Stop just talking about growth - here's how to deliver it

Richard Huntington's piece last week cleverly articulated what the industry has been quietly realising for years: we've become our own worst enemies. We've gone from counsel to suppliers, from the room where decisions are made to the room where executions get approved. From building businesses to making ads. The diagnosis was sharp and necessary, even if it was most likely painful for many.

The problem is that diagnosis is easier than remedy, and most of what's happened since is agreement without much action. Everyone nods at the argument and stops there. The harder question is how. How does an agency rebuild that lost influence? What structurally has to change? Because if the answer is carry on as before, but with the word growth added to the front, then we're all just wasting everyone's time. Growth doesn't come from better campaigns alone. It comes from connecting the entire system that produces them.

The first practical shift is that every challenge must be treated as a growth challenge, answered with a theory of growth rather than starting with a brand or communications plan. That means starting with commercial friction. The opening question is not ‘What do you want to say?’ but ‘What is stopping this company from growing?’

Sometimes the answer is awareness, but often it is something else entirely: pricing power, conversion inefficiency, market perception, sales alignment, investor confidence, or a broken customer journey. Brand and communications absolutely play a role, but they play it better when they're answering the right problem rather than leading the diagnosis.

In practice, this means starting every engagement with a growth diagnosis:

From that comes a hypothesis about which lever, pulled hardest, will move the numbers. Strategy, creative, media and technology then align around removing that friction as one system. The creative answer follows better because the team is solving the right problem rather than the briefed one.

The discipline this requires is uncomfortable but unavoidable. If we can't articulate how our blood, sweat and tears will deliver top-line growth, we have no business being in the room. That means saying it before the contract is signed, not inventing the explanation six months later. It means being willing to tell a client that the brief in their hand isn't the right one, which is a conversation a generation of us has trained ourselves out of having. It also means being prepared to walk away from work we don't believe we can deliver growth on, which is harder than it sounds when the lights need keeping on.

Which brings us to the CFO - they are not the enemy. They control the capital that funds the growth our work is meant to deliver. The reason marketing and finance talk past each other is translation, not hostility. Marketing talks in impressions, reach, and brand health. Finance thinks in payback periods, capital allocation, and risk.

The fix is to stop presenting marketing as spend and start presenting it as capital allocation. A CFO is not looking for brand love. They are looking for the confidence that investment will create future cash flow, that the company is becoming more competitive, and that growth is predictable and scalable. 

Earning that confidence means speaking a different vocabulary. Efficiency versus effectiveness. Acquisition quality versus volume. Payback periods. Retention economics. Market expansion. Pricing leverage. Growth risk. These are the terms in which capital allocation decisions actually get made, and they should be in every senior conversation an agency has with a CFO.

It also means involving finance earlier, not at the end of the budget cycle when the conversation has already become defensive. It means doing the financial homework.

Before the conversation, an agency ought to know the client's current cost of acquisition and lifetime value and the ratio between them, the operating margin and where it's under pressure, the board's growth target for the year and what happens if it gets missed, and what the most recent earnings call reveals about what the CFO is genuinely worried about.

The difference between presenting a campaign that costs £2m and presenting an investment that returns it is precisely this homework. However, none of this is about caring less about creativity. Creativity wins hearts, changes minds, and moves people who weren't planning to be moved. There is nothing more powerful in the commercial world. The problem was never creativity. The problem was that we let it sound like the destination rather than the means by which it is reached.

Growth is what we do. Creativity is how we do it. The work suffers wherever one-half is treated as the senior partner.

The agency that defines the next decade will be the one whose clients grew the fastest. Almost without exception, those will be the same agencies making the work everyone wants to talk about. The two things have never been opposites – we've just spent too long treating them as if they were.

Chris Shadrick, director of strategy at Ammunition