There is a widespread lack of pride and optimism regarding the state of creative work
We’ve built entire industries on creativity, advertising, branding, product design, yet most of the people working in these roles don’t feel proud of what they’re producing.
A recent global study by BetterBriefs, conducted alongside Flood + Partners, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), found that only one in three marketers feel proud of their creative output. For agencies, it’s even lower, just one in four. That’s disconcerting, especially given the scale of investment going into campaigns. You don’t want your top creative minds delivering work they’re not proud of. That disconnect tells us something is broken, and it’s not talent. It’s structure, process, and leadership focus.
If people inside your organization aren’t energized by what they’re making, you can’t expect the market to be. This lack of pride reflects a deeper problem, misaligned expectations, too many approval layers, or internal politics suffocating potential. Creativity suffocates when teams are demotivated or unclear about purpose.
A lot of companies miss this. They focus entirely on KPIs, efficiency, and budget spend, ignoring the ecosystem that produces strong creative thinking.
For executives sitting at the top, this should be a trigger to act. Pride in the product doesn’t live in a slide deck—it lives in the room when ideas are made. If your teams don’t feel it, your customers won’t either. Addressing this means leading better. Fix the process, reaffirm the vision, minimize the noise, and let creators create. The results will scale.
The creative development process is plagued by inefficiencies, particularly due to excessive rounds of revisions
When it takes five rounds of creative work just to get something approved, you’re recycling effort. The system isn’t optimized, and the data confirms it. According to the BetterBriefs report, creative teams inside marketing organizations go through an average of 5.0 rounds of revisions. Agencies and in-house departments aren’t far behind, both averaging 4.8. That’s a signal that alignment is missing early in the process.
What’s worse, this pattern leads to wasted time, energy, and budget. Earlier research by BetterBriefs found that up to one-third of advertising spend is wasted due to work that isn’t clearly directed. That adds up, fast. You burn people out, dilute quality, and still miss the performance upside. Repeating cycles of revisions doesn’t improve a campaign’s success rate. It delays execution and depletes energy.
If you’re leading a team, this is one of those silent cost centers you don’t see in a budget line. It looks like process, but it behaves like drag. And most organizations are too slow to address it because the inefficiencies are embedded in outdated or unclear chains of command, uncalibrated briefs, and subjective decision-making.
Solving it comes from getting the fundamentals right, tight creative briefs, clear feedback protocols, trained evaluators, and fewer decision-makers who know exactly what the output needs to achieve. When those pieces are in place, iteration becomes intentional, not habitual. This cuts timelines dramatically.
As leadership, if you’ve got a team taking five full cycles to approve creative work, that’s a clear opportunity to intervene. Redesign the workflow. Remove ambiguity. Empower the people closest to the work to guide approvals. Eliminate unnecessary layers. You’ll see gains—faster project completion, stronger creative, and a culture that values progress over perfection.
Creative briefs are often underutilized as a reference point for idea evaluation, undermining strategic direction
Creative briefs are supposed to set the foundation, clear objectives, defined criteria, key messaging, and target outcomes. However, the data from the BetterBriefs report shows that most teams aren’t using them consistently throughout the project lifecycle. Only 10% of respondents said creative ideas are always evaluated against clearly defined criteria. That’s a problem.
What this means is that briefs are treated as preliminary checkboxes instead of persistent reference tools. Teams start from them, but they rarely return to them when assessing whether output is on track. Creative moves forward, but evaluation is often driven by personal opinion, not original intent. This disconnect creates misalignment, slower approvals, and campaigns that miss the mark.
When briefs are ignored after kickoff, creative risks drifting away from strategy. That leaves teams arguing over subjective elements without a shared framework to recalibrate the work. It also makes feedback harder to give and measurement harder to quantify.
For senior leaders, this oversight is a strategic liability. If your process doesn’t tether creative review to clearly defined guidelines, the outcome becomes volatile. You lose control of consistency across messaging, tone, and brand position. You also waste resources revisiting discussions that should’ve been settled at the start.
The fix is straightforward. Creative briefs need to be treated as living documents. They should remain central during concept development, revisions, and final decisions. Leadership should enforce accountability here, not just asking if the work “feels right,” but asking how it maps to the defined objectives in the brief. This step alone eliminates ambiguity and reduces reliance on personal taste.
You don’t scale influence by increasing volume; you scale it by making sure every piece of output is on brand, on message, and on mission. That starts by using briefs as decision-making tools, not just project starters.
Both marketers and agencies are challenged by a lack of structured training in evaluating early-stage creative ideas
Creative ideas are subjective, abstract, and often unpolished in the early stages, that’s the nature of the work. But inability to evaluate them effectively stalls progress and weakens outcomes. The BetterBriefs report found only 30% of marketers and 27% of agencies feel they’re well-trained in evaluating creative ideas. Most teams are moving without structured methods, relying instead on instinct or personal preference.
This is an operational weakness. When people aren’t confident in assessing concepts, decision-making slows down and inconsistencies creep in. Teams step into feedback loops unprepared, unsure what to look for or how to measure it. Good ideas get dismissed. Undeveloped ideas get pushed forward. Resources are wasted refining creative that doesn’t align with strategic goals.
Leaders often assume creative judgment is innate, you “know it when you see it.” That assumption is costing companies time and clarity. Early-stage evaluation requires a framework: understanding the brief, audience, objectives, tone, and differentiation. Without this, creative meetings devolve into subjective debates with no clear resolution.
Training changes that. When teams know how to break down a concept, place it in context, and evaluate it against intended goals, the process becomes focused and repeatable. Iterations improve. Feedback improves. Output improves. The goal isn’t just efficiency, it’s raising the baseline so everyone involved knows what strong creative looks like and why it works.
If you’re leading a marketing or brand org, prioritize training in creative evaluation. Build a shared language around criteria. Make expectations explicit. This doesn’t stifle creativity; it accelerates it by narrowing the gap between idea and execution. Once teams align on how to assess creative, you remove second-guessing and replace it with momentum. That’s when performance scales.
Feedback mechanisms between creative teams and their clients are notably ineffective
There’s a clear disconnect happening between those who give feedback and those who receive it. In the BetterBriefs study, 56% of agencies said they don’t get clear or constructive feedback from marketers, yet only 23% of marketers recognize this as a problem. That’s a wide perception gap, and it’s not benign. It directly slows down creative cycles and increases unnecessary rounds of revision.
Vague or inconsistent feedback stalls progress and introduces confusion. Teams either revise blindly or second-guess solid work because the direction wasn’t clearly articulated. That drains creative energy and adds risk later in the pipeline when misaligned expectations can no longer be course-corrected easily.
If you’re leading a brand or marketing organization and your teams are stuck in repeated revision cycles, feedback quality should be one of the first areas to inspect. Poor feedback is often the result of unclear priorities, lack of confidence, or poorly defined ownership. Without structured guidance on how to give input that’s specific, usable, and brief-aligned, teams revert to surface-level commentary that doesn’t move the work forward.
Executives need to set the expectation that feedback is a strategic lever, not an obligation. It should be specific, actionable, and tied directly to the objectives laid out in the creative brief. Vague direction like “this doesn’t feel right” or “can we make it pop” wastes time. Feedback should tell teams what’s working, what isn’t, and why, based on measurable goals.
Improving this doesn’t require more meetings. It requires better preparation and active accountability. Provide frameworks for giving feedback. Align everyone on the purpose of the creative. Make it clear who owns sign-off authority and on what basis decisions are made. Once feedback becomes sharper, revisions become fewer and creative work becomes stronger. That’s the shift that scales output without scaling cost.
Dysfunctional approval processes contribute to inconsistent and subjective decision-making
When decision-making structures aren’t clear, approval becomes a bottleneck. In the BetterBriefs report, marketers and agencies pointed to their approval processes as slow, inconsistent, and often subjective. The result is time lost, diluted creative quality, and increased frustration on both sides.
Many teams operate without a consistent, repeatable process for approving creative work. Briefs are often ignored during final decisions, and feedback is steered by personal taste instead of strategic alignment. Worse, the right people are sometimes left out of the conversation entirely. According to the study, 43% of marketers and 62% of agencies say the actual decision-makers aren’t involved enough in signing off creative. That number shouldn’t exist in mature teams.
If you’re leading an organization that’s scaled its marketing function, approvals need to be clean and connected to the business outcome. Subjective decisions made without reference to the initial goals, or by people disconnected from those goals, do more harm than good. You don’t preserve brand integrity or consistency without clear, criteria-based signoffs.
Another key issue is that creative work often gets reviewed by committee, not by decision-makers with final accountability. That slows things down and leads to compromises that weaken performance. Approval should be efficient and strategic, not arbitrary. For executives, that means setting up systems where priorities are defined early, and approval roles are locked in from the beginning.
Fixing this starts with structural clarity. Define your approval flow. Name your decision owners. Remove layers that add delay without adding insight. And always bring feedback back to the brief, if input isn’t tied to the brand objectives or campaign strategy, it shouldn’t redirect the work.
Good creative needs consistency. That only happens when decisions are made on time, by the right people, using shared metrics. If that’s missing, your creative will always feel off, and getting to finished work will take twice as long.
Personal opinions unduly dominate creative decision-making
Creative work should be evaluated with purpose, not personality. Yet most decisions in the process are still being driven by individual opinions instead of collective alignment. The BetterBriefs report makes this clear: 89% of marketers and 84% of agencies admit personal judgment heavily influences final decisions. That’s a problem, especially when those opinions aren’t grounded in strategy or customer insight.
Subjectivity can’t be fully removed from creative. That’s expected. Crafting powerful messaging requires nuance, intuition, and empathy. But when the majority of decisions are driven by what someone personally likes or dislikes, the work veers off course. It starts to serve internal tastes instead of external outcomes. That reduces precision and weakens results in market.
For executives, the challenge is to strike balance, recognize that emotion is part of good creative, but insist that it’s evaluated against predefined standards. When feedback is subjective with no strategic filter, teams lose clarity. Ideas get second-guessed. Iterations increase. Alignment vanishes.
This becomes especially dangerous at scale. As teams grow and more stakeholders get involved, the influence of opinion multiplies, if left unchecked. Every senior leader doesn’t need to approve creative. What they do need is a framework that ensures decisions align with the brief, the target customer, and the metrics defined up front.
The solution is process and discipline. Standardize your evaluation criteria. Tie feedback to business impact. Make sure every stakeholder understands what the creative is trying to achieve before they weigh in. If someone’s reaction isn’t linked to a strategic reason or market insight, it shouldn’t drive the revision.
In a highly competitive market, intuition alone isn’t enough. You need that edge paired with structure. That’s how you protect brand consistency, improve output, and get real results from your creative investment.
There is a substantial trust deficit between creative agencies and marketers
Trust is a basic requirement for producing high-quality creative work. Without it, collaboration breaks down, and outcomes suffer. According to the BetterBriefs report, 70% of creative agencies do not trust the creative judgment of the marketers they work with. That finding reflects deeper structural issues, not just personality clashes or isolated conflicts.
When agencies doubt the decision-making of their clients, it leads to guarded communication, reduced openness, and a lack of risk-taking. Teams become cautious, choosing safe ideas instead of bold ones. Marketers, in turn, often feel they’re not getting the best from their creative partners, reinforcing the divide.
Many marketers still operate from a position of control instead of partnership. They edit instead of guide. They critique without context. That dynamic erodes confidence and makes agencies less willing to stretch. If you’re an executive overseeing agency relationships, it’s your responsibility to establish an environment where both sides feel respected and aligned.
Agencies also reported not feeling inspired by their clients, this matters. Creative excellence requires more than project briefs and deadlines. It needs energy, shared ambition, and mutual respect. When clients fail to provide vision or clarity, agencies disengage. That directly affects the quality of the work and the efficiency of the process.
Fixing this isn’t about more meetings or tighter contracts. It starts with clear roles, shared goals, and consistent engagement. Define what success looks like together. Involve agencies early in strategic thinking, not just execution. Give feedback in context, not in isolation. When expectations are clear and dialogue is continuous, trust builds.
For leaders, the gap here is fixable, but only with intention. Frame the agency relationship as an extension of your internal capability, not an outsourced task. When agencies are treated as strategic partners, the output improves—and teams on both sides start operating at their full potential. That’s where better creative starts.
The bottom line
Creative output isn’t broken because people stopped being creative. It’s broken because systems around it haven’t evolved fast enough, or at all. Misaligned briefs, too many approval rounds, unclear feedback, and trust gaps are symptoms of a larger issue: lack of strategic clarity and operational discipline.
Leaders can change this. You don’t fix creative by stepping further into the weeds. You fix it by designing better frameworks, defining who owns what, and reinforcing a culture where collaboration is respected, not overmanaged. Briefs need to be sharper. Feedback needs to be useful. Decision-making needs to be intentional, not subjective.
Get the structure right, align the team, and execute fast. When you do that, creativity scales, confidence returns, and output starts matching ambition.
