Author: Maureen Hoch

The creation of a successful advertising or marketing campaign requires a tricky formula. In a multi-platform world, it includes inventiveness, risk-taking, and luck. And the decision-makers often face a myriad of choices, as we’ve been exploring in the Future of Advertising Insight Center.

To shed a little light on what it takes to manage this process, we asked a group of top CMOs and advertising executives — from Xerox, Leo Burnett USA, Cleveland Clinic, Adobe, and Nike — a question: If you could solve one challenge in the advertising business, what would it be?

Read on for their answers:

Christa Carone – Chief Marketing Officer, Xerox Corporation

The challenge we’re seeing is that “paid” is no longer the hero in the marketing mix. “Earned and owned” are playing more prominent roles than ever before. To really engage in conversations with stakeholders, brands are developing and curating quality content that cuts through the clutter. The spots and dots only work if they’re tightly woven into a consistent and ongoing narrative from and about the brand.

No doubt, advertising agencies can produce the smartest creative, but their businesses were not built to deliver within the speed and cost parameters required for “always-on” content marketing. Brands like ours need highly creative content — lots of it. Advertising agencies have highly creative people — lots of them. But does the Madison Avenue business model survive their clients’ demands for content at scale delivered in much more nimble and efficient ways?

Susan Credle – Chief Creative Officer, Leo Burnett USA

Let’s reverse the trend of advertising agencies becoming vendors and get back to the business of being trusted, respected partners. We give away brilliant thinking because it does not come with hard costs. How do you put a price on a set of words that defines a company or a brand? Creative ideas often appear cheap, even free, and yet, the best ones are priceless. Therein lies the tension.

Unlike a lawyer who charges by the minute, or the FTE (a tragic acronym for full-time employee that has crept into our business), a great idea can happen in a flash. Time spent solving a problem does not define the value of the solution.

Project-based assignments force agencies into the vendor business. But a valued partnership embraces long-term growth and thinking. A partnership doesn’t come down to math. A partnership is not just a transaction between two companies. A partnership is about mutual support and success. The global economy, not just advertising, would be far better off if we would get back to truly embracing partnerships for mutual success.

Paul Matsen – Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Cleveland Clinic

The business of advertising is fundamentally changing as digital and mobile platforms become the primary way of connecting with consumers. Content marketing expressed through social media, apps, search, and e-mail marketing must be integrated with mature platforms such as print media, television, and digital display advertising. The challenge facing the advertising business and marketers is how to effectively and efficiently organize for this new, nimble era of content creation.

Traditional agency models often lack the depth of business knowledge and cross-platform skills to address this need. Internal marketing and communications departments are also poorly equipped to move with the speed and teamwork required. To be successful in the digital, content marketing era, marketers and agency teams are going to need team members who can create and shape a narrative and be part of an agile, multi-platform team that executes in real time. While this may sound like a huge challenge to overcome, we witnessed during the Super Bowl how smart marketers are responding to events in real-time to build their brands.

Ann Lewnes, Chief Marketing Officer, Adobe

Advertising has long had an accountability issue. There’s that old adage: “I know half my advertising works, I just don’t know which half.” This cliché is obsolete…or at least it should be. The answer is digital. As more advertising has moved to digital, and with the tools and technology we’ve got at our disposal, advertisers are well positioned to tackle this challenge. We now have critical data and insights about how our campaigns are performing and we know more about our customers than ever before.

This will only happen if marketers accelerate the shift to digital. Gartner estimates that today most marketers are spending, on average, 25% of their budgets on digital. We spend 74% at Adobe. And we invest heavily in digital marketing technology. This has enabled us to determine the budget we need to hit our revenue goals as well as model the ideal media mix. Throughout a campaign, we measure the impact of every element of the mix and optimize the campaign based on what we learn. There are no excuses anymore for not knowing how your advertising is working.

Davide Grasso, Vice President of Global Brand Marketing, Nike

Brand storytelling is both an art and a science. As marketers, we need to make things simpler and remember to romance the story along the way.

When communicating a brand’s story, it’s important not to complicate the storytelling by adding friction through unnecessary layers. To avoid this, it’s critical to ask the following: What’s the best way to unleash strong ideas and engage consumers in your story with a relevant and authentic experience? And why should they care? If you’ve satisfied these answers honestly, your story can end up being the one people love and, more importantly, remember.

It’s not usually an easy thing to ask for extended leave from work. At best it’s a friendly negotiation; at worst, it’s a career-ending blow or an entry into financial hardship.

The Family Medical and Leave Act (FMLA) was passed into U.S. law 20 years ago this week with the goal of shifting that conversation. The law gives eligible workers the right to job-protected leave in certain circumstances like serious illness or the birth of a child. An employer doesn’t have to pay you for this leave but does have to continue your health insurance. (Read the full eligibility list from the Labor Department and the full list of reasons why you can take FLMA).

This 2012 Labor Department study is chock-a-block with statistics on usage of the law, as well as its limitations. The predominant reason was an employee’s own illness. Nearly half of all leave events lasted 10 days or less and only around 60% of U.S. workers are eligible for the law’s protections. About 56% of employees who took FMLA leave were women.

So 20 years after FMLA — are we better off? And what gaps should we be addressing? For help understanding the big picture around the law, work-life issues, and the road ahead, I sent some questions to Emily Zuckerman, Senior Director, Global Administration and Legal Affairs, at Catalyst. She practiced labor and employment law for more than 10 years and holds a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. Below is an edited version of our exchange.

In the last 20 years, workers have used FMLA a reported 100 million times. What’s changed the most over the past two decades, and what hasn’t?

Workplaces — and work-life expectations in particular — are very different than they were in 1993. For example, demographic change has drastically altered the workforce. It is often reported that members of Generation X are willing to trade financial rewards for family time, as they sense they may not be as well off as their parents. Meanwhile, Generation Y and millennials find face time less essential, and merge their work and home lives more than any generation in over a century. These changes have made work-life issues important to both men and women.

In addition, the academic and policy debate has shifted from viewing work-life as an individual problem to a structural one, and it has shown how current workplace expectations disadvantage both men and women. Although change has been limited, the problem has been articulated more clearly than ever before.

Clearly there have been benefits to the passage of the FMLA. As Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, said on Feb. 4, the FMLA has “had an enormous impact, letting tens of millions of workers take leave when they needed it the most, and changing the culture in this country. Those are women who needed medical care during difficult pregnancies, fathers who took time to care for children fighting cancer, adult sons and daughters caring for frail parents, and workers taking time to recover from their own serious illnesses. Because of the FMLA, their health insurance continued and their jobs were waiting when they returned to work.”

But it is important to remember that some things have not changed over the years. No new major work-life policy has been passed during that time. And, as the National Partnership for Women & Families points out, women are still less likely to be covered by the FMLA or employer benefits such as paid sick days because they tend to work for smaller employers, have shorter tenures, and cobble together multiple part-time jobs. To help manage work and life responsibilities, many women still need predictable schedules to ensure childcare, fewer rigid work rules that prevent them from making a phone call to check on a sick child, and less mandatory overtime.

What about the employer’s point of view? What challenges and changes have work-life policies brought about for them?

Since the passage of the FMLA, “work-life” has become a part of the workplace lexicon. Just as employers adopted policies saying they do not discriminate based on race, sex, national origin, etc., in response to discrimination laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s, no large employer today would be without a leave of absence policy, covering everything from maternity leave to military caregiver leave.

The FMLA forced covered employers to institute large leave of absence programs, often hiring outside vendors and laying out clearly which leaves are paid and unpaid, which benefits are maintained, etc. Of course, implementation of work-life policies still varies by employer. But like Equal Employment Opportunity and discrimination before it, work-life has now become a permanent part of the workplace vocabulary. This is a change for employees as much as for employers.

Yet employers must go beyond the FMLA and other laws that are on the books. Organizations are becoming more focused on retaining talent and maximizing their effectiveness in order to compete in a global environment. Flexibility is seen as a key vehicle for accomplishing this, and new ways of working are developing as the workplace adapts to technological advances. Companies must figure out ways to respond to these ongoing work demands and market changes.

What should come next?

Although the FMLA, and the need for paid family leave, are one part of fixing the workplace, we must continue to build on it. Business leaders concerned about a wide range of issues surrounding performance and accomplishment recognize that their organizations can benefit from taking a broader approach to work-life because of its effects on workplace and employee sustainability.

New technology has changed expectations of how and where people work, and will continue to do so. Deeper structural change in the culture and expectations is the next step. Historical context shows us that the meaning of work has changed over time and will continue to do so. This is bigger than one company, but rather the entire culture of work.