Did Stephanie McCarty Just Say What Other CMOs Are Thinking?

Stephanie McCarty is chief marketing and communications officer at Taylor Morrison Homes, a home builder based in Scottsdale, Arizona. McCarty is top of mind for a lot of agency leaders at the moment, because she used her LinkedIn page to speak some hard truths about the agency business.

When her LinkedIn post went viral, Adweek commissioned an article. In the Adweek article, McCarty makes it clear that “the whole idea of an agency is broken.”

What I need from an agency is creativity. Fresh ideas. Out-of-the-box thinking. I need them to bring a new perspective to the challenges I already know we’re facing.

But here’s the beef. So many agencies are convinced that they need to do these deep, months-long dives into the brand before they can even think about being creative. They want to run focus groups, conduct surveys and spend countless billable hours trying to ‘immerse’ themselves.

Meanwhile, my team and I are already living and breathing this stuff every single day. We know our customers inside and out. We’ve done the research. We’ve got the insights. So, in a way, what I’m really paying an agency for is to not be immersed; it’s to bring an outsider’s perspective to the table.

McCarty doesn’t want slow, methodical, poor listeners to slow dance with. She wants new ideas from exceptionally creative people, and she wants them now.

She’s also adamant that the client owns strategy. This has to be hard for some strategists and their employers to hear, especially since great creative depends on smart strategic inputs and strategic direction.

In the comments on her LinkedIn post, David Baldwin weighs in with this:

The distinction I’d make is that clients are often quite good at knowing their customers and their business strategy but are terrible at creative strategy. So many client briefs have “and, and, and…” in the ask because they won’t make hard choices. So the agency process is often trying to get the chain of command to make hard choices before going to market.

To my mind, that’s a smart distinction.

McCarty says she and her team have all the data they need and that they know their customers well. Her problem is turning those insights into actionable ideas.

She’s not looking for an agency. She has an in-house agency and she believes the agency model is broken. Instead, she’s looking for creatives who rock the boat. She wants to hear big ideas from outsiders, the sort of challenging ideas that would likely never come from inside the company.

In my estimate, there are thousands of people (both inside and outside the traditional agency structure) who would gladly provide this outsider perspective. But how will McCarty or other like-minded clients find these industry renegades? And if they do find them and hire them, will they also trust them enough to take their advice?

According to IBIS World, there are 13,998 advertising agency businesses in the US as of 2023, an increase of 2.4% from 2022. I mention this because the word “agency” means different things to different people. In her piece, McCarty is talking about agencies that insist on partnering, instead of recognizing that the client wants a vendor. She’s talking about the agencies who ask for months to scope a project and a large fee to do so.

There are more nimble and fast-moving options. Small shops capable of sprinting. Some call themselves agencies and some do not. Either way, they rarely get written up in the trades and they don’t fly to Cannes every June.

In her Adweek piece, McCarty argues, “It’s time to be bold. It’s time to take risks. It’s time to burn the old playbooks and write a new one.” I like where she’s headed with this sentiment and I agree that the agency business can burn the current playbook, but I don’t agree that a new one is needed. The old playbook that called for big ideas that make brands famous worked well for Ad Legends like Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, and Bill Bernbach. If given the chance, the old playbook can continue to guide today’s ad workers and create extraordinary value for clients.

Lastly, it’s not every client who wants what McCarty is asking for. In fact, ideas that rock the boat are often the last thing that CMOs clinging to their jobs want. Big ideas that transform a brand are rare for a reason. They’re disruptive whether a CMO’s job is secure or not, they are risky, and they’re hard to get produced. Agency creatives with the skills will gladly dream the big dreams, but in nine out of 10 cases, the client organization is not ready to hear, produce, or embrace them—even when they ask for them upfront.