To elevate the entire customer experience, Telstra's marketing team rates every creative output on a 1-10 scale quarterly. This system, marked by internal teams and an external CCO, ensures a high standard across the 'long tail' of marketing that customers see daily, not just hero campaigns.

GM created a tiered agency structure. A "foundational" agency handles high-volume, operational production work (the "60%"). This frees up smaller, specialized creative agencies for each brand to focus solely on distinctive, compelling creative without getting buried in executional tasks.

The advantage of a massive holding company like Publicis isn't just efficiency. Its scale enables agencies like Digitas to build deep, product-level partnerships with platforms like Reddit. It also lets them seamlessly pull in specialized expertise from sister agencies for clients without new procurement cycles.

The modern marketing flywheel requires testing creative organically, then amplifying winners with paid media. An agency that only handles one part of this process cannot be fully accountable for results. To prove ROI, agencies must offer both creative development and media buying as an integrated service.

The modern disconnect between creative campaigns and business results stems from a structural flaw: the unbundling of media buying and creative services into separate agencies. Brands that succeed today, like DTC startups, inherently integrate these two functions, ensuring creative is always measured against business performance.

Changing creative agencies frequently resets brand momentum and knowledge. Consistent, long-term relationships build trust, deep business understanding, and a creative shorthand. This allows conversations to shift from foundational debates to building on shared knowledge, leading to more effective and efficient work over time.

Paying an agency just to brainstorm ideas in slide decks is inefficient and disconnected from modern marketing needs. To be effective, agencies must integrate creative ideation with in-house production capabilities to execute at the volume and speed required by digital channels.

In today's fast-paced environment, paying an agency to simply generate ideas and presentations is inefficient. Brands must move to an integrated production model where ideas and creation happen simultaneously and at scale.

The traditional, siloed agency model of a strategic "hand-off" to a creative team is outdated and inefficient. A more effective future model pairs a strategist and a creative together from the start, short-circuiting the process to produce better work faster.