The Speed of Culture: The Competitive Edge of Creativity With FCB New York's Emma Armstrong

What does a successful brand look like today, and how will it look tomorrow? As companies constantly evolve their models, values, priorities and strategies, it can be overwhelming for marketers. So how can brands keep pace?

In today’s episode of The Speed of Culture, Matt Britton talks to Emma Armstrong, CEO at FCB New York, about the changing role of agencies and how brands can creatively gain competitive advantages.

Truly being creative thinkers and coming at problems from a different way, creating bespoke solutions, is the only way you get a competitive advantage.

Emma Armstrong, CMO, FCB New York

Armstrong has more than 20 years of digital and brand marketing experience. Previously, she was a managing director at iCrossing, evp/global account director at Grey Group, and evp/worldwide senior director at BBDO. Named to the Adweek 50 List of standout leaders in marketing, media and tech in 2020, Armstrong is a purposeful leader who inspires teams to deliver solutions that truly move the needle for clients’ businesses.

Discover more about how brands can creatively attain competitive advantages by checking out the key takeaways of this episode, or read the full transcript below.

Key Highlights:

• The Agency of the Future: Agencies are playing a more active and strategic role for their clients. They take a more holistic approach regarding their processes and mission, coordinating the value exchange between the business and the rest of the world. They also have more open communication with customers to creatively solve brand challenges and provide valuable solutions. To make it happen successfully, you need to have a top team heading in the same direction and aligned to the same values.
• Enabling Better Consumer Experience: The companies that are growing fastest understand how to provide the backbone and infrastructure of a better customer experience. 
• The Energy Revolution Has Arrived: The energy sector is being revolutionized. New products are constantly appearing while existing technologies are being massively improved including batteries and charging networks. These are having a tremendous impact on the automotive industry.
• Making the Most of Life Experiences: Armstrong believes the experience economy, including short- and long-term travel and entertainment, is one of the fastest-growing consumer trends. Thanks to two pandemic years of disrupted plans, consumers now want to rebalance and rethink life priorities.

For more episodes from The Speed of Culture podcast, check us out Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

Transcript

Matt: To thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape, brands must move at an ever-increasing pace. I’m Matt Britton, founder and CEO of Suzy, join me and key industry leaders as we dive deep into the shifting consumer trends within their industry, why it matters now and how you can keep up. Welcome to The Speed of Culture. Today, we’re going to be speaking with Emma Armstrong, who is the CMO of FCB New York. Emma, thanks so much for joining us today on The Speed of Culture.

Emma: Thank you, Matt. I’m delighted to be here.

Matt: We’re going to start by getting to know a little bit about you. You went from working in digital and brand marketing director roles at iCrossing, Grey and BBDO, to now being CMO of FCB New York, really an iconic New York ad agency. Tell us a little bit about your journey that led you to where you’re today?

Emma: I started in digital. I spent 10 years working, for those of you who remember it, at agency.com on and off and across different continents. It sounds a little crazy, but we really built the internet, we created the first digital advertising, we set up all sorts of things for incredible, incredible brands who were just dipping their toe into digital, and what I learned from that was a real love of solving business problems. I came stateside—as you can hear a little bit, my accent is not fully American. I came stateside, and what I realized was we were solving business problems, but back in the early days of digital that was only going so far up the chain, and really unlocking business change was going to require getting to the CEOs, the CMOs.

Matt: A seat at the table.

Emma: A seat at the table, the trusted adviser seat. I moved to bigger, more traditional integrated agencies and ran big global brands for 10 years at BBDO and at Grey and really brought that love of digital solving business problems, together with an understanding of brand and creating platforms that endure and really, truly creating customer value across the entire chain. Then I felt as if I’d got a little bit far away from media, so I went to iCrossing for a bit, and then I ended up at FCB, which really for me is kind of the merging of everything I learned in the last 25-odd years between digital brand and media because I think that’s where the future is going. The future is now.

Matt: Yes, of course. What’s the one brand that you have the most heart for? I know it’s like choosing between your children, so to speak, but what brand have you worked on for your career, whether it’s early stages or when you finally hit scale and got on a big stage?

Emma: That is a great question, and I’m going to dodge the question by saying two. I know. I’m sorry. It gives you an idea about how the rest of this podcast is going to go, Matt. [laughs] Two very different brands, GE and Pantene. GE, we did incredible work. The reason it has a special place in my heart is because it was, at the time, a juggernaut of a company that was very, very hard to understand. I think we did a great job at truly emotionally engaging people and what traditionally was very, very disengaged, don’t really care until something goes wrong. Then Pantene because I went there deliberately to work with some incredible people and truly prove that creativity could drive business, and we did an amazing, amazing job. I’m so proud of the team and the work that we did, launching a global platform and really selling a lot of shampoo and conditioner along the way.

Matt: Often, as you know, it’s less about the actual brand, whether it’s shampoo or toothpaste or deodorant, it’s really about that time in your career, the team you work with, your relationship that you’ve had with the clients.

Emma: Certainly.

Matt: Really, really the feeling that you really made an impact because when I found on both sides of the coin when I was running an agency for 15 years is that sometimes we would have a very lucrative client, but it didn’t really feel like our work was doing anything. I think we were making a lot of pretty PowerPoint decks that ended up on the cutting room floor, or other times whether you had that visionary champion with inside the client organization or you just work with a great team, you felt like what you were doing actually ended up in front of the consumer, it’s actually really impacting the business. I’m sure you will agree when you’re an agency, that what really gets you up in the morning, is when you feel that.

Emma: I totally agree. I’m very bullish about the future of agencies. I think we have such an important role as a translator; we translate the outside world into a company. No matter how good you are, it’s too easy to become a little focused on the company once you’re within it, and then we take the company, the product, the brand, the service, and we translate it back out into the world, and that value exchange is essential. To your point, you have to have a great team. You have to have a great team on the agent side, you have to have a great team on the client side. There really are no sides—it becomes one amazing team pulling in the same direction.

Matt: When we look at the agency world, I think of two existential threats, and they’re both opportunities and threats at the same time. First and foremost is you have these management consulting firms, the Deloitte and McKinsey of the world, who had that ultimate seat at the table because their work is connected to not brand results, but business results now diving into this digital marketing set. What’s always struck me about the management consulting agencies is for some reason, they’re allowed to work on Coke and Pepsi, but the holding companies need to create two different agency brands to work on it. I just never really understood that because theoretically, they’re touching much more sensitive data than even the ad agencies are.

Emma: I totally agree. What’s the saying? Two is a conflict, three is a specialty or an extra team.

Matt: Right. There you go. Well said. It’s crazy. I think the other thread is just, you look at agencies and they’re competing now, whether it’s the Googles or Salesforces or Oracles of the world, and most agencies don’t have their own intellectual property, they don’t have customer data, all they have is people, and in this world where everyone’s fighting for talent, it’s really hard to build that differentiation. When you look at FCB, what is your firm’s differentiation?

Emma: That was a sneaky add into the back of a question. I want to talk about white labeling and the evolving business model.

Matt: Yes, let’s do that, too. Fundamentally, white labeling is a competitive advantage if you’re doing that.

Emma: Massively. I’m coming up on four years, and I will get back to your question.

Matt: Please do.

Emma: I’m coming up on the start of my fourth year, and the first year was really getting the team in place, the second and third year ended up being expanding the agency and surviving and thriving through the pandemic and helping the teams really, really survive. Year four is about evolving our business model for exactly the reason you’re talking about because we’re stuck in this FTE world, and so we’ve got to look at both top line and bottom line because if we don’t fix our business model, we can’t invest in the people, if we don’t have the best people, then I can’t fulfill my promise to the client, which is bringing the best people, the sharpest minds, giving them the right environment to make the best work possible so we can grow our client’s business because all we talk about is using creativity as an economic multiplier. The only way I can do that, and you asked about a competitive advantage, it really is the smart people that we have.

Matt: Has to be, right?

Emma: It has to be. That’s what consulting firms sell, externally, in reality: They sell the playbook. I always think creative agencies have the benefit of truly being out of the box, and it’s such a trite thing to say, but truly being creative thinkers and coming at problems from a different way, creating bespoke solutions, which is the only way that you get a competitive advantage in the world ahead.

Matt: Yes, and innovate and change the story and ultimately build a brand. Every brand is ultimately about the story and where the stories come from. I also would add that the hard thing in being part of a holding company and IPG—I believe is one of the best, if not the best—is that they have pressures [from] Wall Street they need to meet every quarter. So innovating often means you need to take one step back to go two steps forward, but that’s all well and good until you miss quarterly numbers, so it’s basically that balancing act. I’ve been in your shoes before, once my team was acquired by Google’s group, I understand, and I think ultimately, it is about the people and it’s about the relationship you have with your people and that they have with your clients that do great work and ultimately build a great business.

We’re going to move on to the next section, which we call Culture Watch, where basically, I ask you four core questions that really dive deeper into what’s going on inside your brain, and I have a feeling that your brain is really jumbled all over the place because you seem to be a very smart, creative person, eccentric, and you seem to have a lot of ideas like myself, so I’m really interested to dive a little bit deeper into it. The first and foremost is, what’s the most important business decision you had to make quickly?

Emma: It’s not probably an original answer, and I’m sure everybody listening to this will be like, “Yes, me, too,” but deciding when to close the office and then what to do—

Matt: Oh, my God, totally.

Emma: —when Covid hit. There was a moment: We closed the office on a Thursday; on Wednesday, we found out that we had won our first big piece of new business, and we’re all celebrating. Wednesday night at 10 o’clock, I read an article and it was an anonymous doctrine in Italy and she said, “Watching the West right now is like watching a scary movie where the teenagers are going into the basement and you’re screaming at the TV, ‘Don’t go in the basement, you’re going to die!’ and no one is listening.” I texted my boss, who is amazing. I said, “Sorry, IPG, I don’t care. IPG can fire me, but I’m closing the office tomorrow because this is coming and making that decision.”

By the end of Thursday they’re like, “You guys do whatever you want. Figure it out.” It felt as if it happened so quickly. Then suddenly we were at home, and I was incredibly grateful to, and it sounds really silly, but all of the technology that we’d set up already. Like we’re on Slack, we’re using Google Docs and actually, the transition was—

Matt: A lot of companies weren’t didn’t have that.

Emma: No. We had a massive advantage already because it kept the culture going.

Matt: Absolutely. How many people were in the office you were running at that time?

Emma: We have doubled in size in the last three years. I think it was probably around a hundred.

Matt: Big shift. Lots of communication, lots of change management through that.

Emma: A lot of human management as well. Everyone was scared. We forget. Everyone was terrified. We were all terrified. Managing through that and trying to keep our clients’ businesses running was the challenge.

Matt: Absolutely. The second question is what do you think the fastest growing industry will be in the next few years?

Emma: This is a bit of a cheaty answer, but I think the entire industry enables better consumer experience. Everything from your Adobe stack all the way through to the mechanic that is becoming Salesforce through to the behavioral scientists who are having their moment in the sun because they’re figuring out how to take that data and make it into actionable insights and then use it for competitive advantage. The whole infrastructure and web that supports that, because I think customer experiences have changed. The expectation has changed. The adoption curve went like rocket fuel in the last two years. Expectations are never going back.

Matt: When I think about customer experience, I think about why is it so hard to cancel my cable bill? Why is it so hard to change my flight? I think the key about customer experience is landing that overall strategy and practical ways to touch the consumer that really make their lives better. Companies that can do that are ones that are going to win even in the smallest ways that make consumers’ lives better. What do you think the fastest growing product category will be in the next few years?

Emma: I’m fascinated by the revolution and this goes back to my GE days by the revolution that’s happening in the energy sector overall. It’s such a great question. There are a million answers but I do think that there will continue to be a mass revolution in battery tech because that really is the thing, and charging and the infrastructure that brings electricity. Ten, 15 years ago you had new forms of electricity being created and you couldn’t move it efficiently across the country because the systems were so old, not capable of handling it. Everyone wants a Tesla, everybody wants an electric vehicle. We’ve got to figure out a way of making that battery tech that supports that. Then the charging network to support it.

Matt: Absolutely. What I think a lot of people overlook when they think about electric vehicles is that the raw materials needed to build the batteries have their own issues with sustainability. It’s not just, “Oh, we have a Tesla, we don’t use gas anymore, that’s it.” It’s “Where are you going to find the lithium? Where are you going to find the raw materials to basically make the batteries themselves?”

Emma: You know where a lot of them are, in pristine woodlands in the north of Canada or in tiny islands in the Pacific and understanding that chain and making that as close to a closed-loop of recycling as possible because the battery in your car is obsolete after about five years. Also, it can only go 300-400 miles without a charge. They’re incredible, but they’re still so nascent.

Matt: Exactly. Definitely in the first ending there. Then lastly, in terms of the consumer and their changing habits coming out of this pandemic, if we actually are out of it already or not, who knows, changes every day. What do you think the fastest growing trend will be heading into 2023 with the consumer, whether it’s an old trend being revived or a new one in this new world that we’re living in?

Emma: I think it’s an old trend interrupted and now on steroids. The experience economy, travel experiences overall. That’s no surprise to anyone. The economy is incredibly volatile. It will continue to be incredibly volatile and yes, people have been deprived for so long. My family’s in England, there was a period of time where I couldn’t get on a plane legally and go see them.

That is an incredible constriction of our ability to make choices. I think people are using this newfound freedom and ability to feel a bit safer as they go out and about to make good on a lot of what they’ve had to constrain themselves from doing over the last couple of years. We were already moving towards the experience economy anyway, but I think this is just doubling down. Then you’ve got the interesting part, which is the demand is there but there are no pilots. A restaurant here told me it was going to take New York City two years to get back up to the quality of service that we had pre-pandemic because everybody left.

Matt: They got stimulus checks, which they are still living on.

Emma: All the things. It’s fascinating. Looping back around to consumer experience, there’s this pent-up demand. There’s an ability and desire to pay for that demand, and yet you go to a five-star hotel and the experience can be incredibly patchy, for example.

Matt: Absolutely. Did FCB reopen their office?

Emma: The management team came back probably May-June last year. We reopened the office for anybody who wants to come in. We’ve been back partially since September and then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, this month. The vast majority of people have been here and we’re placing a bet on a form of hybrid, and I believe it’s a competitive advantage and time will tell.

Matt: Would you say that the return to office has been flipping on the switch to 2019 all over again or is it markedly different? If so, how?

Emma: That is a great question. I think it will never be the same. What we are seeing is people have a newfound appreciation for the balance that they’ve been able to flex in the last couple of years to the benefit of being together when it matters and using that time together to truly appreciate being together and solving problems together, and then use time apart to do things that require more quiet time, require more thoughtfulness. I think it’s a significant shift.

I’ve always, particularly running global businesses, I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around and I always worked remotely. I have two, not-so-small kids anymore. I’ve always felt as if this industry is pretty flexible. I think that was probably not felt by everybody through the ranks. It’s been interesting talking to people here and saying, “Look, you always could stay home and get your fridge delivered and work from home or if you have a sick kid or if you have many, many, many reasons to go be quiet somewhere or do whatever you want.” It’s reinforcing that we’ve always been flexible. You can continue to be flexible.

Matt: The other question I have coming out of all this is your relationship with your customers. Are they more reluctant to see you in person? Are you seeing them just as much? How has that changed?

Emma: We’ve seen clients and partners move into two very distinct camps. You have the ones that ran back, and then you have the ones that last year decided to let everybody do whatever they wanted. Then a few in between, but it’s actually very polarized. One of the things we’re talking about a lot at the agency is how you manage those two different groups. How do you create in the same way that we are trying to do within the agency? Have a structure and use time together for things that you want to use time together for and then time apart for time apart?

Creating the same relationship with clients and being more thoughtful about why you come together, what you do when you come together, maybe come together for a slightly longer period of time, knock off a lot of the big questions and then go away again. It’s working pretty well. It’s hardest honestly with fully remote, fully dispersed clients. Figuring out how and helping them in some cases, how they come together and reminding them that they also need to come together and maybe we should be there at the same time when they do, it’s interesting. I think the next couple of years we’ll learn a lot.

I feel as if the next couple will be codifying that and truly studying it and then figuring out what works because what works for one industry is not the same as what works for another industry. Even within ours you have an agency in London going back five days a week and you have agencies that are fully remote and everything in between.

Matt: We’re all just figuring it out in the work in progress right now as we try to totally rebalance things. I was excited about what you said about customer experience and how important it’s the ad agency world has changed advertising in general where it used to be much about top-of-funnel brand building. Now what we’re finding is that instead of brands being built top-down meaning I’m going to run 30 second TV spots and I’m going to differentiate why Hershey’s, or Tide or Nike did, in a world where we just watch linear TV. Now, many great brands are being built bottoms-up, meaning they’re being built one great experience at a time. One customer has an incredible experience, they tell somebody else, they share on social media. We all know the story. Has that changed your business model and the way that you pitch brands and ultimately, the role that you guys want to play overall? Because again, we used to just want that big headline award, that amazing TV spot.

While TV still matters, it’s certainly a different world now and customer experience and your answer is customer experience really is emblematic of that.

Emma: Yes, absolutely. For us, it all starts with the audience and truly identifying the audience. We start with behavioral psychology, and we figure out really what the mindset of that audience is. You think back to the days where you had an eight-person segmentation, and you’ve got the busy, hurried mom and the overworked father or whatever it is.

Matt: Cookie-cutter demographics.

Emma: Cookie-cutter demographics, they’re insulting to almost anyone that looks at them now and don’t truly represent the world that we live in. Didn’t then and definitely don’t now. You also look at how those segmentations were used. They were used to create generic insights that went into a TV spot to your point, and then to say, “Oh, here are the big five TV networks that people are watching,” and off we go to the races. We really have taken a step back, starting with the mindset that these people have that unites someone in a shared pursuit, in a shared belief, and whatever that is.

Then we go straight into it, so IPG’s data spine is Acxiom. We have software layers that sit on top that allow us to go in, analyze that data, pull it up, add it to syndicated data and create an incredibly robust audience that takes that mindset, and basically, you know everything about them. It’s based on real humans rather than just extrapolation of tropes and clichés. Not only can you then use that to create incredible experiences, because you truly understand what is going to move their hearts and minds and wallets, [chuckles] which is ultimately what we’re trying to do, but then you can buy against them within the media profile.

I don’t understand how people do business without doing that now, but otherwise, it’s just throwing darts at a dartboard. I think it’s never been scarier, and I say this every year, so it just progressively clearly gets scarier to be a client. If I was a client and our world is so much more porous, most of my friends are clients, I would want as much surety as possible to make the bravest decision possible to move your business forward and compete because it’s a knife fight out there, no matter what you’re doing and who you are, even for the best brands. Why not use that data to understand the people and then create true value exchange?

Matt: Couldn’t agree more. In Suzy, our tagline is assume nothing, validate everything. It’s basically the same thing. It needs to be rooted in data. You can build creativity on top of that. If you have the right data, you know who your audience is, which allows you to cover the right insights and also know where to reach them. It seems so simple when we put it this way, but I think that the advertising industrial complex is built in such a way where it’s not always that simple when you’re working in your organization, you’re working with customer organizations and all the silos that you’re trying to break down. That’s where it becomes challenging.

Emma: Exactly. I think you’re totally right. I think the thing that is holding companies, agencies, independents at the entire world back are those silos. I think back to my days, 15 years ago, running FedEx and it was silo. The data was over here and the marketing team was over here. They’ve done an amazing job of pulling that together, but even then it should have been more closely knitted together.

Matt: Absolutely.

Emma: The client side of that evolution needs to break down. On our side, you said it before, who has that one seat at the table? There are many seats, but there’s always a first seat. We want to be that trusted business partner, but so do a lot of other people. How do you aggregate that knowledge and, really, I think the biggest differentiator for us now that we’re seeing is having people who understand how to create collaborative teams and set a vision. That team includes all the different people that you need to solve the complex business problems, including the clients. Set a vision and move everybody in that same direction. It doesn’t matter necessarily where some of that money flows, it matters if someone is leading the charge.

Matt: Couldn’t agree more. In that is just simplicity doing one thing great, being known for that one thing that’s going to drive business results. That was great. This has been really fascinating just to see inside your world, literally as you show me your office, which is great to see people are back in. In this crazy, fast-moving world that we have right now, what’s the one thing that you slow down for? When do you finally get to take a deep breath and slow down personally?

Emma: I slow down for books and reading. I think it’s one of my most annoying traits, and I like to think it’s a nice trait, but I think it’s probably annoying to most people around me if I’m insatiably curious. You can probably hear that in my career journey and what I poke away at, I just like to learn. I like to know. Nothing absorbs me better than a good book, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction and the annoying part of that is that I will read something and then press it on the next five people that come my way because I think it’s so great and everyone should read it.

Matt: What are you pressing on me, today?

Emma: What type of books do you like to read?

Matt: More business-oriented books versus fiction books.

Emma: This is not a business book, but have you read Being Mortal by Atul Gawande?

Matt: I have not. No.

Emma: I will send you a copy as a thank you for doing this.

Matt: Oh, thank you. We’ll post it in the podcast notes as well.

Emma: Everybody listening, I think it should be required reading for being a human. He’s an incredibly gifted surgeon and also a writer and it sounds like a very depressing topic. It’s about end-of-life care, but it’s the one, death and taxes happens to us all and it is an incredibly charming, uplifting, insightful book about something that we all go through with our loved ones. At some point, we go through ourselves and it’s just, I think, what would help anyone that reads it, so read it.

Matt: Yes. It probably makes you so much more empathetic in your leadership. It’s so important to have that different perspective. You’re in the weeds every day, you read a book like that, it zooms you out a little bit and then you look at things a little differently. I think we all need that so thank you for that. To wrap things up, in our last episode, we had Gayle Troberman, the Chief Marketing Officer of iHeartMedia and we asked Gayle, “If you had one question for our Suzy market research quant network, what would it be? She was really curious about why consumers listen to audio, being in her position as head of iHeartMedia.

Not surprisingly, we learned that while the majority listened for entertainment purposes, many people listen to not feel alone or to feel connected. They had people feel a certain connection with their podcast host or radio host. Just really interesting to hear. I guess to wrap up, and I’d love to know, is there any burning question you have for our Suzy consumer network that you’d like us to dive deeper to, which we’ll reveal the answer on during our next podcast?

Emma: As you started the podcast, I have two questions.

Matt: Great.

Emma: I did crowdsource. In the spirit of Suzy, I did my own little, mini Suzy version and crowdsourced this. This is a question from the agency; one serious, one not so serious, but maybe it’s deadly serious. One is how people’s vision and expectations of leadership have changed over the last few years. Two is, how much fun is everybody having right now?

Matt: I love that.

Emma: Maybe not so serious but maybe deadly serious. Did anyone have fun yesterday? Did they expect to have fun today and are they going to have fun tomorrow?

Matt: Yes, because there’s so many reasons to have fun. The world’s opening up, yet there’s lots of reasons, whether it’s what’s going on in the world more broadly with the political and social unrest that we’re seeing or the financial turmoil, et cetera. There’s a lot of reasons not to have fun, but hopefully, people are finding the light, especially as we head towards the summer.

The Speed of Culture is brought to you by Suzy, as part of the Adweek Podcast Network and a guest creator network. You can listen and subscribe to all Adweek’s podcasts by visiting adweek.com/podcasts. To find out more about Suzy, head to suzy.com.