Telstra’s Brent Smart on Why Marketers Should Treat Creativity as a Capability to Stay One Step Ahead

When it comes to brands that are killing it creatively, in Australia you don’t get much bigger than Telstra. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that for CMO Brent Smart, the key to staying ‘One Step Ahead’ is to double, triple and quadruple-down on creativity.

Speaking to Omnicom Advertising Group’s CEO and president Troy Ruhanen in the second episode of his One Step Ahead interview series, Brent details just how he ensures that his team engages with creativity across the board to ensure that all of their marketing, beyond the show-stopping TV ads, is as effective and impactful as possible.

As a tech-driven business, Brent and the Telstra team are no strangers to tech innovation, but as far as he’s concerned, creative innovation is just as, if not more, important. 

“For me the most important thing for us as marketers is to be distinctive,” he says. “Our innovation is really focused on creative innovation, on creative excellence and how we can use creativity to be a distinctive brand more than anything else. That’s our number one priority.”

In order to do that, says Brent, his team treats creativity as a capability. He reflects that most marketing teams have media, martech and automation capabilities but that creativity is treated as “this black box thing that happens at the agency”. At Telstra, there’s a head of creative excellence on the marketing leadership team (he appointed Nicky Bryson to the role this week).

The team has a shared ‘language’ around creativity, a framework for assessing it, and go through every single output, on every single touchpoint, every single quarter.

“You just have to do that consistently because it says to people ‘it matters’,” he says.

It has a knock-on effect on the impact of the work, the customer experience (as every touchpoint is treated with creative care), but perhaps most profoundly it shapes the team.

“Ultimately, I think what’s really important is you’ve got to give people creative confidence,” adds Brent. “And this is something I’ve learned. I think I was lucky because I grew up in agencies, so I was pretty confident around the work, but a lot of people in corporates, they’re not and creativity is a bit scary. So we want to build creative confidence in our teams.”

That creative excellence focus extends into the marketing team’s application of AI. It’s not enough to use it as a means of creating cheaper, faster content. “I’m more excited about the creative potential of using AI where it can actually add to the experience and make the experience way more interesting than it could have been without it.”

Perhaps the one thing that really keeps Brent ‘one step ahead’ is that he makes a point of going back, back to the thing that attracted him to the advertising and marketing world in the first place: the work.

“I would say to anyone in the business that if you are in the business because you love the work, I think that can sustain you for a really long time. Money’s great but I would say if you’re about the work, that can give you a whole lot of energy and, importantly, a whole lot of reward.”

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Check out the full interview here.