The Diminishing Of The Ad Agency Creative Department

Much has been written about the changes in advertising over the past couple of decades.  Account management is on the wane; planning is no longer dominant.  But little has been written about the diminution of creativity and executions. Once upon a time in American advertising, the creative department reigned supreme. This was true even at agencies that were account or strategic oriented. Even at those agencies, with few exceptions, if there were an argument over execution (not strategy), the creative department would win. Many of my readers would agree that now there is a dearth of exciting, innovative executions, especially on television.  Here is why.

Over the past 30 years a conversion of events has caused the influence of creativity to diminish.

The advent of planning has affected creativity more than the creative departments realize.  Corporate procurement has interfered with implementations, furthering the diminishing of executions.  Weakened account management has effected strategy and given rise to the consultants, who, for the most part, don’t understand advertising or production.  And the holding company emphasis on profits, profits and profits has caused the work to suffer since less time is spent by senior people “tweaking” the work.

While the intent of planning was excellent – originally to be the voice of the consumer and the provider of new insights in order to allow more effective communications – planning has devolved into management of focus groups and supervision of outside research. Many categories and brands have been focus grouped to death.  It is very hard to develop new insights into these.  How many times can an agency develop new insights into detergent or pet foods or computers - categories which have been planned to death over the past quarter of a century.  As a result, my observation is that planning is on the wane at most agencies and, in fact, there is actually less and less classical communications research.  Sadly, neither planning nor research is really being replaced at ad agencies.  In fact, clients have taken over a lot of this role, which is kind of like the inmates running the asylum. 

Much has been written about procurement departments and corporate management demanding that less money be spent on marketing and production.  WPP made an attempt to establish Hogarth as purely a production agency, taking the supervision and execution of all aspects of broadcast and, to some extent, print production away from the creative department which developed the work.  This, was an effort to save clients’ money. Interpublic followed suit. My observation is that these attempts have not achieved their intended goal; rather they have diminished the quality of the message because the very people who created the work are not totally involved with producing it.  The truth is that the vision to execute should remain with the people who created the concept.  One of the complaints by both agencies and clients is that by cutting costs on some production, much has been lost in the translation.

There is no question that more than occasionally, agencies abused the trust clients paid them by overspending on executions, particularly production of television commercials.  I can remember one agency creative director arguing with his client about hiring one of the most expensive star commercial directors at an outrageous rate of $20,000 per day, but with a three day prep minimum and two shoot days; ridiculously, the commercial was merely thirty seconds of a talking head, shot from the waist up.  The total cost for that commercial was to be about $400k.  The account people complained but the creative department insisted.  Eventually, the client rejected the bid and got its own bids for less than a third of that. I am sure, because of the nature of the commercial, it was not much worse than if the star director had done it.

Over time, with incidents like this, clients lost faith in their agencies ability to look out for their best interests.  

Client fees put a damper on big production costs by putting constraints on the amount they would pay for execution and implementation, regardless of the concept or the need for a big production.  As a result, much of the show business has been taken out of advertising.  Today, much of the norm is stock footage and stock music.

This may be good for the corporate bottom line but is not good for the executions or the consumer.  

Finally, the star system is gone. This may be the biggest reason that there has been a diminishing of the creative department. Once upon a time there were creative people whose names everyone in the business knew.  They created award winning work.  Other creative people would, if necessary, take salary cuts to work for them.  These were not only creative directors, but included group heads and others.  Most of the major agencies had one or two (or more) of these well-known people.  Today, there are very few "name" creative people.  The star system has been destroyed by the holding companies, for reasons that make no sense. 

All of these things have contributed to the diminished influence of the creative department.