Hasta La Creative!

By and large, CMOs today aren’t happy. A recent study shows that a CMO’s average tenure decreased from 48 months to 44 months in 2015 — the first drop in a decade. No doubt, quick-turnaround demands from consumers for content, tight budgets, and an endless cycle of seeking new partners to cut costs are contributing to this unhappiness.

But the creative review process recently completed by McDonald’s — despite what some may think about the payment structure offered — has me thinking hopefully about the hard work that went into the process to find the right partner and that it may spur an industry-wide trend of putting more effort into searches for the right reasons.

McDonald’s is one of the biggest accounts an agency could ever hope to land, and it is loyal, having been previously tied to Leo Burnett for 35 years. With that in mind, everyone involved knew that the stakes couldn’t be higher. Rather than sending an RFP far and wide, McDonald’s honed in on a small group of big shops it knew could handle the volume of work it needed. Then, it initiated “chemistry sessions” to get to know the personalities and strategies behind them. The winner, Omnicom, went so far as to build out an entire floor of an office to show McDonald’s what its dedicated team would look like in action. The process was an unusual one, but it shows that the road to finding a dedicated partner shouldn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach.

Continue reading at AdAge.com