What’s the True Value of Creativity – and Who Decides?
One of the great things about Cannes Lions week is the concentration of high-quality conversations we at LBB get the chance to have with some of the world’s foremost creative leaders. So every year we make sure we take the chance to ask some of the big questions to a range of people from around the world of creativity.
This year, as AI’s impact on the industry looms, we asked some of the people we met: How does the way creativity is valued and paid for need to evolve to keep pace with its true impact? Here’s what they said.
Ronald Ng
Global chief creative officer at MRM
The best creativity builds relationships, engages, inspires action, and grows the bottom line. To accelerate the pace, we need to not just treat creative brilliance as a cost centre, but also recognize creativity as a growth engine. That means valuing not just the brilliance of the idea, but the impact it creates. That means rethinking how we price and reward work – not just fees for ideas and executions, but shared incentives tied to real and lasting business results – because creativity and commerce are not in opposition. After all, is it really creative if it’s not effective? When creativity becomes part of the outcome – not just the output – we align incentives, clarify our intellectual property, and elevate the work that truly deserves to be called creative.
Steven Erich
Co-founder and president at Erich & Kallman
Well, I mean, if you're talking about how most agencies are paid—which is an hourly rate—we don't do hours.
We get paid on deliverables. So it's like, when you make this campaign with this many spots, and it goes all the way down – digital, radio, out-of-home, whatever the deliverables are – we work with a media team and client to price all of that out. It's basically like going in and buying a whole new outfit. It's not based on how many hours a person put in to get a pair of pants. It's more like: how much are these pants worth? Are they made of a nice material, quality, will they last, whatever?
We can do television spots that don't take a whole lot of effort and expertise, or we do ones for the things like the Super Bowl that take a lot of effort and expertise. So everything we do is based on the deliverables.
We're structured right now to do just fine with the way the market is going. We don't have to worry about hours being taken from AI. We look at the opportunity for AI to make us faster.
Whereas in most agencies right now, with their compensation models, they don’t want to get faster – it doesn’t work. So we’re in a good place.
And we did that not because we knew this was going to happen, but because we don’t believe in it – we’ve never believed.
Eugene Park
Global marketing lead for IMX, creative and design at CJ CheilJedang / Health & Wellness jury member
Creative work is still too often treated like a deliverable, rather than a growth engine. But the best ideas don’t just get clicks – they shift perceptions, open new markets, even change behaviour.
We need a new value model – one that rewards outcomes, not just output. Compensation should reflect influence and impact, not just time spent.
Reda Raad
Group chief executive officer and co-founder at TBWA\RAAD
I can speak about the MENA region, because that's the region I operate in. We have to be careful not to commoditize creativity. Yeah, our clients and our industry in the MENA region need to be a lot more sophisticated when it comes to dealing with creativity. And to give greater appreciation for it, stop commoditizing it. That's a struggle for us as our region evolves and matures. I think that's something that everybody's having healthy debates on. The procurement process in our region tends to be one size. You can't negotiate creativity the same way that you negotiate building a house. It's not a unit here and a unit there. That's something that comes with education, in terms of making sure that people understand the value of creativity. It comes with experience, it comes with agencies being brave enough to push back and move towards output, what we come up with as a solution that affects them online. That and look at measures.
We're seeing a lot of maturity [in effectiveness discussions], definitely. If you look at our performance in Cannes, the way that we're impacting, it's an exciting region. And I think with that comes a lot of excitement, a lot of sense of responsibility. So the industry is changing. We are right up there with the rest of the world. Where we need to be, in terms of creativity, in terms of sophistication. But there are aspects of the industry which need to be continuously looked at. I think how we price and how we measure and what value we put to creativity is something that is still a little bit lagging behind.
Tarek Miknas
Chief executive officer at FP7/MENA
I started as a creative so for me, it's all about the creativity. We're in the business of creativity. This is it. It's everything for us, and everything else is a distraction. The idea is the most important thing, and how you deliver it is, is all the rest of the stuff around it. Now, how do you get paid for it? It's the million dollar question. We're never going to feel like we're fairly compensated because we are paid on people's time versus the value of what we produce. When you're paid on people's time, your pitches, your contracts are split between your ability and a financial proposal. That financial proposal, in a lot of cases, will have “give me your offer, give me your next offer, give me a better offer, give me a best offer, give me a last offer.” It just keeps chipping away. The marketers don't seem to have a strong enough voice to say, “no matter what, knock them down by 10%, but give it to this agency”. I don't think that voice is there, at least from what I've seen. I think when you pass the technical side and it goes into a procurement world, they don't really care which. They've been given a selection of three, and those three can all deliver on the scope. And so it becomes the race to the bottom.
But we have to find the time to reinvent that and to do it together as an industry. Because when we are asked to compete, we're asked to compete within these formats. This is your brief. This is your task. On the creative side, on the financial side, we'll get the list and names by the hour, by the minute. We try to shift that. Some brands that believe in the power of creativity to the point where they want to be awarded, they want to see their work famous. Some of them, we will challenge each other and say, if we get you at the level of gold, we’ll agree to a bonus to incentivise us to give you more of the good stuff. We're going to be paid to do the day to day, give us a carrot and let our nights and weekends be more meaningful. That's not a long term solution. I think the solution is the industry coming together, and probably in some countries, some regions, it's better than what we do. Aligning on what we accept as an industry. In the meantime, we are so ultra competitive, and we're not helping ourselves.
Dimi Albers
Global chief executive officer at DEPT
I don't think people should overhype sort of the death of being paid per FTE [full time equivalent] or hours. Anybody who works with any organisation understands that organisation needs people to do things. The work that all agencies and consultancies do is often functioning in the organisation of the client, figuring out how we do [various things]. That human part will always be very significant, and I think clients will be fine with paying for it in certain roles. But then there is the part of what we all do which is connected to what you could call production, either digital, engineering, media or creative. And I would agree that if now the mix is 80% by the hour, and the rest is outcome or performance based, I think that will become significantly bigger, and outcomes is most likely the way to go. We have a bunch of clients who already pay per the amount of assets that we provide, or variations of that. Yes, I am slightly sceptical about some of the performance.
I understand it. I also think that we shouldn't overestimate ourselves as an industry, because in creating outcomes for our clients, there are many factors that we don't notice. We don't do the supply chain, we don't do the pricing, we don't control inflation.
Plus, I don't know if clients necessarily love putting all their eggs in one basket. We've been building a business for 10 years, which is more diverse than most companies out here. And if there's one thing I can tell you, it’s that they prefer to have a few baskets and put a few of those eggs there and find some orchestration around those baskets.
It's hyper important. If we are not able to do it on outcomes, which are a blend of people, technology and a bunch of other things, then we have a problem. But the pendulum almost never swings the other way. You need to understand the challenge of the client, and how you can create a better outcome for them. If that outcome is really good, they're going to pay you for it.
Peter Figge
Global chief executive officer at Jung von Matt
I think that people mistake creativity too often for something executional, which it isn't. Creativity is eternal. Creativity has a lot to do with everything which makes us human, even with our human deficits. If you think about one of the greatest artists in the world, probably why they were so creative was because they were always fighting themselves.
I don't know if it's still undervalued or if it's on the rise again. If I see the discussion in Germany, I would say it's on the rise again, because people see that it's a currency that's never going to cease to exist. But maybe it's just currently overlapping with the tech or the AI discussion. To me, creativity and AI are no controversial enemies. The opposite. Creativity is something which is so much related to the human being that it will only cease to exist if this earth ceased to exist. So it's really forever. And probably it's a little undervalued, because many people only attach it in the advertising arena to executional stuff – great story, great director, great casting. But creativity can be anything.
To give you an example from our own work, one of our creatives thought about fighting the right – a big issue in Germany. The right wing movements and the fascists have a lot of short acronyms that they're using to represent their beliefs in a more modern way, and also try to make them sort of untouchable, because it's not an SS, not a swastika. Together with [Laut Gegen Nazis] we trademarked all those abbreviated Nazi phrases, so that they were no longer ownable by everybody, but only ownable by this organisation. When they printed this on a t-shirt, they needed to pay because it's trademarked. That's a very creative, very ingenious, very Trojan idea, and it has nothing to do with execution. It's a legal mechanism.
These creative ideas show that power of the unexpected, creating an increased impact on your energy, time and money. That this is eternal. It's never going to stop. And I would argue that, for the time being, AI would not come up with something like that.
