Marketing Procurement

What I heard from a year of CMO conversations

I’ve spoken to clients about their worries; I can see they want to be brave. They want to embrace the mindset shift required to tackle bigger and bolder marketing opportunities. They want to use new platforms to try new things.

It’s an interesting time to be an agency group. The big six are about to become the big five. WPP has shed approximately 6,000 members of staff in the past 12 months and have a new CEO to succeed Mark Read.

Promises of greater integration and tech developments have been achieved with mixed results. Smaller, nimbler challenger groups are emerging, powered by potent combinations of Ai and access to brighter and more specialist talent.

I’ve spent time in big networks, small agencies and as a client. And I can honestly say that, now, as a challenger marketing group – MSQ is currently just shy of 2,000 people working in 24 markets around the world, and the UK’s fastest-growing marketing group – I haven’t experienced so much opportunity within grasp.

The tricky thing, of course, is identifying the right opportunities to focus on. I may not have experienced such opportunity in my career, but that’s also meant I’ve never been busier!

Identifying those opportunities means that a good chunk of my job – and in truth, the most fun part – is speaking to senior marketers, brands leaders and adjacent experts to zero in on the solutions they really need.

When it comes to creating and producing marketing collateral, what are the most regularly recurring themes that marketers have told us are keeping them up at night?

And what should that mean for the way marketing groups are set up and how agencies deliver value to clients going forward?

Here’s what I’ve been hearing…

Connectivity

Audiences are becoming increasingly fragmented. We all know this. But understanding how and where you can find your audience – and then being able to adapt your messaging and output accordingly – is still a massive challenge for most brands.

It starts with using the data you have effectively. I’ve spoken to countless marketers who tear their hair out knowing they’re sitting on loads of useful data but still don’t know how to access it or how to use it.

And for those who can – those who understand where their audience is and when they want to reach them – there’s still a different challenge.

Serving an ad on a connected TV platform is very different to serving one on a linear TV platform, because the audience is in a different mindset, consuming content in a different way.

How do you use the data you have and repackage your existing creative and content for new audiences and worlds?

Consistency

Of course, with more distribution channels comes more assets.

I’ve spoken to so many clients recently who are struggling to juggle the desire for creative freedom to personalise assets with the need for brand consistency.

Some of that comes down to how marketers manage the balance between their agency partners and in-house teams, and how they’re set up to work both globally and locally to land nuanced messages whilst still staying on brand.

Now more than ever it’s crucial to have an agency roster or a reliable agency lead that thinks as much about workflow systems and approval processes as it does the initial jazzy shoot.

It’s why our M3 Labs offer is named as it is – because it puts equal precedence on its Make, Manage and Measure capabilities.

How are you connecting your internal and agency stakeholders to develop modular creative frameworks and processes that allow for joined-up thinking?

Speed

You want more, but you also want it now. Which is where I hit 2025 thought leadership bingo by finally using the term ‘Ai’.

Of course, Ai is fantastic for speeding up various processes, but I completely understand the concerns of the marketers I spoke to about feeling overwhelmed with the number of tools on offer.

What’s more, clients are increasingly concerned that their agencies have locked in to ‘an amazing new tech solution’, when we all know that what’s best-in-class today may need unplugging tomorrow.

How can you ensure your agencies are constantly innovating, unconstrained by proprietary tools and with a mindset – and a commercial model – that embraces flexibility?

Trustworthiness

Selecting Ai tools that keep you one step ahead is key, but so is ensuring those Ai tools won’t get you into hot water either.

A lot of clients we’ve spoken to recently have pulled back from their initial Ai flurry because they’re worried about what’s safe to use, what they can and can’t put out into the world and whether they will run into regulatory and compliance issues moving forward.

Currently the uncertainty around Ai, the questions on fairness, transparency, accountability and equity means you need to rely on genuine, trustworthy experts to progress.

How can you ensure your internal teams and external partners are behaving responsibly and have clear guardrails and tool-scrutiny to guide towards safe Ai solutions?

Transparency

You’d like to think we were past this, but the truth is, there’s currently so much content being served up at the wrong time and in the wrong place and it doesn’t appear to be a problem going away any time soon.

We talk so much about the need for transparency. It’s the reason our media agency Walk-In Media exists – launching as a modern, full-service agency focused exclusively on delivering data-driven outcomes for brands.

Because clients are well aware that larger networks are using things like non-linear AV as a way to increase their margins.

They want – but aren’t getting – a single, holistic view of all marketing activity.

How can you make opportunities like Connected TV as open and transparent as possible to foster greater effectiveness and understanding and to build greater agency-client trust?

Sustainability

There was a big push towards sustainable production a few years back, but the clients I’ve spoken to worry that agencies have found the ‘bare minimum’ levels needed to tick the right RFI boxes and aren’t fully committed to sustainable practices.

The need for smarter sustainable solutions is only going to exacerbate, and our work with AdGreen shows first-hand how easy it actually is to measure, understand and reduce carbon emissions.

It can also translate to faster and cheaper production practices too – for example, we’ve used local teams to shoot live plates in Iceland, meaning no need to ship a crew and a fleet of expensive cars to a remote location.

It’s a blow for every creative team whose script starts ‘we open on a beach in the Caribbean’ – and the agencies who take a hefty margin from said shoot – but leads to huge cost savings that can then be reinvested in creating more assets.

How are you and your agencies working with the right partners and sustainability experts to ensure your marketing process is reducing carbon emissions and achieving desired commercial outcomes?

None of this is particularly easy. If it was, it wouldn’t be keeping marketers awake at night.

Yet despite the proliferation of tech and Ai and expanding number of assets and channels and stakeholders, what’s still clear is the need for strong relationships to sit at the heart of this industry.

Because whilst I’ve spoken to clients about their worries, I can also see they want to be brave. They want to embrace the mindset shift required to tackle bigger and bolder marketing opportunities. They want to use new platforms to try new things.

They want to truly commit to sustainable production methods. For those marketers willing to open up new conversations – and for those agencies willing to listen – I predict very exciting times ahead.

About the author

Kate Howe , Executive Director at MSQ Partners

Kate has 30+ years of extensive agency and client-side experience with British, European and global clients. She has experience working at senior management and C-Suite levels with clients such as Cola-Cola, Sony, McDonald’s, Heinz, Post Office, Kellogg’s, John West, Beiersdorf, Vodafone and Santander.