In Figliulo&Partners Founder and CEO Mark Figliulo‘s new opinion piece for Campaign, he sums up the current state of advertising as essentially a few holding companies, led by a handful of finance gurus, who then select business-forward leaders for individual agencies rather than creatives. The solution, according to Figliulo, is to “empower the storytellers to make sense of” the complex problems facing the current marketing and communications landscape.
“I don’t mean they should lead a campaign or a department, I mean they should lead the whole damn thing,” he clarifies, drawing a parallel to the fashion industry, where “it’s the creative directors who are the visionary leaders of their companies.” He argues, “The same thing has to happen for agencies.”
In other words, today’s creative leaders shouldn’t lead just teams of other creatives, “but strategic and analytic teams, media agency teams, client teams and ultimately millions of consumers.” Such leaders would need to be collaborative and have an understanding of disciplines sometimes seen as outside the creative purview, such as tech, strategy, analytics, marketing and even finance.
Figliulo makes the argument that having a CEO with a creative background is a “priority statement.” Choose a CEO with a financial background instead and you’ll get “procurement-led communications”; one with a client-service focus and you’ll get “‘give the client what they want’ communications.” At such agencies you have to look down the organizational chart quite a ways before you find someone with a creative background. With a creative leader, however, you’ll get the kind of “idea-led communications” that can lead the way forward.
Figliulo does sneak a bit of self-promotion into the piece, ending by presenting his own agency as evidence that a creative-first model can work. He says he “hand-picked an amazing group of partners that are truly exceptional at what they do,” noting that they are “much smarter about finance, strategy, production and client relationships than me.”
He adds, “They are even better at running a viable business than me, but we work well together because we all know that at the end of the day, it comes down to the power of the idea, and the skills of the creative leader to make that idea happen.”
That would be him, right?