What does a finance director hear while listening to a campaign idea?
On the agency side, that question rarely gets asked. The deck is prepared, the idea is presented, and everyone waits for the quietest person in the room to speak last. That person is usually from finance, and usually asks a single question: “What do we get in return for this?” It feels like a question asked from outside the idea. Like the rudeness of someone trying to measure creative work with a line item. The idea dies, and the team leaves the meeting saying “they didn’t get it.”
That sentence deserves a look from the other side. They didn’t get it, true. But nobody explained it either.
An idea that cannot be translated is not a good idea; it is an unfinished one.
Translation is not a concession
The creative world holds a deep suspicion of translation. Turning an idea into another language is seen as watering it down: as if intuition has to fall silent when numbers speak, as if tying an idea to a revenue line makes it smaller. The suspicion is romantic and expensive. Romantic, because it assumes a world where the idea is enough on its own. Expensive, because that world does not exist.
An idea lives only as long as it can be carried from one room to the next. An idea born in the studio has to get into the brand manager’s room, then the marketing director’s, then finance, and sometimes the board. Each room speaks a different language. The brand manager speaks perception, the finance director cash flow, the chief executive risk. Whoever knows the idea only in the language of the first room leaves it at the door of the second.
What I mean by translation is not a “return on investment” slide added to the end of the deck. It is rethinking the idea itself in the units the other person makes decisions in. Which behaviour will this campaign change? On which revenue line will that behaviour show up? If it won’t show up, why is it still valuable, and what evidence does that “why” rest on? An idea with no answer to these questions is not ready. It may be brilliant, it may be right, but it is not ready. An architect does not hand over a building with no structural calculations and call it a vision.
The power of a sentence
The most effective thing the marketing world has said to finance in the last twenty years was not a commercial but a ratio. In 2013, in The Long and the Short of It for the IPA, Les Binet and Peter Field went through the cases in the UK’s advertising effectiveness databank and said, roughly: about sixty per cent of the budget to long-term brand building, forty per cent to short-term sales activation. The precision of the ratio can be argued with, and it has been. But the real achievement of that work was not its finding, it was its language. It turned what creatives had defended by instinct for years into a sentence a finance director could repeat in a meeting.
That still surprises me. The industry had known for decades that brands create value over the long term. It could not say so. The day it could, the tone of the budget conversation changed.
This is the skill creative directors talk about least. In our portfolios we show ideas, count awards, describe teams. We rarely show that we can carry an idea safely all the way to the finance room. Yet this is often what decides whether an agency is a supplier or a partner in the client’s eyes: whoever can explain an idea only in their own language is a supplier; whoever can think in the other person’s language is a partner.
On 23 September I read that an agency holding company’s finance director is moving to an advertiser’s finance desk. The news reminded me of the same thing: the person sitting on the other side of the table often understands the economics of our work better than we think. The way to persuade them is not to simplify the idea, but to finish it well enough that it also answers their question.
So which room’s door is your idea waiting at today, and does it have a single sentence in that room’s language?