From Bolt-On to Built-In: How McCann Is Embedding Social into the Agency’s Heart

For years, social and influencer marketing were too often treated as bolt-ons – briefed late, passed down the chain, and handed off to specialists without much thought to the bigger brand picture. But for McCann Worldgroup, that model is no longer fit for purpose.

Crystal Malachias, global co-managing director at McCann Content Studios, has seen the transformation from the inside. “Brands, more than ever, need to find ways of building their brands on social, which hasn't necessarily been the case,” she says. “A lot of it has been about conversion, that is bottom of the funnel. We're now moving it top funnel and throughout. Because social has the power to collapse a funnel.”

That shift means social is no longer something to tack on at the end of a campaign. It's becoming the campaign itself – or at least a central part of it. But to do that, it can’t exist in a silo. “Our clients are building their brands through social,” says Crystal. “They're not just using it as a way to jump on trends, be reactive.” She notes the logos that spring into your mind’s eye when you think about brands that are good on social. “Ryanair and Duolingo do an amazing job of what they do. That is not the guidebook of how to do social.”

Mel Arrow, who recently took on the role of chief executive officer at McCann London after serving as chief strategy officer, agrees. She sees the shift in client priorities first-hand. “It feels like we are really at a tipping point – an inflection point – in terms of marketing. Money and investment are really going into social, so it really needs to count,” she says.

That means stepping away from knee-jerk social executions that mimic whatever’s trending and instead baking social thinking into the creative process from the beginning. “Big brands are realising that, yes, by doing that, they're in social – and they're certainly not standing out like a sore thumb – but they’re certainly not building their brand.”

CMOs are finally looking at their social output as a serious representation of their brand, rather than something left to junior staff and external agencies: “Their CMOs are now looking at their social charts,” says Crystal, “finally going, ‘hang on a second – this is how my brand is represented?’ Somebody needs to get hold of this. The first place [audiences] will meet brands is on social – and that can’t be through the kinds of executions happening for the majority of brands.”

Truth in Layers

The conversation inevitably turns to McCann’s famous motto: ‘Truth Well Told’. With its roots in the age of big TV brand platforms, does it still hold in the messy, meme-driven world of social feeds?

Mel thinks it does – but in a very different form. “Advertising is a reductive thing. You have to simplify and say one thing – and say it quickly,” she says. “Social isn’t about that. I think we're now entering an era of more complex storytelling, more complex ideas, more layered things.”

Social, in her view, is a space for rabbit holes, for narrative arcs and connected ideas that reveal themselves in fragments over time. And that complexity isn’t a contradiction of a brand’s big-T Truth – it’s a richer way to express it. “We're actually really excited about more complex, layered ideas, rather than the single-line proposition, the reductive nature of ideas. Let's make them bigger. Let's make them wider,” she enthuses.

Crystal, meanwhile, is interested in how new platforms are reshaping strategic inputs too. “Social is changing the way we insight-hunt,” she says. “We use TikTok and Reddit to find insights. You can be within conversations and understand what consumers are saying and thinking – through all these conversations they’re having daily with influencers and creators.”

From Last-Click to Lasting Influence

If social is now about storytelling, the industry still has a way to go when it comes to measuring its impact. “To put things like last-click attribution against social is crazy,” says Crystal. Especially with the rise of ‘dark social’. “I don’t think consumers are giving away their likes and comments as much anymore. A lot happens in DMs or private shares. We don’t get that data, but it still matters.”

That’s where new metrics come in. “Share of search is a big one we’re trying to put against social,” she explains. For Mel, this is part of a broader shift towards rigour in areas that were once seen as intuitive or unstructured. “We’re applying tools, data, and rigour to something that hasn't had it before. It’s giving a real reason as to why, defining social voice and how a brand should turn up – using our own proprietary tool to define a brand’s social voice.”

That tool, developed under McCann Content Studios, draws on Jungian archetypes and real-time social sentiment to help brands understand their most consistent voice across channels. “We mapped it into four archetypes that felt most aligned with how you would show up on social,” says Crystal. “And actually, through the research we've done, brands that show up in two adjacent quadrants have the strongest social voice.”

Identifying that voice is something that gets Mel animated. The CSO turned CEO talks about one client for whom they’re calling the tone ‘Main Character Energy’, another that’s ‘Yes Chef Energy’. “It will suddenly go from feeling very scientific to incredibly springy and creative. And you can picture that person who’s going to go out there and represent your brand on social. It’s a combination of those things. It can’t just be correct in the data. It also has to have that creative aspect.”

The Non-Linear Creative Journey

In practice, McCann’s new integrated model is already showing results, particularly in the way it enables stronger collaboration between creators and creatives. “What everybody has to do on social is create storylines,” says Crystal. “Lots of different stories that layer into that one truth. Because it can be different things to different types of people.”

There may be six or so platforms that brands need ideas for social now. “Each one of those needs a specific strategy, creative, different creators or influencers – because you have to be platform perfect,” says Crystal. “Because the algorithms are kicking you out if you’re not – the content’s not right.”

Mel sees social and strategy as increasingly inseparable – and, crucially, as something that can’t be dropped in partway through the process. “If you disconnect social strats and creatives from the very wiggly creative process – and just do a check-in at this point, when the idea’s over here, and then a check-in after that – that’s when you become disconnected. It worked for a moment, but then the idea’s moved on. But if you go on that journey together, which we do on everything that we work on, everyone is embedded from the start. Everyone is on that non-linear creative journey together.”

Rolling It Out Across the Network

Building this model in one market is challenging enough, but Crystal’s remit is global. Over the past two years, she’s grown the London team from six to over 35 people, bringing in different thinkers and working out how integration actually works in practice.

“We have 20 [studios] around the world now – but each one of them is at different stages,” she says. “We want to create consistency within those and take the learnings from market to market.”

That consistency comes not from rigid structures, but from common language and strategic anchors. By defining things like social voice clearly, in ways both data-driven and creatively useful, McCann Content Studios aims to give local teams the freedom to create within a coherent framework.

What’s Next?

For Crystal, the opportunity that the industry still hasn’t cracked is truly deepening the relationship between brands and creators – and between creators and agencies. “They are absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, becoming the new frontier in broadcast,” she says. “To help creators be the new brand guardians – and to help them build their own brands as well – that’s really exciting.

Mel sees promise in a slightly different place: branded formats. “We are the masters of fluent devices, of sticking with an idea and reinventing it all the time in advertising, and yet we don’t do well at serialised format content,” she says. “Culture is increasingly shaped by those repeatable formats, like ‘Hot Ones’ or ‘Chicken Shop Date’, and creators are brilliant at making them. There’s so much to learn there.”

In both visions, there’s a clear message: the future of brand building isn’t just about appearing on platforms. It’s about understanding how they work, how people behave within them – and building something enduring out of what, at first glance, might seem ephemeral. Because if social and influence are going to shape brands for the next century, they can’t be add-ons. They need to be built in from the very beginning.