consulting Firms Enter the Agency World

Ad agency silos have long blocked access to said data, inhibiting collaboration and slowing down work streams. These weaknesses were exploited by consulting firms, who successfully muscled into the advertising game with their own targeted enterprise data offerings to pose a significant competitive threat.

To battle the Accentures and Deloittes of the world, the big six agency holding companies are all vying to get to the same place — win more of their client’s budgets and take back some of the market share they’ve more recently ceded to consulting firms. To get there, however, they’re taking different routes. Some are betting on data ownership, while others are doubling down on finding efficiencies across their networks and following different paths.

Agency Brands — Do They Matter Anymore?

While some agency holding companies are doubling down on their marquee agency brands, others are looking for efficiencies by having their historically competitive agencies come together to work as a “single” agency.

Publicis has perhaps been the most vocal about operating as a “single” company since acquiring Sapient in 2014. Their integrated strategy won over major global clients like GSK and Marriott, albeit at the expense of individual agency contributors, shared Greg Paull, co-founder and principal at independent global marketing consultancy R3.

Publicis has been pushing its “Power of One” model for years, through which it transformed its business model and organizational structure to center around client needs by facilitating access to all its services across agencies in a fluid, seamless manner — touting the move as one from holding company to platform. By pooling creative, strategic, and technology expertise, their aim is to provide top-tier service by cohesively leveraging the individual strengths of its many subsidiary agencies.

In a somewhat mixed approach, IPG and Omnicom continue to spotlight the achievements of individual agency brands like McCann and BBDO on earnings calls, capitalizing on the brand equity that these agency names evoke. Still, behind the scenes, they also have a history of combining services across agencies to service major clients. Omnicom Media Group is now managing new business development for all of its subsidiary agencies in order to eliminate operational siloes.

WPP, on the other hand, has been merging individual agencies across disciplines to form sub-holding companies that effectively pool resources, doubling down on its corporate brand and leveraging talent across its network more cohesively.

Does this Transformational Collaborative Business Model Work?

Like all things, there is an upside to this cross-agency, collaborative trend — and a downside. Clients see a single bill for services without the dust-ups that can happen behind the scenes. However, what looks good to the C-Suite and shareholders may not work so well for the folks on the ground.

The land of ‘cooperative creative’ can provoke unrest among employees, and executives have complained about the lack of communication despite newly broken-down siloes. Others cite a sense of confusion about where their loyalties should lie if they only work half the time for the actual agency that employs them.

Paull from R3 said that holding companies that veer too far in the direction of a collaborative singular organization may struggle, as “intercompany conflicts are still a top five issue for big brands.”

Pfizer — A Client-led Push for Consolidation

Sometimes, however, it’s the clients who call the shots. After all, the customer is always right. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer decided to consolidate its agency relationships and house its account, worth $2.8 billion in 2022, to a single agency. The NYC-based pharma company, whose accounts had historically been spread across a vast network of agencies and agency holding companies, wanted to find economies of scale and simplicity with its advertising agency engagements on the heels of pulling in tens of billions of dollars from its COVID-19 drug and vaccines.

But in September 2022, Andreas “Drew” Panayiotou came aboard as the company’s inaugural biopharma Global Chief Marketing Officer role. His goal was to “bring Pfizer’s marketing organization into the same transformation the larger organization has undergone over the past years — to be more innovative, nimbler, and data-driven,” Panayiotou told PR Week in an interview. “By consolidating and centralizing our agency model, we will use scale to our advantage to get the best of the best from the agency world and power better content creation.”

In February 2023, the brand initiated a massive global agency review to regroup its media, creative, production, and PR duties under one roof. After an intense process of scrutinizing proposals, Pfizer chose two agencies: IPG Health to spearhead creative and Publicis Collective to lead media planning/buying, technology, data, and creative production.

Whether this model will ultimately ladder up to better work for a better price remains to be seen. Only time will tell.

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Bottomline

Regardless of the way in which the big six advertising holding companies position themselves to remain competitive in the rapidly changing advertising world, they’re all doing what they can to find organizational efficiencies while augmenting service offerings as they seek to find cost savings, reduce churn, and hang on to clients. It’s clear they have their work cut out for them.

As the world of advertising continues to twist and morph, many brands are looking for new ways to reach their audiences. If you are looking for innovative, creative solutions at scale, Creative Circle offers a full suite of creative and marketing services focused on optimizing your business and solving your unique challenges.

If you had asked tech gurus ten years ago where AI would have the most significant impact, creativity would not have been at the top of the list — if it even garnered a mention at all. But 2023 changed the game with the explosive advent of generative AI platforms like Chat GPT and Midjourney, which have completely disrupted the creative landscape. And with this tsunami of change comes a host of hard-to-answer questions about the future of creative work.

Ad agencies, Hollywood, and more are grappling with existential questions about the origins of creativity and what that means for the humans whose ideas serve as the very foundation of generative AI technology. It’s clear that AI is here to stay — and major marketers are figuring out how to capitalize on it — with agencies increasingly seeing their role as mediators between this new technology and brands.

The ad agency landscape is primarily led by six agency holding groups: WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Havas, Dentsu, and Publicis, each of which owns hundreds of agencies.

Until very recently, the ad industry had been less impacted by technological progress that has impacted other industries like print media, music, travel, retail checkout assistants, and more. Now, there is a growing tension between the allure of cost savings that AI could bring and what its implementation means for creatives. To find the right way forward, many agencies have formed cross-departmental AI task forces to uncover the opportunities and limitations of the technology.

Some agency holding groups have taken a more strategic approach to using generative AI internally and with clients, setting safeguards as internal groups assemble to work on their due diligence with this burgeoning technology.

How Key Agency Holding Companies are Managing AI

Here’s how some agency holding companies are futureproofing themselves as AI becomes increasingly ubiquitous.

WPP just announced on January 2024 that they are investing $317 million in AI this year while assuring employees and shareholders that they won’t forget about the company’s roots in creativity, said CEO Mark Read.

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Omnicom CEO John Wren said the company’s outlook on AI’s potential is evolving. “We’ll be embracing it as quickly as we possibly can,” Wren said, adding that it would help employees and benefit clients.” In November 2023, the organization announced a groundbreaking collaboration with Getty Images that gives its agencies early access to Generative AI by Getty Images, a generative AI tool that’s trained only on Getty’s licensed photo library, ensuring a commercially safe and legally protected creative sandbox.

Also of note, Omnicom is the first advertising holding company to join Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), comprised of a group of media and tech companies, NGOs, academics, and others, which seeks to increase trust and transparency in digital content by the general public.

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Havas has been implementing AI in its creative agencies to make teams more efficient and effective. The company has taken a business-first approach to integrating the new technology into its agency subsidiaries. As digital advertisers say goodbye to cookies, Havas has unveiled an AI-enabled media planning methodology that optimizes buys as the cookie-less future becomes the cookie-less today.

With respect to creative, copywriters can breathe easy, according to Havas Media Group. The group has made public its intent to use AI to optimize creative, not replace its creatives.

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Publicis is placing AI at the very core of its business. The last six years have seen Publicis evolve from a holding company to a platform — and now, they’re using AI to become the industry’s first intelligent system. Publicis is now positioned to harness the power of AI by connecting every data point, across business units and geographies, to put the data in the hands of all its people. In a January 2024 press release, they shared that “everyone within Publicis will become a data analyst, an engineer, an intelligence partner, with all the information they need at their fingertips to supercharge client growth.”

 

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Bottomline

The AI landscape will be a bit of a Wild West for some time still, especially while the technology continues to evolve at breakneck speed. Some advertising business leaders see generative AI as an accelerant for the industry, seeking to leverage the tech to enhance work and provide increased strategic value. Yet, others are more sanguine in their approach, preferring to wade in more slowly as they assess the boundaries of what’s possible — uncovering ways to use AI tech as an enabler instead of a total solution.

Looking for guidance on how to leverage AI for your company? Creative Circle offers a full suite of creative services focused on solving business challenges leveraging this new technology. Once upon a time, the rise of the internet struck fear into the hearts of many, but here we are today, creating great work that matters — it just might look a bit different than our pre-WiFi days.