How 'Inside the box' thinking wastes billions of ad dollars

Marketers want big ideas that go beyond TV, or so they repeatedly tell their agencies. Agencies are all about big ideas that go beyond TV, or so they repeatedly tell the marketers. In fact the demands for -- and pledges to provide -- discipline-neutral, original thinking have become so commonplace that “outside the box” is now writ large on marketing’s BS bingo card alongside such overemployed aphorisms as “strategic fit,” “leverage” and “synergy.”

Yet the obvious truth is that most in the U.S. marketing world still think inside the box.

It’s apparent in the billions of dollars wasted on TV commercials for ill-positioned, ill-thought-out products; it’s apparent in the industry’s continuing obsession with award shows that focus on the (venerable) craft of making TV spots and relegate other disciplines to afterthought status; it’s apparent in marketers’ efforts to measure the unmeasurable, and their inability to innovate or change their external communications’ models.

But, most worryingly -- because it’s the talent in the industry that will determine its ability to adapt to the new marketing realities -- it’s apparent in the places that marketers and agencies look for their recruits: Marketers hire many brand managers from business school, where methodology and process, not creative thinking, is order of the day; agencies recruit much of their creative talent by watching rivals’ reels or flicking through books prepared in narrowly focused ad schools.

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