UK Independent Agencies’ Conference

By George Porteous

Last September, the Alliance of Independent Agencies, Agencynomics and Pimento came together to host an event to support the UK’s marketing and communications agency industry: the inaugural UK Independent Agencies’ Conference.

Victoria Fox, CEO AAR, was asked to join a panel on ‘What has happened to creativity?’ with Andrew Bloch and Rankin, led by Lucrezia Millarini. The panel focused on creativity and what it means to be creative today; how creativity has evolved with new channels and ways to express creative ideas; whether independent agencies have more flexibility to be creative and how to extend creative thinking to help both agencies and clients tackle a likely recession in the economy.

It was a lively and interesting debate that covered a lot of ground. One school of thought was that creativity is cyclical and in times of great change, in this case technological change, we tend to look inwards and focus on the medium not the message. Another topic that really piqued interest was AAR’s recent research with CMOs which showed a real disconnect in the industry. While the majority saw creativity as a key driver for growth, less than a third said they were doing anything to engineer the right conditions within their organisations for creativity to flourish on a sustainable basis. If it is such an important driver of growth, why leave it to luck?

The impact of the impending recession on marketing budgets loomed large. Would clients fall back to short-term marketing goals only? While this may seem an obvious move, COVID-19 could have shifted the dial. All on the panel had seen a real step change, creativity and lateral thinking to face into the challenges caused by the pandemic and, in many cases, these steps had fundamentally changed those businesses. Has this experience taught marketers to be even braver in recession? It was concluded that this depended on how much trust the CMO had in the boardroom.

This panel session was one of many throughout the day, and the feedback was really positive. The independent agency sector is a growing and thriving community and events like these are great for networking and inspiration. ●