“Simplify, Simplify, Simplify”: Mars Wrigley Chief Brand Officer on Effectiveness and Strategy

Rankin> I love the fact that this combines creative strategy and creative effectiveness. It allows you to think about it in a separate and connected way. Creative strategy celebrates the idea behind the idea and really focuses in on the reductionist nugget in the thinking - to boil down, in classic strategic planning terms, how we are redefining a brand, reinventing a business, or influencing culture. That will unlock winning work. I have so much respect for the craft of that kind of thinking, and to be able to see various cases and examples of people doing that is intellectually thrilling. So that's super cool. That's why I love doing this. 

The criteria for evaluation really talks to that. 30% is interpretation and 30% the insight and problem solving approach in itself, 20% is the creative idea and 20% is the result. So it really puts the emphasis on the crystallisation and reduction to its essence to get to that unlocking thought. I think that's super cool. 

Creative strategy is really about a piece of work as it is done in a given year. It's hard to really evaluate something in one year, so that's why the results aren't the focus. That's also why there's the creative effectiveness component, which is of course about the impact on business. And thereby 50% of that evaluation is about the results that it creates, 25% the idea and 25% the strategy. 

I use those numbers quite deliberately because I think it really talks to two different skill sets required to come together to ultimately create brilliant work that has an impact on the business over time. 

Rankin> To be able to be part of a group that gets to look at work and spend a lot of time going, "Wow, I wish we'd done that," is inspiring and exciting. My experience on juries is it always revives my faith in humanity, open debate, the ability to disagree and have a different view and to come with facts that compete.

To be around the work, take away all the distractions as best you can, just consider the thinking on its own merits and have a really rich debate around it. We're all so caught up in change, in rewiring our systems to be more data driven and digitally capable and all of those things that are incredibly important to being a leader in today's world of marketing, advertising, communications and brand experiences. I'm a content junkie. I love it. That's why I still do what I do. But you can find yourself going a few weeks without really taking a moment to check if you're doing work that is brilliant, that is going to change something, do something. It's grounding. People throw around the word 'inspiring', including me – and I should be more careful – but this is inspiring. Time together to appreciate the work, the craft and the brainpower that's out there in terms of creativity that's solving real problems and improving performance in all respects, be it business, social or otherwise.

Rankin> The criteria is the criteria. But I'm looking for originality. Either redefining the problem in a different way, or the answer to a common problem definition that’s very fresh, different and original. That's so hard. And not original for its own sake – original in that it will resonate and have a consumer go, "Oh, wait a minute. I hadn't thought of it that way." And knowing that you've got about one second to do that. In a world where stories need to be told in a different, shorter, tighter, simpler and increasingly more visual way, either you can see that as a very difficult problem or a really fertile opportunity.

Especially on the creative strategy side, I’ll be looking for precision in the thinking. Smplify, simplify, simplify so that the solution design can be so clear, and the creatives know what's the most important thing to go after.

A lot of the debate we've had in the rooms I've been in the last couple of years is "what is creativity?" and "what is applied creativity?" It's not just a great creative idea, an ad or an experience design. It could be creativity applied in a whole different way – to a business problem. Maybe the application is an app but there's never a piece of communication made. There's a solution designed for the consumer to deal with that problem. Opening our minds and remaining open to creativity in all its forms is probably the other thing I would hope that the room that I’ll be leading with would engage with.

Rankin> This is a slightly schematic generalisation, so I want to be careful. But if you've been in the industry for 20 years, you probably grew up around the idea and the story being the thing. And then the game changed as the way people consume those stories changed to be about cleverly adapting our means, methods and approach to storytelling to fit into where they're receiving stories. That's changing different media, different platforms, different time spans to work with. So effectiveness became delivering a story in a multiplicity of typically shorter timeframes and a little bit more precision on measuring the return on investment. That begat what became known as performance marketing. 

At the same time, I think marketers started to realise their assets have got to work not just in media, but in commercial. The blurred line between content and commerce that goes into shopper marketing and all these other channels. So now we're talking about holistic storytelling across an array of channels that go from inspiration all the way to conversion, through what we used to call the 'linear funnel'. One day we woke up and realised, actually, the consumer journey is not linear. We've got to create brand experiences that are fit for journey, moment, platform, audience, etc. all around that nonlinear journey. And then we've got to understand how we allocate investment effectively. That's a task and a half. 

The big conversation linked to effectiveness is, "How do you measure all this?" We're spending a lot of time recognising it's nonlinear and we've got to have holistic and effective storytelling and conversion happening in the right places at the right times – not everywhere, not all the time. And therefore that will change your approach to content entirely. It will require you to reimagine how you design content and the tools and infrastructure of your content ecosystem. 

As you do that, how will you evolve your measurement capability? Because what you measure today is not what you measured yesterday. The worry I had was that we were overcorrecting to performance. Yes, we want efficiency, but we must have effectiveness. That journey has brought us back to recognising that it's both. And so we're trying to improve performance while recognising we have to build brand equity. The job to be done is to build mental availability and brand power. If you lose sight of that because you're so focused on performance, I think you will do yourself a mid- to long-term disservice. 

The challenge, therefore, is how do those work together? And how do I balance investment in both? Not just creation, but also in measurement. And then the infrastructure that goes with that.