It's Time Agency Teams Had a Direct Line to the Client CEO

In October 2023, Huntington was part of a dedicated Publicis Groupe team that helped U.K. telecom brand EE build the blueprint for its biggest overhaul ever, in which it replaced legacy business BT as the group’s flagship consumer brand.

“New EE,” as client CEO Marc Allera has christened it, was launched into the stratosphere with a thumping ad campaign highlighting how the brand shows up for customers every day, whether they are gaming or working.

A closer look at that pivot, though, revealed it to be much more than a marketing push. It was a wholesale business transformation designed to help EE burst the telecom bubble, underpinned by a new retail media platform, an app, fresh products, internal changes and more.

For Huntington, the project is a testament to why creative shops should be engaged with the CEO, not just the CMO. “[Allera] told us this was happening two and a half years ago,” he said. “We sat in empty, socially distanced office spaces, post-lockdown, architecting this plan and what the new brand would do with the guiding belief that for any business to grow, it has to bust out of its current market.

“We built a marketing plan, but also products and services underneath it. Instead of the client communicating to us what it wanted to do, we helped them understand what their vision could look like and how they might want to deliver that to customers,” he added.

Empowering the CMO

This kind of advisory was once the purview of management consultancies, but ad agencies are now increasingly helping clients deliver business transformation across the board.

In guiding these metamorphoses, it’s imperative that agency teams have a hotline to not only the marketing chief, but also to the person sitting in the top seat, said Dena Walker, chief strategy officer at U.K.-based indie agency Above+Beyond.

Her team has recently cultivated close relationships with the CEOs of clients, including paint brand Dulux and betting shop BoyleSports, and the results have been surprising.

“Deliberately bringing these CEOs into our early strategic thinking helped us to give voice to their concerns, opinions and desired outcome as the strategies were developed,” she explained. “In both cases, this really helped our CMOs to establish new marketing strategies and brand platforms that excited their stakeholders—cutting the amount of time needed for stakeholder management and approvals significantly.”

In short, CMOs are empowered when their agency partners have stronger relationships with their bosses. With McKinsey analysts estimating that just 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs have marketing experience, this could help close the gap between the C-suite and marketing team.

Walker agreed: “It means there’s another voice in the room to make the case for marketing, and to demonstrate how marketing is a force for growth.”

Keeping it real

Swedish agency B-Reel was recently briefed by startup founder and CEO Shilo Ben Zeev to create a global platform for biometric baby bottle brand Emulait.

B-Reel founding partner Petter Westlund said building a rapport with CEOs is a “crucial” part of his agency’s DNA. “These relationships typically start at a pivotal point in the client brand’s trajectory—during a strategic shift, scale-up or similar,” he said. “It sets the tone for the entire partnership as one with a shared goal and shared vision for the direction to go in and makes for a shared understanding of the context that is bigger than the KPIs of any specific campaign activity.”

He said working directly with Zeev ultimately led to better creative work because it encouraged more transparent discussions, faster approvals and a deeper understanding of the brand’s vision.

B-Reel builds these CEO relationships through communicating clearly, understanding business goals and showcasing the agency’s value in achieving those goals. “It’s important for many reasons—but CEOs often have the final say, and a direct line can speed up decision-making,” Westlund noted.

Ultimately, having the ear of the CEO could lead to campaigns that work harder, better and faster.

That’s good news for CMOs and their agency partners, in a world where marketing effectiveness firm Fournaise Group recently found that 73% of CEOs hold the view that marketers “lack business credibility” and the ability to generate sufficient growth.

So, agencies—it might be time to pick up that phone and prove your client’s boss wrong.

This story is part of the Connections and Collaboration special feature.

What about the CMO-CEO relationship?

As agencies forge new connections with CEOs, it leaves unanswered questions about what that means for CMOs.

There’s famously a disconnect between the CMO and CEO positions, with underlying tensions around how marketing plans are executed, budgeted for and measured.

A 2022 report from U.S.-based ad agency Boathouse illuminates just how wide the gap is, with just 32% of CEOs saying they trust their top marketer.

For James Rowe, managing director at adam&eveDDB New York, bringing the top boss into the agency fold is one way to close this chasm.

He asserted: “A great CMO will understand that cultivating a bond between their CEO and agencies will ultimately lead to a stronger relationship and more powerful and effective work.

“This doesn’t mean the CEO being directly involved in the work output, but it does mean facilitating moments for [shared] thinking and having both formal and informal conversations about their business and industry,” he continued. “It’s often in these moments that agencies can offer additional value, gain a fresh perspective on the business and the challenges that we collectively need to solve for ‘beyond the brief.'”