As the back-to-school season kicks off, BITE asks industry leaders what they are committed to unlearning. Alistair Schoonmaker, Co-founder and MD at Ultra, is unlearning clients coming with answers and adopting an ask the right questions mindset.

In the not-too-distant past, in my experience, clients seemed to believe they had the strategic questions answered to deliver clear creative briefs to agencies: “Here’s the brief - we want you to develop an amazing idea and then bring it to life".

But as they say, ‘Times, they are a-changin,’ and things are becoming less certain. New questions are being asked by the C-suite about DTC, e-commerce, AI, personalisation, and where audiences spend time.

It’s thrown into question what a brand should brief in. Increasingly, the conversations start with, “Do I need a brand strategy?”, “Do I need positioning?”, and “How do I balance brand and product marketing?”.

Brands often haven’t got everything right before we start creatively. We’ve done a good job of delivering creative answers, but we are being pulled into developing the right questions.

Insourcing vs. Outsourcing

There’s been a significant move towards in-housing in the last five years. Brands often have huge in-house brand and marketing teams now, with many of the core functions of marketing covered.

Part of the idea is to be less reliant financially on external consultancy for support. So it’s become much harder from an economic standpoint for a CMO to go to the C-suite and justify external spending on strategic or even creative consultancy. But brands still need perspective, for a whole host of reasons.

There’s still lots of economic uncertainty at the moment, for one. This can lead to shifts in consumer behaviour that brands need to identify and adapt to quickly - and it’s often easier to spot these meta-trends as an agency working across a wider range of industries and markets.

As a partner, you need to be helping brands avoid tunnel vision and drinking too much of their own Kool-Aid to the point where it’s counterproductive. External suggestions regarding where a smart strategic investment might pay dividends could potentially give clients the confidence to take action (or at least recommend it to the board) rather than simply cut budgets and continue to lose market share.

Brands are also unsure about their marketing mix - some are concerned about how to maximise their ROI and choose the right channels to reach their target audiences, especially in light of challenger brands entering the market in almost every sector and shaking things up. Challengers are changing the rules of engagement. So for those clients who have been in-house for a long time, tried-and-tested methods aren’t always delivering the way they used to.

Beyond that, there’s the current mega-trend of generative AI and all the questions that come along with it about how best to integrate it into creative workflows. This is still a learning process for the industry as a whole, but as creative experts working in the space daily, we’re very much at the coalface and eager to apply our learnings with clients.

Keeping your distance

All this is to say that I’m unlearning clients coming to us with the answers. As an external agency, we’ve got unparalleled insight into how the challenges I’ve outlined (and many more) are being approached across the industry as a whole, so we can offer brands an invaluable sanity check. We also have that crucial distance from the brand that sometimes makes all the difference in terms of perspective.

But that distance shouldn’t mean a gap in alignment. As an extension of the brand itself, we give deeper consideration to its vision, goals, and market challenges. This means we can create work that syncs up with long-term business objectives and the brand trajectory, ensuring strategic cohesion.

Building a long-term relationship with brands allows us to add value where needed by helping them evolve and adapt over time. This is much more likely to lead to sustainable growth, innovation, and consistent value generation than short-term projects.

If clients are coming to creative agencies, we should be helping them to find the right questions as well as answers.