Mumbrella360 video: CMO Confidential
In the lead-up to Mumbrella360 on June 7-9, we revisit highlights from last year’s event.
In one of Mumbrella360’s most unusual sessions, four senior chief marketers reveal what they love and loathe about their creative agencies – while hidden behind a screen.
Among the observations covered off by the four – dubbed Mr Travel, Mr Retail, Miss Finance and Mr Alcohol – by session convenor and founder of New Business Methodology Julia Vargiu – were candid views and observations about dodgy practices, lazy work and supreme levels of services, leaving many in the audience wondering if it was them being talked about.
A few questions for the CMOs.
1. What’s with the obsession with hiring the most risk averse and terrified marketing departments?
2. What’s the point in hiring the agency most willing to do your bidding for the absolute lowest figure, and then moaning that the work isn’t any good.
3. Why hire marketing people who are incapable of making a decision without consulting research companies?
4. What’s the point in setting up multi-tiered layers of approvals? Each layer is terrified of the one above, so the work gets progressively worse until what eventually gets out bares little or no resemblance to the original concept.
5. We get that you don’t understand brand advertising anymore, but don’t moan when the brand tracking is at an all time low when you’ve paid a digital company millions to create a series of pointless games and content videos that absolutely nobody cared about.
6. Why have you enabled the media company to ‘come up with their own ideas’ when your team was barely capable of approving – or even understanding the work your creative agency did?
7. When your budgets have been slashed to the point where a team has a single day to crack a significant brief, again, don’t have a moan when it’s not up to your, already extremely low, standards.
8. Don’t move the entire business to the sexiest agency in town when your department are unchanged. They were incapable of approving work at the last place. It’ll be far scarier for them now.
I’m with Yeah. Whatever. Couldn’t have put it better myself.