70% of agencies don’t trust their clients' creative judgement
Here's one way to start fixing that
"It's always difficult to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this..." - Juror #8 in Sidney Lumet's '12 Angry Men' (1957)So I’m in the midst of developing a bespoke Creative Ladder for a new client I can’t talk about yet. Suffice it to say, given who it's for, it might generate some intrigue when finally revealed– more to come.
But rather than be that person offering a ridiculously annoying tease about my own work, this post is about someone else’s. Because so much of what I do is reliant on the brilliance of others. Most obviously, the well-known (I hope) work of Peter Field, Les Binet, Adam Morgan and Andrew Tindall who've all played their role in establishing the unquestionable importance of fame and attention in the model of brand communications that underpins the Ladder.
But have you heard of BetterBriefs? Their BetterIdeas Project deploys the simple but powerful trick of asking marketers and agencies the same set of questions about the creative evaluation process, and see if there any differences (spoiler alert - there are differences).
Here’s what they found:
The issue
🧠71% of agencies and 64% of marketers agree that “Evaluating ideas is hard”
📣30% of agencies and 52% of marketers agree that “We/my clients provide clear and constructive feedback” (the big gap between the two data points tells its own story here doesn’t it?)
🤮In response to “How would you describe the current approvals process when it comes to getting ideas signed off?”, the top responses were “Inconsistent, Slow, Subjective, Painful”
The result
Time and money down the drain: “It typically takes five rounds of creative development to get to a signed off idea”
And even more damaging in the long-term: “70% of creative agencies don’t trust the creative judgement of the marketers they work with”
Just let the startling implications of that stat sink in…
A possible solution
In a 2024 scientific paper published in Nature and bearing the kind of brilliantly byzantine title that rewards re-reading - “Greater variability in judgements of the value of novel ideas" - Wayne Johnson and Devon Proudfoot (Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, and the Industrial Labor Relations School at Cornell respectively), confirmed that, “consensus about an idea’s worth diminishes the newer it is” and, “people interpret greater variability as a signal of risk, reducing their willingness to invest in the idea.”
Novelty invites divergence of opinion - and this divergence feels like risk. The more a group seems to disagree about the value of an idea, the less likely it is to gain support. Which results in sleep-walking towards ‘safer’, middle of the road ideas.
But Wayne and Devon point to a solution - “Our predicted effect is diminished when we offer evaluators a common template on which to assess idea value”. Their findings make a good case for better frameworks to guide us - not to eliminate subjectivity, but to give it some structure.
"Great! We’ve got some labels now"
Imagine a table covered with a variety of oddly shaped objects representing a variety of personal and subjective opinions about creative work. The Creative Ladder acts like a very thin cloth we might lay over these objects. It doesn’t hide or erase the differences, but gives us a shared topography: a way to describe the contours, compare elevations, and map the terrain together.
But as BetterBriefs’ co-founder Pieter-Paul von Weiler pointed out in a recent WFA webinar mentioning the Creative Ladder, it's a mistake to have one and then relax thinking, "Great! We’ve got some labels now" – it takes more work than that. From the foundations - like developing well-defined descriptions for each rung, illustrated by examples from your own category - through to building the wider ecosystem that over the past decade has proven essential in embedding the Ladder into a company’s operating system, including:
🎓Live onboarding ✅➡️ To learn the new language and help avoid common mistakes when using it
🗣️Regular Creative Councils ✅➡️ To review finished work in order to benchmark over time
🤘Internal Merchandising✅➡️Building the visual artefacts of change (physical booklets, office posters, virtual backgrounds etc.) that build the crucial physical and mental availability that support usage.
An open invitation
Ultimately this isn't about frameworks, but rather embracing the scariest question in the world:
“What do you think?”
Followed up by the even more frightening:
“...and Why?”
These questions demand we reveal, not just our knowledge—but our personal taste, our judgement, our values - to peers and bosses. And since all of us work collaboratively in teams, a pertinent and even harder question is:
"What do WE think?”
Having a common template for evaluation offers the hope we might be able to more quickly articulate and aggregate our individual opinions around a single collective viewpoint – and avoid the five rounds of development and mistrust that is otherwise generated.