Some agencies have lost the plot, says Goodway Group’s Paul Frampton-Calero

With over 25 years working across the agency and advertising ecosystem, Goodway Group’s Paul Frampton-Calero has a blunt assessment of the industry: Agencies need to be focused on growing their clients’ businesses, not just their own.

Frampton-Calero spoke with The Current’s Lee Singletary about how some agencies have “lost the plot,” how fragmented measurement can obscure what actually matters and why he believes the industry has reason to be optimistic.

What should marketers expect from their agency partners now that they really couldn’t three, four or five years ago?

I worked at Havas for many years, so I’ve worked on the holdco side. I’ve worked on the independent side. I actually worked at a tech company and had a marketing and sales team.

I’ve worked in all different parts of the ecosystem, and agencies need to be agencies for the brand and for the customer, not for themselves. There’s been a period of time where I think the agency became so focused on being an agency for their own bottom line that they lost their raison d’être.

And if you look at the definition of the word “agency,” it’s to work on behalf of someone to drive an outcome. Agencies need to get back to understanding clients’ businesses, understanding how they bring incremental understanding of those customers and then how their craft and their expertise and intelligence supplement what the brand has.

Brands have lots of expertise. They don’t always need agencies; but I think agencies are additive to that equation. So I would just encourage all agencies to remember they’re here to grow businesses, not to win awards.

Do you think we lost the plot?

We did lose the plot. And hopefully we’re refinding it this week.

I’m enthused by the fact that I see more collaboration. I see less fear about AI. I see people seeing creative and media coming back together through data and analytics and intelligence. Very slowly, I’m not sure it’s like a big bang. But I see some things to be optimistic about.

You’ve been very vocal about connected commerce. For a CMO who still thinks in terms of silos, what is it and why is it valuable?

I think about the fact that the consumer journey used to be linear, and now I call it a game of snakes and ladders.

You can win on brands, but you can lose if you haven’t got machine availability or if someone finds a bad review on Reddit or whatever it might be. In order for brands to actually connect across the funnel, they need to start reconnecting all the things that we disconnected over the last 15 years of digital. We created all these disparate disciplines that don’t communicate and work with each other.

Connected commerce is not just about connecting media, connecting full-funnel brand performance and retail media. It’s also about connecting disciplines on the marketing side to make sure that loyalty, media and all of the ways that you think about working with shopper marketing comes back together, because, ultimately, the consumer is moving at the speed of lightning.

AI is accelerating that. And yet quite often, legacy structures and silos get in the way of actually connecting the journey to win the modern shift.

What does it solve for that a legacy structure couldn’t today?

I just talked to an old client of mine that’s now at Pizza Hut, and she was talking about the damn dashboard.

Everyone says, just look at the dashboard and it will help you. But the problem is there’s a different dashboard for social, for programmatic. There’s a different dashboard for loyalty, for paid media, there’s an MMM model.

We don’t have a holistic way of looking at measurement and effectiveness. We need to solve the tools, the talent and the structure all in harmony in order for this to work.

Most marketers say that they are outcomes-driven but are still reporting channel metrics. For new brand clients, in particular, what’s the first metric that you look at to really assess campaign impact, but mostly campaign impact for business outcomes?

Lots of people use the word outcomes, and then they use very downstream metrics and try to call it an outcome.

The reality is an outcome is [if] there is more revenue generated and was that revenue high margin? That’s what real businesses want in terms of growth from marketing and marketing as a great engine.

In retail media, particularly, we often talk about have you won somebody new to brand or is that incremental ROAS? They’re OK metrics but really brands care about did I grow my shelf share? Did I grow the category and my share of the category?

That’s what they really care about. And they ultimately care about the percentage of net sales or what drives through to the bottom line.

Yet, because we’ve created this channel-centric, siloed ecosystem, a trader working on The Trade Desk or someone that’s pushing an influencer campaign or someone that’s running the Nike brand film, those people are looking at completely different metrics.

And they’re not all thinking about what’s the ultimate outcome I want. We need to harmonize around it. And it’s very hard for an agency to work on outcomes-based remuneration unless you’re aligned with the client in the first place on what a good outcome actually is.