Connected creativity ignites business transformation

This article is part of a content series on empowering business transformation created in partnership with Publicis Groupe.

 

Against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving advertising landscape, more and more brands are looking to take a more holistic approach to their marketing and communications to reach consumers across an ever-growing range of formats and touchpoints. For Publicis Groupe and its clients, that takes the form of connected creativity — what the Groupe’s CEO for Australia and New Zealand, Michael Rebelo, calls a fusion of business, brand, media and communication strategy, underpinned by data and intelligence. 

 

“In today’s landscape, you need to have a more connected and integrated approach to brand and customer experience in order to unlock new, and more importantly, consistent forms of competitive advantage,” said Rebelo. “It’s how you are looking at your customer in the most holistic sense possible and activating the data behind that. It’s also a natural evolution of what clients have always come to us for — communication solutions.”

 

This boundary-breaking mindset doesn’t just benefit the work. To Rebelo, connected creativity is the driving force behind marketing transformation for clients. To learn more, we spoke to Rebelo and two of Publicis Groupe’s clients about how embracing connected creativity has empowered transformation and growth for their businesses.

 

Fostering a more fruitful client-agency relationship

 

It goes without saying that a strong client-agency relationship has to be the foundation of a collaborative partnership. For Rebelo, working alongside clients towards a common goal of connected creativity creates a shared language between the parties; a way of thinking about success that can transcend a single brief, portfolio of brands, and short-term challenges.

 

“By having connected creativity at the centre of this language — one that stretches into data, media, commerce, communication, and shopper — it can empower strategies that shape the market, instead of being led by it,” he disclosed.

 

To him, the best client-agency relationships are adaptable, aligned, and most of all, effective. Australian FMCG icon and long-term connected client of Publicis Groupe, The Arnott’s Group, is a prime example of this. Under Publicis Groupe’s bespoke agency model The Neighbourhood, Publicis agencies spanning across creative, media, PR, production, and shopper all work alongside each other to best grow the Arnott’s business, whatever their marketing transformation needs may be. 

 

Evidently, the approach is working — at the most recent Australian Effie Awards, Arnott’s and The Neighbourhood won a Grand Effie, a Gold in the Food & Beverage category, a Silver (“the only awarded entry in the ROI category”), as well as an honourable mention as Effective Advertiser of the Year in Australia.

 

While Sathyesh agrees on the importance of a shared vision, he noted that a one-team spirit based on trust and transparency is one that gives rise to the occasional debate, rather than a ‘client is king’ mentality.

 

“We need to get to a level where either side can express their point of view or push back in a constructive way without biases or agendas, and know that debates and arguments are integral when pushing the boundaries of what is possible,” said Sathyesh. “The acid test for this, in my opinion, is when an outsider walking into the room cannot tell who the client is and who the agency is after listening to the team debate an idea.” 

 

Similarly, Haysom advocates for treating agencies like the bona fide partners they are. “We don’t just send a brief. We bring our agencies well upstream with us in terms of our business and strategy discussions. They come into meetings with the CFO, unpacking what we’ve taken to market in terms of our annual financial results and understanding what the organisation’s long-term business strategy is. So they don’t just get a brief; they really deeply understand our business and our customers,” she said. 

 

Connected creativity’s long-term business impact

 

When it comes to the business impact of any new idea, the question inevitably turns to viability. This, to Rebelo, is where connected creativity shines. “No matter what your competitors are doing or what you have done before, if you can leverage creativity across any area of your marketing transformation — from brand to commerce, through to performance marketing — there will always be an opportunity for growth. Delivering tangible business results is table stakes at this point,” he said.

 

“It has been proven empirically that brands and companies that are creative deliver significantly more mid- and long-term growth in revenue,” noted Sathyesh. “Companies that believe in this philosophy usually do not sacrifice great ideas just because of budget cuts. The trick in running a business or balancing profits and losses is to be able to find resources and earmark them for the critical drivers of the business, and having the clarity of what gets cut first and what gets cut last.”

 

One of the long-term opportunities that has emerged from Heineken and LePub’s dynamic client-agency relationship is Heineken’s award-winning campaign, The Ghosted Bar. “Heineken had identified relevance to the youth in Asia as a clear objective at the beginning of its working relationship with LePub and Publicis Groupe, as we were struggling to capture the hearts and minds of these consumers with just our global ideas,” said Sathyesh. 

 

“Consumers in Asia are not very receptive to messaging that asks them to leave work to enjoy social interactions, because many of them think that they let their colleagues down by not staying at work longer,” he explained. The Ghosted Bar subverted that idea by showing they are actually letting their friends down when they stay at work too long, highlighting how ‘a friend stuck in the office is a ghost at the bar’, leaving friends hanging out with their ‘ghost’ instead. It then took the idea to different touchpoints to engage Heineken’s consumers. “Talking about delivering growth, we took this idea to our partners in bars and restaurants and drove footfall into their premises by encouraging people to tag their friends stuck in offices using a QR code and asking them to come over for a Heineken,” said Sathyesh. 

 

He noted that both the work and results exceeded expectations, with impressive brand equity scores and sustained business growth. “We have also been recognised for the creativity of the work, not only in Asia, but on a global stage in forums like the Cannes Festival, where we won four Lions this year on campaigns like the Heinekicks and The Ghosted Bar,” said Sathyesh. 

 

At Suncorp, connected creativity has yielded a long-lasting impact that extends beyond the organisation to the Australian people. Working with leading housing-resilience experts, Suncorp designed, tested, and prototyped a house capable of withstanding fires, floods, and cyclones — ‘One House.’ The One House to Save Many campaign, which ties into the organisation’s key brand pillar of resilience, is an ambitious and far-ranging initiative that has not only raised awareness for disaster prevention, but also provided open-source designs online for the public’s benefit, and spurred the Australian government to create an AUD$600 million resilience fund.

 

“One House, which came about from a very clear strategy to support Suncorp’s customers in being more resilient to perils, embedded connected creativity at its heart,” said Haysom. “To land that idea, we had to collaborate and innovate with a range of people — scientists, architects, our agency partners, and the media.”

 

The campaign went on to win a slew of awards, including a Cannes Grand Prix for innovation. For Haysom, however, its value will endure far beyond awards season. “It was a lot more than a campaign,” she said. “It was a documentary, it was an online information hub, it was the foundation for new product development. It was about the democratisation of innovation intellectual property to support customers and communities, and the connection of the creativity that really helped bring that to life in such a brilliant and magical way.” 

 

Alongside creativity, Haysom credits data and performance for enabling Suncorp to successfully invest in bold ideas during times of economic turbulence.

 

“It’s absolutely the role of CMOs and marketers to use the data that they have, to tell the story and the business case for the importance of both,” she noted. “If you’ve got sophistication in your metrics, in your tracking, in your data, then you have the information to tell the story to your stakeholders as to why you should probably, in most instances, be investing more when there are challenging market conditions.”