Trust me when I tell you this about the state of creativity…

You always remember your first advertising heartbreak. You’re young, enthusiastic and working on an exciting idea you know is going to go viral. The client looks like they’re going to buy it. And then, after a million “small changes”, they decide it’s too out there and go with something dull as dishwater instead. But, hey, at least their logo looks really, really big on the ad!

Amid all the turbulence in the world, there is one reliable constant: agencies and clients will always be feuding about creativity. And if you needed any more evidence of this, take a look at the Cannes LIONS annual State of Creativity 2024 report.

LIONS polled 3,000 advertising practitioners globally and found that, while the industry is a lot more optimistic about growth than it was last year, there’s a communication breakdown between clients and agencies. The major takeaway (generously paraphrased) is that “if we’re going to realise the potential of creativity as a growth driver”, agencies and clients need to go to couples therapy..

The report is fascinating for a number of reasons. But what really struck me was the fact that it could have been written a decade ago. A lot of the headlines point to perennial issues in the client-agency relationship that nobody seems to know how to fix.

Take the issue of trust, for example. Brands hire agencies because of the agency’s expertise: because they think they’ll be able to help them do better work than they’d be able to do alone. And yet, when push comes to shove, a lot of brands don’t seem to trust the people they’ve chosen to partner with. “Clients don’t trust us to do daring creative work”, one Chief Creative Officer from Uganda complained to the LIONS. “Client’s don’t trust the power of ideas”, added another creative director from New Zealand.

I don’t want to sound like a psychotherapist here (I have spent a lot of time in America, and we all know how much they love therapy speak), but trust is the bedrock of any relationship. It doesn’t matter how smart the people are or how big the budget or how great the ideas –it’s almost impossible to do great work unless the brand and agency trust each other. When there is mutual trust and respect. Great things happen.

The LIONS report has a nice case study illustrating this from a telco company called Skinny in New Zealand. The campaign –which won a Grand Prix Radio & Audio LION— was a fun idea outsourcing voice talent for a radio script to the entirety of New Zealand. Radio scripts were plastered all over the country, from outside exotic dance clubs to the front of bar coasters, urging people to call a free number to record a radio ad. It avoided wasting money on celebrity voice talent and generated instant talkability.

The agency, Colenso BBDO, Auckland, had apparently attempted the idea before but hadn’t had much success. This time, however, Skinny said they “let go of creative control and fully trusted in the expertise of each of their partners”. One of the brand’s leaders told LIONS he laughed when the idea was presented to them yet again “but I also had to trust that [the agency] wouldn’t push the idea if it wasn’t going to drive results for us. What was different this time around? The strength of our relationship had grown.”

So what’s the lesson there for advertising agencies? If you really believe in an idea, fight for it. And that doesn’t just mean pestering the client by repeatedly telling them how cool your idea is –it means constantly making the business case for creativity. Because, as we all know, there is a very strong business case for creativity. Les Binet and Peter Field did seminal research on that almost 20 years ago. Study after study shows that creative ads are more memorable, more efficient and more cost-effective than non-creative ads.

Creativity, however, is also scary. We all say we want creative ideas but, as humans, we’re programmed to gravitate towards the familiar. It’s also harder to assess original ideas because there is nothing to compare them with. “As ideas become more novel –that is, they depart more from existing norms and standards– disagreement grows about their potential value”, one recent study published in Nature Human Behaviour found.

One way of building the business case for creativity, and of gaining more trust between clients and agencies, is systemizing creativity. “Companies win with creativity when it becomes a real system”, the Global Chief Marketing Officer of AB InBev, Marcel Marcondes, told LIONS (Marcel will be speaking in Toronto on May 16).

Those systems can take different forms, but the LIONS report notes that “Lion-winning businesses like AB InBev and McDonald’s have developed new platforms that allow all employees, regardless of department or seniority, to express their ideas and contribute to a piece of creative work”. Finding ways to help ensure everyone across an agency and brand feels invested in a piece of work helps trust thrive.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway here is that building trust is hard. There’s a reason this issue keeps coming up in our industry! Trust takes time. It takes work. It takes effort. But, in the end, it’s worth it. Trust me on this.