Mars global marketer warns brands need to pay agencies ‘enough to make a very good profit’
The global chief marketing officer of Mars has said the public is simply not interested in what brands have to say, warning the industry it needs to look to the world of entertainment and be willing to fail spectacularly to create connection with consumers.
Speaking at the Australian Association of Nation Advertisers Reset conference in Sydney today, Aussie Bruce McColl said the FMCG giant was applying four rules of creative excellence to make sure that its roster of agencies, BBDO, DDB and Mediacom had the confidence and freedom to drive brands, which included paying them enough to make a profit.
He outlined them as: “(Paying agencies) subsistence rations – we have to pay them enough to make a very good profit. I want our agencies to be able to recruit the type of talent that can provide four star advertising. But we are still fiscally responsible.
Hope the willingness to pay properly will start extending to the performers they hire in their material, not been the case to date.
Awesome stuff Bruce. Totally based in reality from my big agency experience.
Now, I’m trying to crack a product placement sitcom – but jeeze, try and get anyone on the industry just to read it. Agency people are the laziest and most conservative people I’ve worked with, and still in denial that entertainment is the way forward.
Good old fashioned sentimentality, the universal story of love and hope and dreams.
Romantic, soppy, naive, schmaltzy, sentimental, too good to be true? Sure it is, and it’s just exactly what 99% of the world would love to imagine was not only the truth, but their truth.
Brilliant :o)
Hey there Pete Rush, after 50 years in the business, I can find a lot of failings in agency people but laziness is not one of them. Few industries work at the intensity of ours and none is challenged to come up with original thinking, on a daily basis, often with impossible deadlines and inadequate funding.
Sorry, you can’t get your project off the ground. Try a hissy fit, I suspect your pretty good at those.