Steve Harrison is an award-winning copywriter, creative director, Doctor of Philosophy, and a best-selling author of the book “Can’t Sell, Won’t Sell – Why Adland has stopped selling and started saving the World. Steve talks about what inspired him to write the book and explores how the concept of purpose in marketing has derailed the advertising industry. He shares his views on how issues such as the climate crisis, diversity and inclusion and social responsibility have usurped the underlying purpose of advertising, which is to create demand for clients’ products and services and deliver financial growth.
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I think that if the advertisers don’t do it, it’s because they have lost faith in the advertising industry’s ability to deliver.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Wooley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy. And welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
For those regular listeners to the Managing Marketing Podcast, you’ll know I have a particular fascination with the concept of purpose in business; brand purpose, marketing purpose, business purpose, and commercial purpose.
Many point to Simon Sinek’s book, Find Your Why From 2017. But I go back to last century in 1994, a book by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last, where they identified enduring businesses have a consistent purpose at their core.
Today, my guest has a similar fascination, particularly in how purpose has derailed the advertising industry and undermined the perception of value it can create. His 2020 book, Can’t Sell Won’t Sell, clearly describes how Adland stopped selling and started saving the world.
Now, he was regarded by Campaign Magazine as the greatest direct marketing creative of his generation, having won more Cannes Lion Awards than any other creative director. Please welcome award-winning copywriter, creative director, doctor of philosophy, and bestselling author, Steve Harrison. Welcome, Steve
Steve:
Thank you, Darren. Good morning to you at 7:30 in the morning.
Darren:
Well, look, first of all, you’re a doctor of philosophy and yet, you don’t use the honorarium, you are not going by the name of Dr Steve Harrison.
Steve:
No, I always think that’s rather pretentious. If you’re on a plane and somebody says, “Is there a doctor available?” I really couldn’t do much good by reciting what I can remember from my doctoral thesis from 1985, could I? I’m afraid I can’t loosen people’s buttons without getting arrested.
Darren:
There is always that confusion, isn’t there, about what doctor means.
Steve:
Yeah. One of the most frightening statistics of the Wannsee Conference in 1941, which established the Final Solution of the 14 people around the table, eight of them had PhDs. So, it’s not something that you necessarily want to use as a signifier of any great knowledge, oh, goodness, to be quite honest.
Darren:
Well, I had the opportunity when I was working in medical research, my boss kept encouraging me to go and do a PhD, and it triggered me to go into advertising as a copywriter. And she asked why.
And I said, well if I did the PhD, it’d be six to seven years of my life to become very deep in a very narrow subject. Whereas, I can go into advertising and get paid for being very shallow in a very broad subject.
Steve:
And within seven years, have your own agency and sell it.
Darren:
But look, the reason for having this chat is that I picked up a copy of your book, Can’t Sell Won’t Sell, which you actually contacted me while you were writing it because I’d written an article about had advertising lost its focus on purpose, which is to actually sell things.
And that’s when the book came out, I wanted a copy. Actually, this is my second copy, because you’ve had three editions in a very short period of time, haven’t you?
Steve:
Yeah. I wrote the first one and sent it to the publishers in March 2020. And then went to Australia for three weeks in anticipation of the book hitting the shelves or hitting Amazon sometime around the 1st of April.
And of course, in the meantime, COVID-19 happened, and I figured that the world had something perhaps more pressing to worry about than whether advertising had stopped selling and started saving the world.
So, we had a very soft launch. I wrote another few chapters then on how the ad world responded to COVID. And then 12 months later, I wrote a proper appraisal of how the advertising world had responded to the COVID crisis. And spoiler alert, it hadn’t handled it very well, in my opinion.
Darren:
Well, there was certainly a lot at the time in early 2020, the way brands were almost consistently jumping on board with trying to show brand empathy by virtually using almost stereotypical imagery and words to say we’re with you. We’re all in this together.
It was quite interesting how it all became a bit of wallpaper. But I’m just wondering … sorry, Steve. Yeah?
Steve:
Well, I must have done the ukulele manufacturing industry, the world of good, because each one of those empathetic ads had a backing track of someone strumming a ukulele, I seem to remember.
Darren:
Absolutely. What was it that was the genesis of writing this book? What were the things that you were noticing in the industry that really got you thinking and identifying the fact that we had as an industry given up on selling, and started focusing on this, as you put it, saving the world.
Steve:
Initially, it was Patrick Collister who runs the Caples Awards, which is one of the few international awards that builds effectiveness into the judging process. And Patrick wanted me to give the inaugural speech at the first of the Caples under his auspices.
And he gave me the subject, “Why have we become ashamed of selling?” And he gave me the statistic that of all of the Cannes Lions winners in 2018, I think it was, only six of the Grand Prix winners had selling as an objective.
So, I went in search of why this would be, and my attention was taken by what was happening in the United States and articles that were appearing in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and Forbes, with the gist being: can a left-leaning industry empathize with 65 million people, 65 basket-of-deplorables, i.e., those who voted for Donald Trump.
And a very serious debate, was being had. Could the East and West Coast advertising agencies and those in Boulder, Colorado, bring themselves to sell things to people they despised?
And so, it was then that it occurred to me that the political aspect of the industry’s makeup and the fact that it’s at odds with what are generally conservative mainstream groupings that had not been addressed. And that’s where I started looking really.
Darren:
It’s interesting because there is a heavy focus in the book around this idea of, in America, they call it the loony left or the woke Democrats. In the UK, you talk about it being the sort of anti-right. Or how would you define it there?
Steve:
I’d say, I mean, it’s people who are culturally left-leaning. I’m not talking about good old-fashioned politicians like Tony Benn and Michael Foot in the 1970s, who talked about wealth redistribution, who talked about state ownership of the means of production, that old-fashioned kind of class-war, left-leaning principles.
These are culturally left-leaning. They are middle class, affluent privileged people who want to fight over who have whose bête noire are racism, homophobia, sexism, and of course, the climate crisis. And they put all of the great sins of society at the door of capitalism. Now, if you are of that mind, if you are of that leaning, it’s very difficult for you, I would imagine, to go into work and oil the wheels of capitalism’s engines of growth and consumption.
And I think people, when they attend their dinner parties in West Sydney, in whatever the shi-shi neighborhoods of Melbourne and Sydney might be, or the equivalence of Islington and Chiswick, when they rock up with their dinner party guests to hide their embarrassment that they work in something as vulgarly capitalistic as advertising — they say, “Oh, don’t worry. We’re not selling things anymore, how 1980s — we’re saving the world, darling.” And that is my point about where ad folk are nowadays.
Darren:
Well, I’m not sure, Steve, that that’s new because back in the 1980s when I moved from medical research into advertising, I had someone in advertising tell me, I should tell people I play piano in a whorehouse because that was more acceptable than saying that you worked in advertising.
Advertising’s always had a sort of questionable perception because it’s constantly down there in the least trustworthy professions, isn’t it?
Steve:
But it used to be something that a lot of young working-class kids aspired to be. It was one of those, not professions, but occupations that had no barrier to entry, or less barrier to entry than others, and it was glamorous.
I mean, I grew up in the world where the Saatchi’s were actually sitting in number 10 Downing Street advising the Prime Minister on policy and strategy. I grew up where the Saatchi’s were going to buy what became HSBC Bank in the United Kingdom. They were going to buy the Midland Bank, for goodness’ sake.
I grew up at a time when the commercials were more entertaining and more liked than the programs. So, yes, advertising has always had a rather louche image. But I don’t think it was … not despised, but ignored as it is nowadays.
The great paradox, Darren, is that as advertising has moved to the margins of culture and consciousness, it has ascribed to itself, the great role of telling us all how to live our lives. As it’s been ignored and nobody takes any notice of it anymore, it feels that it’s in a position to tell us all how we should be living our lives and setting our moral compass for us.
Darren:
Steve, I just want to pick you up on a point about advertising being quite a glamorous industry that is relatively easy for all sorts of different … because I was going to say when I look around, agencies seem to be filled with private school boys and girls, upper middle class, dressing like the working-class in the creative departments, and pretending to come from Struggle Street, yet very strongly, embedded in that privileged middle class group.
Steve:
I don’t know what the situation’s like in Oz, but in the UK, 84% of the agency workforce is aged 18 to 40. 70% grew up in a household where the chief income earner was social grade AB — that’s 70% as opposed to a national average of 29%. 63% had parents with a professional background, which meant they were lawyers, accountants, schoolteachers, whatever. Whereas the national average is 37%. So, that’s 63 to 37%.
Only 17% come from what is a working-class background, as opposed to 40% in the general population. 88% have got a degree or an MA. And I heard a horrible anecdote recently, that to get an interview at an advertising agency, you had to have come from not just a university, but a Russell Group University, which is one of the top 20 universities in the country. That’s before anyone would see you.
And as far as our black, Asian, and mixed ethnicity colleagues, 70% of them are public school educated. So, as opposed to a national average of 7%. So, we are a privileged elite. We differ from the mainstream in pretty much all of our attitudes, our aspirations, and our experience of life.
Darren:
It’s interesting that diversity and inclusion has become such a big issue for the industry as it has for society. During the pandemic and just prior, we had the death or murder of George Floyd in the U.S., the rise again of the Black Lives Matter.
I’ve had clients, major clients in the U.S. approach me, asking me if we have benchmarks for diversity and inclusion within agencies, that procurement have spotted this as becoming such an important thing to do.
And my perspective is that diversity and inclusion is essential for creative industries because creativity comes from a diversity of ideas all bumping together to create new ideas and new thoughts. What’s your opinion?
Steve:
Coming from, I suppose, a working-class background myself, I would say that I would agree entirely, but I think that diversity and inclusion needs to be colorblind. And I think there’s quite a lot of showboating going on with… if you don’t understand, we need lots of people of color in our creative departments and in our planning departments.
And not a lot of effort made to include the most underprivileged and deprived sector of UK society. That’s the white working-classes. I don’t see many programs designed to get kids in from Hartlepool and Halifax, and from my home area.
Unfortunately, in my home area … I’m getting very parochial here, but there is a school in Preston for advertising and it’s been closed. Its funding has been cut off. So, the one major college in my hometown in northwest of England, the advertising college’s funding has been cut.
And I don’t think they saw many people from London coming recruiting in the first place. So, yeah, I think D&I should be colorblind, and I don’t think it is.
Darren:
Well, I think it should be diverse in its view. The thing that annoys me is that most people when they start talking to me about diversity and inclusion are talking about gender and race or culture. And yet, there’s also an incredible amount of ageism because diversity is also age.
It’s also educational status. It’s whether you grew up in a rural setting, an urban setting or a city setting, there’s lots of different measures, but it seems that we’re stuck on two. And that is race and gender.
Steve:
Yes, yes.
Darren:
And I think all of them are important, but we need to look at how do we how do we actually make the advertising agencies, first of all, full of talented people that bring various lived experiences to the forefront.
We have a copy school in Western Sydney, one of the biggest issues they have is trying to attract people to that school because they don’t see advertising as a career path.
Steve:
Right. Why? Because…
Darren:
Just not for them. They don’t see it as particularly rewarding or as an opportunity anymore.
Steve:
I think that maybe because the advertising that they see on their screens, they don’t appear in it, they’re not featured in it. And again, I’m sorry to bang this drum, but you’d struggle to find a commercial on TV or the cinema, which features a positive image of a white working-class person.
You got lots of white working-class people featured in gambling ads, because they’re the fucking idiots who they’re targeting. It’s not a genre you really want to dominate (the gambling genre). But that’s about the only time you’ll see them.
Also, I’ve heard it from my friend, James Hillhouse, who runs Commercial Break, which he has been wonderful efforts to try and get working-class people into the creative industries. And he says that the agencies will take a working-class team on, and they’re a novelty for two weeks. And then Boudica and Oscar will take them out to the kind of restaurants these kids have never been to before for dinner on a Friday or take them to a bar in the evening.
But when the novelty wears off, the two working-class kids just kind of drift off because as you say, it’s not for them. They see no future in it because there’s nobody like them in those agencies, Darren.
Darren:
Now, you touch on in the book about the fact that there’s not this focus on actually creating value. How does advertising create value? And particularly award shows, even the Effie Awards, which should be about return on investment or return on marketing investment, seem to be more about the additional media value that’s delivered by doing what I call trick stunts and novelties, than they are actually about driving sales.
Steve:
Well, I think that’s the CMO’s delusion that clicks, likes, and shares are some indicators of success. And I think that while in the good times, the CMOs were allowed by the C-suite peers to get away with such nonsense, but I do sense that things are changing.
I think that Kelsey Chickering in AdNews on the 22nd of December, I think you contributed to that article. She, at Forrester, said the marketing teams are facing budget scrutiny from internal stakeholders, and they need to prove that every single dollar put into the market will have a strong return.
I don’t think that was the case 18 months ago, or even 12 months ago. But I think that the cost-of-living crisis, rampant inflation, supply chain problems, you name it, have suddenly focused everybody upon something that you’ve always been interested in. And that is commercial purpose, as opposed to social purpose.
Darren:
Absolutely. And look, I think the two can sit hand in hand, but going back to the reference I made in ‘Built to Last’, Jim Collins and Jerry Porres said that profit is to business what oxygen is to human beings. In that you don’t breathe just purely … you have to breathe because otherwise you can’t live.
And profit’s the same for business. That’s why businesses must make a profit because that’s the only way that they can be sustained, and then they can look to making social change.
Steve:
Yes, yes. And in good times when you’re awash with money, you can possibly do that. But we are entering times when that’s not possible. There’s a chap called Les Binet, who is the IPA’s guru of effectiveness along with Peter Field, and Les Binet wrote this last month.
He said, “If you decide to pursue a purpose-driven marketing agenda, you have to accept you’ll probably make less money. Purpose-driven marketing is about 30% less effective than normal marketing in business terms. It’s harder. You have to do everything that normal marketing does, and you need to do brand purpose as well. So, effectively, you are doing marketing with one hand tied behind your back. That might be something you can afford in the good times, but you have to ask yourself whether or not you can afford it now, especially since consumer priorities are changing.”
It’s doing marketing with one hand tied behind your back. But I think that if a company strategy is aimed primarily at making a profit, and that profit can then be redistributed — if the aim is to grow the business and then redistribute it to stakeholders, be they shareholders or employees, I would’ve thought that is the priority of pretty much most businesses.
But if your marketing strategy is social purpose, to use that money in order to make the world a better place, then you’ve got a conflict and a conflict, which I’m afraid, can only be resolved by ignoring it. And you can only ignore it when you’re making enough money to ignore it.
But when you ain’t making that much dough, that conflict comes to the fore. And I think Les Binet has pointed that out there.
Darren:
I do think there’s a big difference between purpose marketing and business purpose. That one of the issues here is that we’ve seen some very successful businesses being based on having a core purpose to the business.
Steve:
Yes.
Darren:
It’s when the marketing tries to create the emperor’s new clothes around a traditional business, isn’t it?
Steve:
Yeah, and I would say that Patagonia set out its core purpose, was to change the world. To use the platforms it created, the products it created in order to have a beneficial impact upon the world. And that’s the exception that proves the rule. There is nothing wrong with a core purpose.
I’ll give you an example of a brand with a core purpose. I would say Volvo has a purpose and that is to produce cars that are safe to drive. And it has made the world decidedly better because of that purpose. And it’s sold garage fulls of cars in so doing, and it continues to do this.
The E.V.A. Initiative is a fabulous example of a core commercial purpose that does good. That they’ve done all the crash test dummies and found out that all the crash test dummies are shaped like men. So, all of safety design is geared towards protecting man-like human beings.
And women, therefore, disproportionately die in car crashes because the safety designs are not built around them. And they have, God bless them, shared all the research with the rest of the automobile industry, God bless them.
But this is a core purpose that is a commercial purpose, but also, has done remarkably good over decades.
Darren:
And Steve, we’ve seen some new companies, and I know you know about this because you referred to it in the latest edition of your book, and that is Who Gives A Crap, which is a company that started producing toilet paper with smaller environmental impacts. And they’re doing it through basically social media and subscription-based.
So, they’ve actually changed the business model, but at the very core of it, their purpose is to provide hygienic toiletry around the world with minimal environmental impact.
Steve:
Yes, and I think if you can afford Who Gives A Crap toilet paper, then I think it’s honorable that you go out and buy it. But I don’t think that … I imagined that the mainstream probably can’t afford, and they could actually give a crap.
Darren:
Well, what I like about it is the business model, it’s a subscription model. See, toilet paper is always struggled from the point of view of it’s an impulse purchase or a demand purchase. Everyone’s got to have a piece of paper to wipe their bum with.
But if you’ve signed up to a subscription, and yes, it does appeal to people that are willing to pay a premium — it locks them into never having to make that purchase decision again, except to maybe stop subscribing. And that’s why I like the idea of a business model where the purpose is actually built into the business model, not just into the advertising.
Because you also point out a couple of examples in the book of where the expenditure on virtue signaling of being a good brand is actually more expensive than the actual benefit delivered. And I think Burger King was my favorite example of where, for around $50,000 worth of benefit, they spent over $200,000 promoting it.
Steve:
It was International Women’s Day, and they produced a press out in the New York Times, which said women belong in the kitchen, which itself caused a brew ha-ha amongst the humorless people who found that offensive.
But of course, they were giving away two scholarships to a renowned culinary course. And those scholarships were $25,000 each, but an ad in the New York Times, which told everybody about this good act, cost $214,000 to run in media spend.
So yes, it was a bit of virtue signaling on behalf of Burger King. Unfortunately, not an aberration.
Darren:
There’s a book called The Status Game, which actually identifies three different types of status. There’s the dominance hierarchy, which is the traditional biological, occurs in the animal and plant kingdom as well as human beings.
Then there’s the virtue status, which has gone into overdrive in the world of social media. That’s the desire to be seen to be good. And then there’s the actually being good, is the third one and allowing your good works to give you status.
Quite interesting that it’s been identified because most people think of status purely in the first basis of the dominance hierarchy.
Steve:
Yes. I would say Who Gives A Crap as far as Maslow’s needs are concerned, that is probably ticking the box of self-actualization; using this toilet paper and having this toilet paper beautifully branded, but clearly branded in your toilet would be more about self-actualization than the functional need of wiping your ass.
And so, Who Gives A Crap is fulfilling something much more different than its practical benefit, but it is fulfilling a certain need for the people who use it or have it on display.
Darren:
But isn’t that ultimately, the role of marketing? I was once told that sales is about volume and marketing is about margin. If you can get a consumer to pay more for the same product, then that’s good marketing.
Steve:
Yes. I mean, when you can go down to TK Maxx or the discount store and buy your Dolce & Gabbana shoes or your Fendi handbag or whatever for knockoff prices at $200, $100 — you no longer get your status in society by wearing such avert symbols. You get your status in society by carrying a tote bag for, I don’t know … which has got the correct slogan on it.
The right t-shirt by being … like I say, having a couple of packets of Who Gives A Crap in your toilet, in your bathroom. It’s the way of establishing your superiority and the way that consumer goods used to. So, it’s status goods aligned with status beliefs.
Darren:
Interesting that we’re talking about toilet paper and status at the same time. But one of the other things, Steve, that I wanted to cover with you is the book fairly lays at the feet of the industry bodies and the industry groups for their lack of actually promoting and reinforcing the value of advertising.
Steve:
Yeah, I think that our institutions, and by those, I would say in the UK, and you can put your own Australian versions in there, but I would say D&AD, I would say the Advertising Association, WACL the DMA.
And then I would … not the IPA, but sometimes the IPA. I would also add our trade papers in there. I would say the Campaign, The Drum, Creative Review. I would say that they’ve singularly failed the last decade and a half of making the case for the value that advertising adds to our economy.
Darren:
Now, you left ISBA out of that list. I’m just wondering, do you think the advertisers also have a role here or do you think it’s very much for the advertising industry itself to do this?
Steve:
I think that if the advertisers don’t do it, it’s because they have lost faith in the advertising industry’s ability to deliver to be quite honest. I think that is the major problem. We’ve failed to get this message across to our clients who have always been skeptical about advertising’s efficacy, I think. And we have failed to hammer home that point.
And the people who run our institutions don’t seem to get this. I’ll give you an example. Tim Lindsay, who is the chairman of D&AD went on to LinkedIn, I think it was, and said, “Where once the public rather liked advertising and we liked working in the business, our consuming public now do pretty much anything to avoid it. And sadly, a lot of us are looking for a way to leave.”
Now, this is the chairman of D&AD who’s supposed to be the custodian of creativity in the industry. And then went into Campaign and said “What was once a powerful business tool that was capable of inserting itself into popular culture, that people said they liked as much or more than the programs is debased and devalued”.
And he said, “How have we let this happen?” It’s like how have we let this happen? Well, by not banging the drum for the value that advertising happens to add and emphasizing its fundamental importance to the industry’s survival, to the economy’s survival. We have made no effort to make the case for advertising’s commercial purpose.
Darren:
Yeah. And yet, there’s lots of effort talking about creativity. There’s lots of banging the drum about creativity and there’s creative awards to champion creativity.
Our own ACA in Australia, which is the advertising body equivalent of the IPA (they do a lot of work with the IPA), have a weekly thing in The Australian newspaper called the Growth Agenda, where there’s lots of discussions about the role of creativity in driving growth.
But the big weakness seems to be linking these proclamations and these exclamations around creativity to actual performance. And I think this is the role that marketers have to be on board with. I mean, marketers, if they want to continue to have an advertising budget of some sort, need to also be on board in championing and proving the role that advertising and creativity plays in growing their businesses.
Steve:
This is your whole point, wasn’t it, when you set up the business, was to take commercial purpose, to help people achieve commercial purpose through creative process, isn’t it?
Darren:
Exactly.
Steve:
And you saw a gap then, or you saw a lacking then. Have you noticed it become even broader, the gap between commercial purpose and creative process — are all the creatives simply playing in a sandpit whilst the rest of the grownups get on with doing business, do you think?
Darren:
Now, you’re trying to turn my podcast around on me, but look, Steve, I will say that what has happened is technology, and particularly, AI and econometric modeling has now made it much easier for marketers and their agencies to have informed decisions around what’s working and what isn’t.
What I am noticing though is the uptake is incredibly slow because people are arguing over which is the best model. And my argument is, if you’ve got zero confidence in your decisions because you have no proof except gut instinct, and someone can offer you a model that gives you, let’s say, 50% confidence or 60 or 80% confidence, then why wouldn’t you embrace it?
Rather than saying things like, “Well, until you get to a 99% confidence interval, I’m really not interested in investing.” Like something is better than nothing. I wrote an article and I’m sure you saw it, where the headline was, “Lord Leverhulme and John Wannamaker were optimists.”
It’s not half the budget that’s wasted. It’s actually possibly a lot more unless you start putting some type of measurement. But I see continual wastage of effort in should it be an attribution model, should it be an econometric model? And if it’s econometric, should it be a linear regression model which takes potentially, a year or more and vast sums to get to the 90% confidence in.
This is all mute, it’s wasted effort. There are already ways of doing this and starting, and shouldn’t we be at least doing something rather than continuing to have these discussions?
Steve:
But whilst these discussions are going on, the advertising creative fraternity are having their award ceremonies, giving awards to work that has all the efficacy of a butterfly’s belch.
Darren:
Well, look, and that is true. One of the things that got me focused on this was an article about Cannes, and I think it was around 2015 where they pointed out that most of the major awards went to not-for-profit advertisers.
And quite a few of them — it was one year, and I can’t remember the particular year, where quite a few of them ended up being pointed out to being scams in many ways because those not-for-profit advertisers really weren’t aware that the work had been done.
Steve:
Yes. When I had my agency, I would encourage people to bring in charity accounts, causes that they were interested in, causes that were close to them. And we would offer to do the work on a pro bono basis because it was sugar for the pill of working for IBM, Microsoft, Vodafone, kind of those big heavy Xerox-like accounts, kind of the hard work accounts.
And I think it was Ben Kay – mixing my metaphor – the copywriter — Ben Kay assessed what was happening at Cannes this year where 85% of the Grand Prix winners were cause-related or social purpose-related. And Ben said, enough is enough. There’s too much icing and not enough cake.
Darren:
Yeah. Well, see, one of the things I’ve always argued, and I had this conversation with the previous chairman of Cannes, which is performance or effectiveness should be organized through a reputable, large accounting firm so that marketers can actually provide the confidential details of sales results So, that they can then be analyzed and put on an index.
Steve:
Yes.
Darren:
Because one of the things is marketers will often not allow their agencies to have access to the data or share the data because it’s commercially confidential. But if we could find a way of doing that in a way that doesn’t expose that.
The other thing I think is that awards shows should not be by discipline, but by client vertical. You should be entering based on what the vertical is. Because in this day and age, the best film or the best online piece is almost largely irrelevant.
These are craft exercises. We live in a digital world where everything is largely digital. And so, the best idea for particular categories of advertisers seems much more relevant to the world than just who did the nicest website or web3 application.
Steve:
Yes, that’s true. I always kind of query the fact that clients don’t give the results to their agencies. I never had any problems getting the results out of my clients. And I think that it’s a well-worn kind of excuse for “We don’t know whether it worked” kind of… I think that that in itself is a bit of a scam response.
But as far as effectiveness is concerned, I think that there should be much more emphasis placed upon it. But you say that we are losing touch without commercial purpose in the industry – again, I’m turning this onto you, but have you found in pitching that the introduction of procurement to the process, whereas where once there were credentials focus, that was based upon capabilities and case studies, which are about effectiveness, which are about commercial purpose, which are about, has this done the job it was given, but introducing procurement to the process.
When you’re talking about modern slavery acts, net emissions, CSR, DE&I programs, those kind of things, is that getting us away from that which we’re supposed to be doing i.e., building brands and selling things, Darren, do you think?
Darren:
No, the two operate completely separately. It’s almost as if the compliance with the Modern Slavery Act, having diversity and inclusion as part of your business strategy. This is table stakes. This is the thing that procurement will focus on.
Meanwhile, the marketers will be looking at which agency do I feel most confident in? Which one do I have good chemistry? Who has the capabilities that I need to deliver my marketing strategy? The two run quite separately. And one is almost like a qualification process. The other is the selection process.
The other sad part is that procurement is also involved in the financial component as well. And the focus there is about cost, not value. And so, to your point, if we flip this whole thing around to what’s the value created, what’s the upside here, and move away from a cost model to a value creation model, then we get quite a different conversation. And I think there’s a whole lot of cause and effect in here that I’m not sure we can answer in the time that we have. But we’ve also seen over the last 20 years, advertising agencies effectively getting paid the same amount of money to do exponentially more work.
Steve:
Yes.
Darren:
That the brands that you worked on in 2005, you may have produced a hundred pieces of work for advertising, today, you’ll be producing three odd thousand or more because of social media and digital channels.
And so, there’s also a whole issue around that, around first of all, are they all needed? Are they all performing, and driving sales? Are they driving value? It’s a huge topic, but I think the thing about your book that I enjoyed was it’s incredibly thought-provoking in that it brings us back to, well, what is the purpose of advertising, and what is the priorities you need to bring to it.
Steve:
Sorry to labor the point. But if the pitch process hangs on your ability to tick boxes on the Modern Slavery Act and net emissions and CSR, could it be that the agency that wins the business is the one that is less capable of delivering on the core function of an advertising agency. That is to build strong brands and sell things.
And the agency that wins the process may be the one that ticks the box in areas that … do you understand what I mean? That we are losing sight of the thing that we are paid most to do. We’ve been sidetracked into areas that aren’t necessarily going to enable us to deliver that which the clients are paying us for.
Darren:
And look, there’s a huge movement inside procurement, but the two are actually run quite separately, because one is about risk assessment.
Steve:
Right.
Darren:
Procurement’s working out, yes, marketers want to go with agency A, but agency A has huge risks associated with their lack of process and rigor around things like their environmental impact. So, how do we manage that? And depending on the category of the advertiser, we get quite different views around what the importance of each of those is.
For instance, if you’re alcoholic beverages and there’re already social pressures around alcoholic beverages and for instance, toxic masculinity and sexual harassment and assault, then you would want to have an agency that has a rigorous HR process to ensure that they weren’t going to become caught up in that type of controversy because it would reflect badly.
So, the balance will constantly change, but it’s not either or. You don’t ever see in a good pitch process an agency rejected because they don’t meet those procurement criteria. But the procurement criteria is the table stakes and an understanding of what the risks are if you went with that choice.
Steve:
Right. Okay. So, this explains why the average DE&I director is earning £64,000 a year, whereas the average creative person nowadays in the UK is earning £33,000 a year. Anyway, sorry, it indicates how important the DE&I people are, anyway.
Darren:
Well, look, Steve, unfortunately. we’ve run out of time. It’s been a conversation that’s flown by. I really appreciate you taking the time in your evening to sit down and have this chat.
I would absolutely recommend to everyone working in the industry to read Can’t Sell Won’t sell. Edition 3 is out at the moment. Any plans for Edition 4, 5, and 6? Are you’re looking to update it soon?
Steve:
No, I don’t think so. Maybe with the tides turning quite noticeably, I’ll give it another six months and see whether that is simply a response to the spike in inflation and the cost-of-living crisis. And if the economy books up, will that just be a temporary response or is the tide really turning back to a commercial purpose? And then if it is, then I might do a revised version.
Darren:
Well, Steve Harrison, thank you very much for your time. I have a question for you before you go, and that is, if there was a list of three things the industry should immediately do, what would they be?
