DTSACMO: Andrew Howie

In the next edition of DTSACMO, a content series where I hand the reigns over to top client side marketers, we’re lucky enough to have Andrew Howie on board.

Andrew’s career started being tormented in creative agencies. He eventually made the move client side to do the tormenting. After very successful client-side periods with Meat & Livestock Australia, Westpac Banking Corporation and Amazon Australia, he now works at Yum Brands as Chief Marketing Officer helping to scale the Taco Bell South Pacific business.

He's an expert in building brands and communications campaigns that grow communities that become part of popular culture. He’s won many creative awards, but is most proud of his Effies. Particularly for Long Term Effects and a Grand Effie.

Howie’s penned a piece titled, ‘Be brave enough to do nothing.’ And in an era where the marketing world is increasingly focusing on producing quantity of content over quality, it’s a refreshing take.

I love the Australian Effies. Over the years, I have never been prouder than when I was winning them. Bronze ones and silver ones. Gold ones too. With the odd Grand Effie and Effective Advertiser thrown in for good measure. These days, I am relegated to judging only. But I pine for the day that I will have work worthy of not only entering again, but also winning the big ones.

Every client and their agency partners who enter the Effies is deeply proud of the work they have done. The results it has delivered for their business was sufficient for them to go through the gruelling process of collating the data and crafting the narrative. Then stumping up their marketing budget to submit it for peer review. Whilst not all entries win something, each one is deemed to have been effective by the entrant. I think that sometimes (often) gets overlooked.

My favourite papers are always the “Long Term Effects” category. These require a kick-ass strategy; world-class creative expression and the part too often over-looked: persistence of execution. It takes clients and agencies to have the discipline to do nothing for a while. Just let the work go to work and be effective.

Being brave enough to do nothing is increasingly hard in a world crippled by short-termism, mile high garbage dumps of disposable content and instantaneous feedback loops. It is further fanned by annual “use it or lose it” marketing budgets and a need to be seen to be doing something/anything for fear of being viewed as redundant.

Necessity is the mother of invention is often attributed to Plato. But I think it might have actually been Plato’s marketing department who was given an unrealistic business growth task with insufficient budget to achieve it. This situation is faced by marketing departments daily across the country, and no doubt across the globe. Marketers with creative aspirations, hamstrung by the realities of limited budgets and conflicting priorities. Winning creative awards is awesome. But so is paying rent and eating food. Faced with this dilemma, here are a couple of different approaches I have applied.

1 – Over-invest in creative at the expense of paid media to deliver breakthrough creative; in turn generating conversation.

This was used (and still is) to great reward by MLA. With only small budgets (and many production favours) the Australia Day/Summer Lamb campaign has always sought to be a moment of conversation within popular culture. So successful has it become, that sheep farmers have engineered their production cycles to line up to the spike in consumption that happens in January. MLA are brave enough to do nothing (or technically not much) for the other 11 months of the year, trading off the benefits gained in January.

2 – Amortise your production budget over a longer period of time.

Believe it or not, Amazon does not invest crazy amounts of money into creative production. There are very stringent production vs media investment guard rails with strong preference being given to reach media. That is not to say there isn’t a very high bar on creativity. Do more with less is a daily challenge. To get around this, when I was at Amazon we utilised a 2-year creative production cycle. This meant that we could invest more in great quality work, and then were brave enough to back the fact campaigns hardly ever “wear in” let alone get close to “wear out”. Run them for two years, then look to refresh. We used “creative frameworks” which were repeatable formats that could be lifted from or gifted to other markets, allowing for shared learning.

3 – Double down on marketing science and nerd your way to success

Distinctive brands assets. Brand codes. Consistency of execution. Audio cues. Long and the short of it. Excess share of voice. These are all things that we should be practicing regardless of budgets. They do seem to be overlooked more often when you have gigantic budgets and the ability to churn out lots of campaigns per year. But when you have a creative budget smaller than your take home salary; you need to be an expert in the marketing sciences. When your total budget is less than 2% of your sister brand, you need to think like a street fighter. Food doesn’t look great against the colour purple. But purple sure is distinctive. And if your sonic device is a bell ringing, ring loud and ring often. Add your logo as a title card on skippable ads so at least there is some forced brand exposure.

What do each of these strategies have in common?

The first step to great work is to always buy the best idea, not the best execution. You can always keep polishing the execution of a great idea. You can’t polish a turd into a great idea. Said differently, they all favour quality over quantity.

Focus on producing work that is laser focused on solving the business challenge. If the budgets are tight (they always are let’s be honest), make less work but make it better. Invest in the idea in a few select formats, not 48973940 different digital display formats.

Whilst I am a huge supporter of “death to shit ads”, I also understand the reality of what’s happening at the coal face. Perhaps for now, let’s strive for “Make the absolute best work you possibly can with the resources you have available.”

Howie’s worked across a range of brands, in a variety of categories, with wildly varying resources at his disposal - and the key takeout from his experience is 'make the best work, not the most work’.

As modern marketers and agencies deal with the colliding storms of increasing media fragmentation and diminishing budgets, it’s important to remember that one thing will always remain true. Creativity still wins out. To quote Howie, ‘The first step to great work is to always buy the best idea’ and ‘Invest in the idea in a few select formats, not 48973940 different digital display formats.’ Amen.

If you enjoyed Howie’s DTSACMO piece, then I’d also recommend checking out Brent Smart’s.