The rise of performance marketing and short-termism means that that today’s marketers often lack the necessary skills to address core marketing principles of brand building and creating long-term value, according to LEGO CMO Julia Goldin.

“We need to bring the marketing back to what its original purpose was,” she told WARC in an exclusive interview. “I feel that will be a much more interesting career for a lot of people.”

At LEGO, Goldin is approaching talent development in three different competencies. “The first bucket is the foundational skills,” she explained. (For more, read the interview in full: How marketing can overcome the talent crunch: LEGO’s experience.)

“They are the same today as they were 50 years ago, and I believe they’ll be the same 50 years from now – for example, obsession with the audience and real customer-centricity.”

The second bucket is about brand-building. “You need to know how to create value – not just with creative marketing campaigns, but what value you bring to the experiences with the products,” she said.

In LEGO’s case, this means an obsession with how kids engage with the brands. LEGO marketers need to be customer-focused in everything they do, Goldin said, and be dedicated to building a brand with real purpose across all touchpoints.

The magic is in the third bucket that brings it all together: creativity. “What is so unique about marketing is it’s a real combination of art and science,” she observed.

“It’s a real combination of left brain and right brain systems. You can’t just be fully rational and logical, there’s always a bit of magic that you need to be able to bring to create really interesting, innovative solutions.”

That left brain-right brain divide is the subject of a new publication from the IPA published today. Lemon identifies the elements in advertising which appeal most to the holistic right brain – like metaphor, music and a sense of place – and those which attract the more focused left, like onscreen text, abstract body parts and rapid rhythmic edits.

An analysis of 30 years of TV ads traces a decline of right-brained elements in advertising and draws on effectiveness research into modern ads to show that exactly these declining elements are the most effective for brand growth. (Read more details in this Admap article: Flatland: Addressing the crisis in video advertising creativity.)

“Advertising needs to entertain for commercial gain,” said Orlando Wood, Lemon author and Chief Innovation Officer at System 1. “When it doesn’t, the whole advertising ecosystem runs to seed; when it does, it unlocks growth and builds reputations.”

Julia Goldin is co-leading the workstream addressing talent as part of the CMO Growth Council, an initiative by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Cannes Lions (WARC’s sister company). Read the full CMO Growth Council report here: CMO Growth Council: How the world's top CMOs are reshaping the future of marketing.

Sourced from WARC, IPA