We have nothing to fear but fear itself
Opinion | The Future of Planning, Strategy and Innovation Week in Focus
The bravest thing in most agencies is an innovative media strategy. But an unorthodox strategy would expose how too much of the client’s money is being wasted on platforms, so it doesn’t happen. Former PHD global lead Matt Sanders reveals the fallout.
Advertising has never been more precise and less effective. The missing ingredient isn’t data or talent. It’s courage, something that has been engineered out.
Last week, I argued that the HoldCo is best understood as a financial construct motivated by margin rather than effectiveness. Ad spend has never been higher, and effectiveness has never been lower.
However, what I hadn’t anticipated was how the reaction to last week’s article would validate the core argument of this week’s. Of all the responses, the most candid arrived by DM, from people currently working inside the HoldCos, telling me how they recognised the cited examples, how demotivated they were but, even worse, how trapped they felt inside an increasingly pernicious model that prioritises shareholders over employees, discards valuable talent in favour of short-term margin and has deliberately manipulated the job market in favour of employers. An industry of ideas, opportunity, and creativity seems to have retreated into fear-driven pragmatism.
Let’s begin with the numbers which provide a bleak context. Peter Field’s 2019 analysis for the IPA found that creatively awarded campaigns were once around 12 times as efficient as non-awarded work.
As short-termism took hold, that multiplier fell to around 10 and, in the most recent period he measured, below four.
System1’s testing finds fewer than one in five ads now clears the threshold for driving share growth. Michael Farmer reports that since 2009, 40 of the top 60 advertisers have seen brand growth fall below nominal GDP, and Dr Augustine Fou’s 15-year study of 80 public companies found that the heaviest digital investors grew more slowly than their category rivals. All this happened during a period when our tools for targeting and measurement became the most sophisticated in the industry’s history.
So, precision is up, whilst effectiveness is down, something that, far from being a revelation, is widely acknowledged across the industry. But here is the ultimate irony: even as advertising became less effective, advertising revenue still funded the incredible growth of Meta and Alphabet/Google, which now sit comfortably among the top 10 most valuable companies in the world. They say you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds, but the platforms seem to have got away with it.
Even more startling is the industry’s complicity, and the seemingly complacent absence of any remedy from a business staffed by so many talented and capable people. That said, fewer of them each week.
Why no remedy? Because most of the talent is paralysed by fear, manufactured by the economic model I described previously.
The efficiency trap
How did we get here? Data-driven digital media delivered real gains. Waste fell, reach was managed, excessive frequency was curbed, and delivery was optimised in real time. For advertisers who had long complained about not knowing which half was wasted, these were genuine improvements.
But somewhere along the way the industry confused media efficiency with marketing effectiveness, and they are not the same thing.
Click-through rates, conversions, and last-click attribution became flawed proxies for success when they mostly measure harvesting demand created elsewhere. Activity that merely converted demand at the bottom of the funnel was being credited for the entire journey. Meanwhile, the slower, hard yards of creating that demand were being starved of investment because the latest quarter’s dashboard was too unsophisticated to recognise it.
Here is where this article builds on the last one. The dashboard obsession is the natural consequence of a model that needed the budgets to go somewhere cheap to service. The platforms provided the channels and the measurement that proved the channels were working, conveniently marking their own homework. The HoldCos accepted it because a metric that champions the cheapest media to activate doesn’t need challenging.
The strategy nobody is allowed to recommend
I’m amazed how little attention this area gets, given how damaging it has been. Creative bravery does not sit exclusively in the creative department. The bravest thing in most agencies nowadays is an innovative media strategy. And in the HoldCo world, the most innovative, unorthodox media strategy is the one that exposes how too much of the client’s money is being wasted on the platforms.
The reality is that such a recommendation would require an extraordinary level of courage from any HoldCo strategist brave enough to make it, effectively challenging their employer’s business model.
They’d be arguing against the channels their network has strategically structured to activate cheaply, and the offshore hubs their group has invested in. Against the volume commitments and the trading relationships negotiated at a group level. Against a dashboard the client’s marketing director has been showing their CFO for three years. Probably against a proprietary tech stack the client is paying a fee to use. It wouldn’t just be a strategic recommendation; it’d be a resignation note.
So, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t get made. Not because anybody has explicitly forbidden it, but because everyone understands the agenda.
The response comes back full-funnel in the charts, but whilst brand gets the flowery language, performance gets the budget. It was never even a consideration for the strategist to argue otherwise, knowing full well that defending long-term brand equity is worth considerably less to their career than hitting next quarter’s CPA.
The result is a discipline quietly hollowed out by a generation of media planners raised on dashboards, more fluent in the platforms’ own jargon than in how advertising actually works, and who have never contemplated making a case against the platforms.
Consequently, we have a generation of clients who, understandably, have concluded that if the strategy always delivers the same answer, then why pay for it?
Hence, the creative problem and the media problem are effectively the same problem.
Media bought in identical environments, against identical data, optimised to identical benchmarks, does not just deliver diminishing returns. It actively guarantees inferior work, because the formats it rewards are the formats in which almost nothing memorable can happen. It’s a barren creative environment by design.
Creativity was the casualty
None of this would matter if the industry had protected its golden goose: the multiplier. Study after study, including the IPA’s decades of data, shows creativity to be the single biggest amplifier of advertising effectiveness, short and long term. Distinctive, emotionally resonant ideas are what multiply media spend into disproportionate business impact. The art is what transforms the science into magic.
Instead, creativity has been reduced to a box on a process map. Ideas are developed inside a stifling grid of pre-determined drop-down mandatories, formats, platform specs and last quarter’s benchmarks, rather than being unlocked by genuine human insight and ingenuity.
Force yourself to sit through a TV ad break and try not to be offended by the formulaic mediocrity. Work that is as dull as it is forgettable.
However, creativity didn’t decline because of a lack of talent; it declined because genuine creativity requires risk, and we now have a system that engineers it out at every level.
The most powerful campaigns in advertising history did not come from codified processes and consensus. They came from bold leaps that unsettled clients, defied convention and sometimes failed their pre-tests. Cadbury’s Gorilla famously did. I worked on that account several years after the ad aired and saw how the payback was still isolatable. Risk doesn’t guarantee effectiveness, but it gives you a fighting chance.
An industry ripe for fear
So, how has an industry that once took pride in its nerve become so allergic to risk?
Consider the conditions under which most people in advertising now work. Once-great agencies that occupied floors of premium office space have been reduced, literally and metaphorically, to sharing a campus floor with the IT helpdesk.
Optimism about the pay review has been replaced by dread of the next restructure, a near-permanent feature of the landscape, with AI-promised efficiency gains for shareholders guaranteeing even more.
It’s worth being clear why. People are the HoldCos’ single biggest cost, and nothing suppresses that cost more cheaply than insecurity. A workforce that fears the next round doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t leave, and doesn’t argue. The fear isn’t collateral damage. It’s cost control. Budgets shrink, targets inflate, and every announcement of a saved account is greeted less with celebration than with trepidation about the commercials that won it.
In that environment, a bold idea that fails becomes clear evidence of recklessness and a career liability.
Nobody behaves bravely with their mortgage on the line, and when your job feels contingent on not putting a foot wrong, fear of the consequence outweighs any gamble on brilliance.
And fearful organisations don’t just produce cautious work; they select for cautious people.
The people who rise are the deferential, those who can be relied upon to deliver on-message and never to create a problem. Promote deference often enough, and you end up with leadership optimised to avoid blame, incapable of inspiring courageous work, since their own success was never down to being brave.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell recounts a national airline that kept crashing despite competent crews and well-maintained aircraft. The problem turned out to be cultural. Co-pilots were so deferential they would watch a captain fly into a mountainside rather than challenge him. The fix was to flip the hierarchy of challenge, and the crashes stopped.
HoldCo management culture now resembles that cockpit. Full of well-paid execs who can see the mountain, will discuss it candidly over coffee, but have learned that calling it out in the meeting isn’t worth the risk.
AI can only make things worse. The HoldCo promise made to shareholders is explicit: the same output with fewer people, immediately sharpening chronic staff insecurity into dread. Automating the cheaper part of the business whilst frightening the expensive part into silence.
Courage is mastery of fear
If fear is the disease, the remedy isn’t an off-site workshop on bravery. You can’t teach bravery inside a culture that neither inspires nor protects it. Instead, I believe at least three things need to change.
Leadership. Culture comes from the top, but as a senior strategy director described it to me, ‘We used to be led by architects; now it’s plumbers’. Instilling courage by protecting those who take creative risks, valuing judgement as an alternative to proof and promoting the internal honesty that fearful, low-growth cultures suppress all need to be explicit parts of the job description for senior management. However, history suggests that fearful hierarchies have a poor track record of reforming themselves, meaning this may require different people doing their job.
Strategy. Media planning needs to regain the confidence to deliver an inconvenient answer, which requires agencies whose economics don’t mandate a convenient answer. Reverting to my last article, an independent agency sector has that spirit baked into its DNA.
Numbers. It’s easier to be brave when you’re backed by hard evidence. The dashboard culture prevailed because it came pre-loaded with gritty data, while brand-building showed up in their Ferraris with flaky conviction and a Cinzano ad reel from the 80s. Econometrics, incrementality testing and long-term brand equity tracking are all considerably more sophisticated than a decade ago, and none of them tells as flattering a bottom-funnel story as the platforms’ own reporting. But giving the bottom-funnel a kick isn’t enough. Full-funnel investment needs to prove full-funnel return in CFO-friendly language.
Clients are critical
None of this happens without advertisers’ buy-in; it must deliver at a business level.
One of the few things that Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp seem to agree on is the importance of brand distinctiveness, and in a sector drowning in over-optimised sameness, it’s possibly one of the last competitive advantages.
However, genuine, effective, distinctive work can only come from agency partners brave enough to originate and recommend it.
To be brave, partners need to be empowered and, crucially, rewarded. That means paying for thinking rather than squeezing it. It means treating a strategist prepared to tell you something inconvenient as a valuable asset, not a nuisance. It means measuring your agency by whether the business grew over a reasonable period, not whether last quarter’s dashboard hit your bonus KPI. It also means openly acknowledging that a genuinely brave idea inevitably carries a risk of failure.
Finding a better way
Successful advertising has always been a confidence game, grounded in the courage and conviction to back an idea before any guaranteed evidence. But, despite the HoldCo bluster, the industry appears to have very little of that conviction left.
Only a fresh breed of leadership, both agency- and client-side, can inspire the talent by championing the human capability and courage required to restore an industry once overflowing with ideas and creativity to its former pomp.
What we should fear most is doing nothing.
Matt Sanders spent three decades in UK media agencies and now works as an independent strategy consultant.