Agency and Team Leadership

The CMO as operating executive

The CMO role is not primarily a creative leadership role. It is an operating executive role. You manage budgets that often represent the second or third largest operating expense in the business. You manage vendor relationships, agencies, platforms, technology partners, that collectively employ more people than your internal team. You manage internal stakeholders, sales, product, finance, the CEO, who all have competing claims on your resources and attention.

Creative excellence is not sufficient. You need to be as rigorous in your operating model as any other C-suite executive.

Structuring a marketing team

Every effective marketing function needs four core capabilities, whether in-house or via agency:

• Strategy: brand positioning, audience insight, campaign planning, measurement design.
• Creative: concepting, copywriting, design, production.
• Media: channel planning, buying, optimization, attribution.
• Analytics: data collection, reporting, modeling, insight generation.

The question is not whether you need these capabilities but how you source them. Early-stage companies typically need strategy and analytics in-house, with creative and media outsourced. Scaling companies bring creative in-house first. Enterprise companies bring media in-house last.

How to brief an agency

The root cause of most bad creative work is a bad brief. Before you evaluate the agency, evaluate the brief. A brief that is vague, internally contradictory, or committee-compromised will produce vague, contradictory, compromised work every time. The agency cannot outrun a bad brief.

The three things a brief must do: clearly define the one problem to solve, give the agency something true and non-obvious to work with (the insight), and give them enough freedom to surprise you. The brief sets the destination, not the route.

Agency evaluation: what actually predicts performance

• Chemistry. You will disagree. The question is whether disagreement leads to better work or to one side capitulating. Good agencies push back on briefs. That is a feature, not a bug.
• Thinking quality. Ask to see their strategic process, not just their portfolio. How do they develop insight? How do they evaluate ideas? What do they do when a campaign is not working?
• Production rigor. The most creative idea delivered badly is not better than a simpler idea delivered perfectly. Ask about their quality control process.

Running creative reviews

The difference between feedback and direction: feedback describes your reaction ("this doesn't feel right"). Direction specifies the problem ("this visual hierarchy puts the secondary message before the primary one, which contradicts the brief"). Feedback puts the burden of problem-solving on the agency without enough information to solve it. Direction is specific, brief-referenced, and actionable.

Managing up: communicating to CEOs and boards

Most CEOs do not speak marketing. They speak revenue, profit, and risk. Your job is translation. Every marketing presentation to a board should lead with business outcomes (revenue contribution, market share, customer acquisition cost) before it touches marketing metrics (brand awareness, campaign performance, channel results). The marketing metrics are supporting evidence, not the story.