Transformational trailblazer.

There’s a very small relationship between brand awareness and performance. There are lots of brands in the world with 95% brand awareness who can’t make their sales numbers. Is Coca-Cola happy with the amount of Coke Red it’s selling right now across the world? No, they’re f#$%ing not.

Look at Burger King. Burger King is lauded as this creative genius brand but they’re not selling any more Whoppers. They’re still one of the worst-performing quick service restaurants in the world. Their output, according to our industry, is the absolute apex of creativity, but the commercial performance that underpins it is abysmal. Those two things [creativity and commercial performance] are not deterministic of one another, and clients need to start seeing us take outcomes and results and growth seriously.

That’s why I think the monetisation models in the industry have been so glacial in their progression. If agencies were really confident that their performance delivered growth, they’d be willing to change their remuneration model to ‘you can pay us when we perform because we’re so confident we’ll help you perform that we’re not going to ask you for the money upfront. But instead of you expecting us to do it at 15% margin with an upfront fee, we want a 30% or 40% margin on a pay-for-success fee.’

If you had a business where you were really confident that you could deliver the results, you would be very quick to redesign and recalibrate your remuneration model to be more reflective of that growth. The reason that a lot of agencies get bullied by procurement departments and whittled down to cents on the dollar is because, at their core, they aren’t advocates enough for their own growth contribution.