By Abdulfatah Babatunde
A marketing research finding has established that Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are more empowered to deliver transformational creativity and innovation to unlock growth for businesses.
Dentsu Creative Nigeria, a media and advertising agency revealed this in its 2024 CMO report made available to TheNewsZenith at the weekend in Lagos.
TheNewsZernith reports that Dentsu, a media and advertising agency does integrated media services including out-of-home, digital, media buying and planning.
It’s a Japanese company present in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa.
Dentsu Nigeria has Dentsu Creative, Dentsu X, Dentsu Performance and Dentsu Location Services.
Dentive, a division of Dentsu International stated that data from the global survey of 950 Chief Marketing Officers, shows that 79 per cent of respondents agree that marketing is a key driver of business transformation.
TheNewsZenith quotes the report as saying that 83 per cent of CMOs believed that creative ideas can transform businesses.
Also, 81 per cent of CMOs see creativity as more important to their business than ever.
“Innovation has also been identified as a key driver of business transformation, with 56 per cent of CMOs planning to invest more than 20 per cent of their budget on innovation over the next 12 months.
“With CMOs more committed to creativity, they now describe the need for new creativity, evolving from omnichannel to omnipresent. This applied across every aspect of their wider business.
“Subsequently, 79 per cent of CMOs are feeling challenged to predict changing behaviours and shape new products and propositions to serve them.
“Bringing inside-out insight to the business is now identified as the most important role of marketing in many markets,” TheNewsZenith quotes the report as stating.
CMOs are now committed to building brands in emerging spaces and platforms. But data reveal their uncertainty about how to navigate and tell stories in these new channels.
Though 88 per cent of respondents agree that it is more important for brands to be part of culture, 74 per cent are unsure how best to connect brands to culture in meaningful and strategic ways.
A similar hesitation is evident with 77 per cent of CMOs agreeing that brands should be in collaboration with other brands, platforms and creators.
However, 60 per cent of respondents also express concern about relinquishing control.
By contrast, trust in generative artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance creativity as co-pilot and accelerator of human creativity is growing.
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This is with fewer CMOs considering it a threat to human craft and ingenuity.
Sixty-seven per cent of CMOs doubted that AI could create content that moves us in 2023. But the number has dropped 18 percentage points to 49 per cent in 2024.
AI training would now interest majority of 77 per cent of CMOs on their brand’s look, feel and voice tone.
As well as feeling more confident about the potential of AI, CMOs also feel more confident about their role in the face of AI.
They are significantly less likely to believe that AI may replace their jobs.
“What we’re hearing from clients, and our survey confirms, is that they need and value creativity more than ever.
“It’s a new creativity that is business-driven, impacting across every aspect of the organisation from communication to commerce to sustainability.
“In parallel, we see new attitudes to AI emerging, where it’s not a threat to human creativity.
“But a way of giving human creativity superpowers-exponentially increasing the pace and possibilities of personalisation, real-time responsiveness and relevance,” Abbey Klaassen, Global Brand President, Dentsu Creative said.
In its fifth year, the annual study is conducted to provide insight into the hearts and minds of CMOs globally.
This is to help benchmark their direction against peers and support them to develop their creative, experience and innovation roadmaps.
Dentsu Creative’s award-winning Global Chief Strategy Officer, Patricia McDonald, prepared the report.
McDonald coded the responses to 45 questions posed to CMOs in 15 countries. These are Australia, Brazil, China, Canada, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, Saudi-Arabia, Spain, UAE, the US and the UK.
The report was in partnership with Dentsu’s international Strategy, Growth and Marketing community.
It identified eight key themes to offer an indispensable industry toolkit and roadmap, this year.
The themes are calling for agencies to not only respond to briefs but also to challenge and drive transformative change.
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