Better stories need more than great creative

 

How many specialists does it take to build a campaign?

 

Walk into most product briefing sessions today and you would be hard pressed to find a spare seat in the boardroom.

Creative, media, social, content, PR, performance, influencer, data, technology and production specialists may all be represented. Each brings valuable expertise. But does building a campaign really need to be this complicated?

 

I would argue not. For years, the advertising industry has moved in one direction, specialisation. The entire system has evolved into separate disciplines, businesses and reporting structures.

 

On paper, the logic was sound. Each discipline could develop deeper expertise and greater technical capability. But somewhere along the way, specialisation became separation.

 

Clients were left managing increasingly fragmented agency ecosystems, with different partners developing different elements of the customer experience, often against different objectives, timelines and measures of success. Which can lead to a significant reduction in productivity whilst agencies and specialists fight over who has the right to do the work. We’ve all been in those meetings, and the passive aggressive emails that follow.

 

The result is not simply greater complexity. It is weaker work.

 

Ideas are developed without a clear understanding of how they will travel. Media plans are built after the creative decisions have already been made. Audience insights sit in presentations rather than influencing the work. Performance teams optimise the final click without always understanding the wider brand story.

 

Every individual discipline may be doing its job, but the whole system is not necessarily working together.

At Cummins&Partners, we have deliberately chosen a different model. We call it Tell The Whole Story.

 

It is the belief that strategy, creative, media, data and measurement should operate as one connected growth system, from the first audience insight through to the final commercial result.

 

We have kept media inside the agency because we believe the best work happens when creative and media thinking develop together, rather than being handed from one agency to another. We aren’t alone in this belief, there are a small number of other well-respected agencies operating in the same space.

 

That belief is also not new. It has been central to Cummins&Partners for years. But it is becoming increasingly valuable as channels multiply, consumer attention fragments and marketers face growing pressure to demonstrate effectiveness.

 

My own background is in media, and throughout my career I have seen the difference it makes when media thinking is involved from the beginning of the creative process. Media should never be viewed simply as the distribution of an idea. It should help shape the idea itself.

 

The strongest campaigns do not begin with a Video asset or media schedule. They begin with an understanding of people, what matters to them, how they behave, where their attention exists and what will motivate them to act.

 

Creative can then be designed to travel through the environments, formats and moments where it will have the greatest influence.

 

Media, in turn, becomes more than a buying plan. It becomes a growth system. Connecting audiences, ideas, channels, investment and measurement around a shared commercial objective.

 

Our recent work with Equip Super demonstrates the value of that approach.

 

By connecting brand strategy, distinctive creative, integrated media planning and continuous optimisation, the campaign delivered a 5-point¹ increase in awareness, a 3-point¹ increase in consideration and a 43%² increase in member acquisition.

 

Those results did not come from creative and media working alongside each other. They came from creative and media influencing each other.

 

The audience strategy shaped the creative platform. The characters and campaign idea were designed to work across television, BVOD, out-of-home, audio, social and a successful Supercars partnership. Media performance informed optimisation, while every channel contributed to the same brand and growth story.

 

That is what genuine integration should look like. Clients do not buy disconnected disciplines. They buy outcomes.

 

They do not care which department generated the insight, developed the idea, negotiated the media or optimised the campaign. They care about stronger brands, more customers, greater efficiency and measurable commercial growth.

 

Delivering those outcomes requires more than placing multiple services under one agency logo. It requires shared accountability, connected teams and a single view of success.

 

Perhaps the question we should be asking is not how many specialists it takes to build a campaign, but whether they are all working together to build the same one.