Only 11% of FTSE top 100 firms have a marketing professional on the main board

Research by The Chartered Institute of Marketing has revealed that a mere 11 out of the top 100 FTSE organisations have a marketing executive at main board level.

"The results show that marketing professionals are struggling to get their voices heard inside the offices of the country's leading businesses." remarked Sonia Modray, Acting Chief Executive of The Chartered Institute of Marketing. "Marketers need to make that extra effort to educate colleagues and gain recognition about what they do. They need to demonstrate that marketing is increasingly a science and much more than just t-shirts and pens. Once the message gets through that marketing can bring real positive differences to the bottom line, and show a healthy ROI, I'm certain that marketers will find themselves actually setting the board room agenda!"

 "The alarming news is that the vast majority of the top 100 firms do not have marketing directors even on the second tier operating board." explains Christine "The exclusion of marketing personnel from the board rooms is a serious cause for concern, not just for FTSE decision makers, but the marketing profession itself."   

The 11 with a Marketing Executive at the main board were BP plc, BPB, British Airways, Imperial Tobacco, Legal & General, Marks & Spencer, W Morrison, Rentokil Initial, SAB Miller, Tesco plc and Vodaphone Group.

Creative services industry failing to convince customers on the issue of trust

A new study has found that only 42% of finance directors (FDs) think that their agencies are perceived as trustworthy. The survey, conducted by Loudhouse on behalf of software company Maconomy, also revealed that incongruously, more than half (56%) of the UK's creative service agencies believe that their clients are demanding more transparency.

Creativity is often viewed as 'king' when it comes to client satisfaction with financial process its unlikely bedfellow;  as 67% of FDs believe clients primarily consider them to only be creative. However, the key finding from the research highlighted that financial processes and creativity can, and must, co-exist to improve agency profitability. Two thirds (66%) of agency FDs agree that this makes for a successful agency.

Only 21% of agencies believe clients would actually consider them to be transparent about costs. Building a sense of trust and demonstrating transparency is therefore vital if agencies are to prosper in the long term, according to Hugh Stafford-Smith, MD of Maconomy. "Transforming internal processes in order to demonstrate account transparency will go a long way in strengthening the agency-client relationship and engender an atmosphere of trust."

The Accounting for Creativity survey also revealed that the following factors are compromising account transparency within the agency-client relationship:

• Creative reluctance - In 62% of agencies negative attitudes towards financial controls exist, astonishingly 21% of creative teams are oblivious to the need for financial processes
• Pass the buck - 58% of creative teams believe that financial process is someone else's problem, while a further 41% view processes as being dull and not part of the creative remit
• Bad habits are hard to break - Financial bad habits are heavily impacting on bottom line profitability; 68% of creative agencies over-service accounts and also under-charge clients, a further 80% never charge for late payment of invoices
• Lack of focus ups the workload - 60% of FDs consider that a lack of financial focus amongst creative teams adds considerably to their workload

Only 56% of agencies consider themselves able to clearly demonstrate costs and processes to the client. However, it does appear that the message is starting to trickle through, and 62% of agencies are willing to invest in people, systems and methods to become more effective.

Commenting on the findings, Neil Backwith, ex European CEO of Porter Novelli, now a specialist profitability  consultant to the creative services industry said: " In my experience financial process  means two things to the creative services industry and both are related to keeping accurate timesheets. Either the firm needs to bill the client for however long a job takes (which clients are generally not too keen on) or they need to limit the time spent on a job to budgeted hours (which creative teams generally aren't too keen on). So naturally, this is where creativity and financial process cross swords, with creatives being  more concerned with the development of the best ideas rather than how long it takes."

Backwith continued; "In a situation where an agency doesn't have accurate time information and transparency, it would appear that not only do they lose the trust of their clients but those very same agencies are also the ones who  'write off' the biggest amounts of time through over-service.  This is a double whammy of less profit and less trust for Agency Britain."