In a creative agency, ideas are currency. But great ideas rarely emerge fully formed—they’re shaped, refined, and polished through the fires of discussion and debate. At AB&C, we believe that disagreement doesn’t mean disrespect. In fact, it’s not just welcome—it’s necessary. Creative progress demands differing perspectives, thoughtful challenges, and the courage to question assumptions.

This belief comes from experience. Some of our best work has grown out of spirited conversations and opposing viewpoints. And yet, fostering a culture where disagreement thrives without crossing the line into disrespect requires intentional effort. It means rethinking how we engage with one another and, sometimes, redefining what success looks like in a team dynamic.

The Value of Healthy Disagreement

Disagreement is not a sign of dysfunction; it’s a sign that people care. Passion for an idea or a direction often leads to pushback—sometimes strong pushback. But this pushback is vital. When team members bring their unique perspectives, they open the door to conversations that enrich ideas and expand creative possibilities.

Healthy disagreement keeps us from settling for ‘good enough’ ideas. It challenges groupthink and encourages innovative thinking. Without it, creativity risks stagnation, and we may fail to fully serve our clients or reach the potential of what we’re capable of achieving as a team.

I can vouch for this personally—some of the best work I’ve been part of started with heated debates among close colleagues. I’ve had moments where I walked out of a meeting thinking, There’s no way I’m agreeing with that idea, only to find myself passionately defending it a week later. That’s the beauty of this process—it doesn’t just evolve the work, it evolves us too.

Making Space for Dialogue and Debate

So how do we create space for productive dialogue and debate? The fact is: it’s tough. It doesn’t just happen naturally. Teams need a structure and a culture that welcomes diverse perspectives and ensures everyone feels safe to voice their thoughts. This means being deliberate about how we approach conversations and ensuring that all voices are heard, not just the loudest or most senior in the room.

This means we’re asking ourselves critical questions:

• Are our meetings structured in ways that encourage differing perspectives rather than silence them?
• Do our team members have the time and space to articulate their ideas fully before the group responds?
• Are leaders modeling constructive disagreement by encouraging challenges and demonstrating a willingness to be persuaded?

These are questions without easy answers, but the effort to address them is essential if you want to keep making better and better work. Creating a culture of dialogue and debate starts at the top, with leaders setting the tone. Yet it also requires buy-in and accountability from everyone in the organization.

The Responsibility of Every Team Member

Creating a culture of productive disagreement isn’t solely a leadership responsibility. Every team member has a role to play. Here are some principles we hold ourselves to:

1. Be Curious: Approach disagreements with curiosity, not defensiveness. Ask questions to dig deeper into someone’s perspective, aiming to understand rather than rebut.
2. Be Respectful: Always critique ideas, not people. Choosing the right words and maintaining a thoughtful tone can mean the difference between a constructive conversation and an unproductive argument.
3. Be Open to Being Wrong: And let me tell you, — this one can be tough. Strong opinions are valuable, but they shouldn’t become immovable. Flexibility in the face of better ideas or perspectives is a hallmark of true collaboration.
4. Stay Goal-Oriented: Remember that the purpose of debate is not to “win” but to arrive at the best possible solution for the client or the project.

Finding the Balance Between Passion and Positivity

In a fast-paced, high-pressure environment, it’s easy for disagreements to become heated. Passion is a good thing—it means we care about the work. But it’s also essential to balance that passion with positivity. A culture that prioritizes constructive dialogue over combative conversations will build trust within teams and strengthen the creative process.

At AB&C, we encourage our teams to view debates as opportunities, not obstacles. It’s a chance to show vulnerability, to test ideas, and to grow together. After all, the best creative work is rarely the product of one person’s vision—it’s the result of many voices coming together, refining, challenging, and ultimately building something better than any single person could have imagined.

Why It Matters

Disagreement is where innovation lives. By pushing back, we push forward. Debate and dialogue drive us to move beyond our comfort zones and uncover solutions that may not have been obvious at first glance. This process isn’t just better for the work—it’s better for the people doing the work. It fosters trust, builds stronger teams, and cultivates an environment where creativity can flourish.

When disagreement is respectful, thoughtful, and goal-oriented, it becomes a powerful tool for growth – for the agency, the client and the individual. It teaches us to listen, to articulate our ideas clearly, and to value the perspectives of others.

At AB&C, we know that great ideas don’t come from avoiding conflict. They come from engaging with it—constructively, respectfully, and with a shared commitment to our clients and each other. So lean into the tough conversations. Let’s embrace the beautiful friction that makes magic happen. And let’s keep the dialogue going.

There was a time when the full-service agency model felt like the ultimate solution. Clients loved the convenience of one-stop shops, where strategy, creative, media, production, and PR all lived under one roof, ready to work together seamlessly. But as marketing has evolved, it’s become clear that no agency—no matter how talented or resourceful—can be everything to everyone.

The pace of change in technology, consumer behavior, and media complexity has made it nearly impossible for a single agency to excel at every specialty. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s better. By embracing collaboration, focus, and adaptability, we can build a new, more effective way of working—one that reflects the complexity and opportunity of today’s marketing landscape.

Why the One-Stop Shop is Losing its Luster

1. The Age of Specialization: Marketing today is more complex than ever, with fields like data analytics, programmatic advertising, TikTok trends, and UX design demanding deep expertise. No agency, however large, can be the best at all of these—and clients shouldn’t expect them to be.
2. The Fragmentation of Media: The days of a single, unified campaign spanning just a few channels are long gone. Today, campaigns need to adapt across dozens of platforms, each with its own nuances and audiences. This level of specificity calls for specialists who live and breathe their craft.
3. Shifting Client Expectations: Clients no longer need agencies to own every piece of the puzzle. Many are building strong in-house teams and are looking to agencies to complement their capabilities—offering fresh perspectives, specific expertise, or strategic guidance.
4. The Rise of Collaboration: Clients increasingly assemble their own teams of partners, blending agencies, in-house talent, and specialists. What they need now isn’t one team to rule them all—it’s a team that plays well with others.

A Smarter Approach to Agency Partnerships

The idea that one agency can do it all is outdated. But that doesn’t mean agencies are any less valuable. Instead, the opportunity lies in evolving how we think about agency-client relationships.

1. Specialize with Intention: Agencies should focus on what they do best and lead with those strengths. Whether it’s brand strategy, creative development, or campaign execution, excelling in a few areas builds trust and ensures higher-quality work.
2. Be the Connector: Instead of trying to be the one-stop shop, agencies can serve as strategic hubs—bringing together the right partners for each client’s unique needs. This means not only knowing your craft but also knowing who to call when a client needs expertise beyond your scope.
3. Collaborate, Don’t Compete: The best agencies understand that working alongside other partners is the norm, not the exception. A client’s in-house team isn’t competition—it’s a resource. Other agencies aren’t rivals—they’re collaborators.
4. Offer Modular Solutions: Instead of all-or-nothing retainers, agencies can offer flexible, project-based options. This approach meets clients where they are, whether they need a single campaign, a long-term strategy, or just some extra hands on deck.
5. Focus on Outcomes, Not Ownership: Clients don’t care who came up with the idea or executed the campaign. They care about results. Agencies that prioritize outcomes over ego build stronger relationships and create better work.

The Power of the Hub-and-Spoke Model

Rather than trying to be all things to all clients, successful agencies are embracing a hub-and-spoke approach. Think of the agency as the hub: a central core of expertise and shared values. From that hub extend specialized business units or “spokes,” each focused on a distinct discipline, audience, or industry.

At AB&C, we’ve structured our agency around this very idea. We have dedicated teams for healthcare, behavior change, B2B, consumer, recruitment, and higher education. Each unit is its own expert, deeply embedded in its field, but the magic happens in the overlap.

• Specialization Drives Depth: Each business unit hones its expertise, staying on the cutting edge of its sector’s trends, challenges, and opportunities. This focus allows us to bring unmatched knowledge to our clients.
• Cross-Pollination Sparks Innovation: While each unit specializes, they don’t operate in isolation. Ideas, strategies, and creative inspiration flow freely between them. A recruitment campaign might borrow behavior change principles from our healthcare team, or a B2B strategy might adopt consumer-focused storytelling techniques.
• Flexibility Meets Scalability: This model also allows us to scale our solutions to meet client needs. A higher education client looking to amplify enrollment could benefit from the consumer team’s creative muscle or the behavior change team’s expertise in motivating action.

The hub model doesn’t just benefit clients—it strengthens the agency itself. When teams share insights and draw from each other’s experiences, it creates an environment of collaboration and innovation. It keeps ideas fresh and ensures that no matter where a client enters the ecosystem, they’re gaining access to the full breadth of the agency’s expertise.

This isn’t just a theory—it’s a practice we live every day at AB&C. When a healthcare project demands recruitment expertise, or a behavior change campaign benefits from consumer insights, our teams are ready to lean on each other. The result? Stronger relationships, smarter strategies, and better results for our clients.

Why It’s a Good Thing

The shift away from one-stop shops isn’t a failure of agencies—it’s a reflection of how much marketing has evolved. Collaboration is the new cornerstone of success. By leaning into our strengths, building relationships with specialists, and embracing a collaborative mindset, we can deliver better results for clients while fostering stronger partnerships.

At AB&C, we believe no agency is an island. We thrive by focusing on what we do best and working hand-in-hand with our clients and their other partners to create campaigns that exceed expectations. Our role is to simplify the complex, navigate challenges, and act as a trusted guide in a fast-changing marketing world.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not about owning everything. It’s about owning what we do best—and being willing to share the spotlight when it’s what’s best for the client.

Let’s Talk

Are you rethinking what you need from your agency partners? We’d love to hear your thoughts—and how we can help you navigate this new world of collaboration and specialization.

Work and workplaces are changing at lightning speed. For organizations to operate efficiently to achieve success in today’s environment, it requires increased diligence and a willingness of business functions to collaborate. For instance, the overall aging of the population, organizations’ desire for the efficient and effective search for new customers, a rise in the use of technologies and artificial intelligence, variable return-to-the-office company policies and an increasingly competitive market for talent with in-demand skills is creating a greater need for marketing and human resources (HR) professionals to work together.

Marketing and HR are interdependent business functions that share similar goals, but for different audiences. Marketing is responsible for understanding and enforcing an organization’s brand and communicating it to customers to increase awareness, usage, loyalty and referrals. HR is responsible for understanding the needs and desires of an organization’s workforce, imposing employment branding and ensuring an organization is perceived positively by external candidates and internal staff who fulfill customer brand promises.

Your marketing team should work with your talent acquisition team to ensure they are bringing in talent that seeks to fulfill the organizational brand promise. HR can lean on marketing’s understanding of the unique components and needs of prospective audiences to bolster the hiring process with brand authenticity tied to your organization’s overall strategy.

According to LinkedIn’s report, The Future of Recruiting 2024, talent acquisition teams will need “new skills, new tools and agility to attract, hire and retain the best talent.” LinkedIn Research surveyed 1,951 recruiting professionals and hiring managers across 23 countries between October and November 2023. The research found that 49% of those surveyed say that employer branding will shape recruiting over the next five years, trailing only the need to measure the quality of hires (54%). In addition, employer branding is the recruitment function that’s expected to receive the greatest increase in spend with 57% of respondents predicting their investment in employer branding will increase in the coming year to match their authentic look and feel and the reality of what prospects find on employer review sites.

The Deloitte Insights 2024 Global Human Capital Trends survey of 14,000 business and human resources leaders across multiple industries and sectors in 95 countries identifies a mindset shift for HR — what Deloitte terms “boundaryless HR,” the adoption of a “different set of practices, skillsets, metrics, technologies and even structural changes.” The survey report emphasizes that “For many organizations, nothing is more important than its people … Human connections drive the majority of value for an organization, including revenues, innovation and intellectual property, efficiency, brand relevance, productivity adaptability, and risk.” Over 80% of executives surveyed said working with other disciplines to solve business problems, improve employee engagement, align HR practices to the overall business strategy and create brand ambassadors is increasingly performed across functional boundaries.

These research surveys highlight the importance of marketing and human resources professionals working together to build and maintain an employment brand.

Good employment branding can help an organization attract higher-quality candidates, making it easier to fill job openings. It can also boost employee morale, engagement and retention by highlighting points of pride and commonality for employees. Good employment branding can give customers a positive image of — and correct misperceptions about — an organization. This is why HR and marketing professionals should work together to ensure that all external marketing and branding — employment and customer — is consistent across all media channels.

Hear are four tangible ways that HR and marketing can work together to make your employment branding equal your customer branding.

• Onboarding – Create an employee onboarding program that is based on your organization’s mission, vision, values and brand promise to spread the right messaging and get buy-in from the start of every staff member’s employment journey.
• NIL (Name, image, likeness) – Don’t use stock photography for marketing materials. Highlight staff quotes, personality and likeness in messaging and imagery in all internal and external marketing communications.
• Brand ambassadors – Your organization’s story and people are the foundation for your employment brand, and employees can be the best brand ambassadors of your organization’s values. Aligning and communicating your brand message effectively throughout your organization supports marketing’s mission of sharing it with customers and HR’s mission of sharing it with talent prospects.
• Social media – Just as marketers leverage social media to reach customers, HR can utilize social channels to bolster talent acquisition. Build and foster a consistent and active social media presence and encourage staff to speak freely. Promote your organization and staff achievements and accomplishments to enhance the perception of your brand internally and externally, as well as reach and engage talent.

There should be no line between marketing and HR in collaborating to ensure your employment brand is strong, driving your culture and helping to attract top talent, and to ensure that employees are sending out the right brand message to your organization’s customers through their actions and words.

Advertising is supposed to be fun. It’s about creativity, connection, and turning bold ideas into campaigns that make people laugh, cry, or think. But if you’ve scrolled through LinkedIn lately—or sat through an industry event—it might not feel that way.

Instead of celebrating the craft, we’ve turned into professional nitpickers, trading excitement for cynicism and turning critique into sport. It’s not that critical thinking is bad—it’s essential. But somewhere along the way, the industry’s collective voice shifted from “How amazing is this idea?” to “Here’s why it could’ve been better if I’d done it.”

LinkedIn: Where Inspiration Goes to Die (Sometimes)

Remember when LinkedIn was a space to cheer on your peers, celebrate wins, and swap creative inspiration? Now, it often feels like the “Hot Takes Olympics.” Every campaign post gets dissected like a college lit paper. Someone’s bold creative swing? Reduced to “Not sure I’d have gone that direction, but okay.”

The rise of this critique culture didn’t happen overnight:

• The Social Media Effect: Platforms thrive on drama, and “this could’ve been better” tends to get more engagement than “Great work!”
• Hot Takes Are Currency: These days, it seems the quickest, most contrarian opinion wins, even if it’s missing the bigger picture.
• Data-Driven Paralysis: With everything optimized to within an inch of its life, we’ve grown so obsessed with perfection that we’re too quick to dismiss anything that doesn’t hit every metric.
• Proving Ourselves: In a hyper-competitive industry, critique has become a way to signal authority. After all, tearing something down is easier than building it up.

The Cost of Cynicism

Here’s the thing: all that cynicism has consequences. It stifles creativity, discourages risk-taking, and fosters a culture of fear instead of collaboration. Why take a swing for the fences if a thousand armchair critics are waiting to pounce?

It also chips away at the relationships that make our work great. Clients can feel when an agency has lost its spark. Teams burn out when every idea is met with skepticism. And as an industry, we miss the joy of doing work that matters.

Finding the Joy Again

It’s not all doom and gloom. The joy of advertising is still here—we just need to remind ourselves to look for it. Here’s how we can start shifting the culture:

1. Celebrate the Wins: Perfection is overrated. Every campaign has a story, and every effort deserves a moment of recognition. Did it spark a conversation? Reach its audience? Let’s give it its due.
2. Build, Don’t Tear Down: Critique is valuable, but it should be constructive. Share insights that help, not just hot takes for clout.
3. Put People First: At the end of the day, our work is for the audience—not other advertisers. If they love it, we’ve done our job.
4. Reconnect With Curiosity: Approach every project with a sense of wonder. What can we learn? What new ground can we break? This industry thrives on possibility, not predictability.
5. Gratitude Goes a Long Way: Celebrate the teams behind the work. Whether it’s a bold client, a sleepless creative team, or an account lead who made magic out of chaos, let’s give credit where it’s due.

A Call to Bring Back the Spark

Advertising isn’t just about selling things—it’s about creating moments, memories, and meaning. And that’s worth celebrating. So next time you’re about to post a critique on LinkedIn or make a snarky comment, ask yourself: Am I adding value? Or just adding noise?

The truth is, we don’t need to love every campaign. But we do need to remember why we’re here—to connect, create, and, yes, have fun doing it. Let’s bring that joy back, one ad (and one LinkedIn post) at a time.

Marketing and fantasy football. On the surface, these two things may not seem like they are in the same plane of existence. I guess that’s true in that one is a very real thing while the other is essentially make-believe, but what I’ve found after years of doing both is that they both satisfy my love of strategic challenges and understanding of consumer psychology and behaviors. So, when I was asked to do an end-of-summer blog — the time when fantasy football seasons are starting — I saw the opportunity to share some of the key marketing principles and lessons that I have applied to fantasy football over the years. Here are just a couple ways that thinking like a marketer can help you dominate your fantasy football league:

Avoid the Sunk-Cost Fallacy

In both marketing and fantasy football, the sunk-cost fallacy can lead to poor decisions. This phenomenon occurs when people continue investing in something just because they’ve already put resources into it. In fantasy football, this might mean holding onto a high draft pick who’s underperforming. But the smart move is recognizing when to let go. If you notice this fallacy playing out with one of your opponents, you can turn it to your advantage, like offering a trade that seems to add value to their struggling pick. It’s a strategy marketers commonly use to upsell customers who have already committed to a purchase, like when you order a pizza online and then get an offer at checkout to add dessert and drink for a few dollars more. It works at the point of sale, and it can work for your fantasy trades, too.

Leveraging Brand Bias

Brand bias is when consumers prefer one brand over another due to emotional or psychological connections. In fantasy football, this translates to managers who have a clear preference for certain types of players. By understanding these biases, you can predict their draft choices or use their favorite types of players as leverage in trades, much like how a marketer would use brand loyalty metrics or buyer personas to help predict consumer behavior. This is helpful when you know that other league members like to draft high-upside guys, like speedy wide receivers or value the point advantages of taking elite tight ends early. These are markers for brand bias that you can use to snag the players you want ahead of league mates during fantasy drafts.

Researching the Competition

Which brings us to researching your competition. Just as marketers analyze competitors to gain an edge, fantasy football managers must research their opponents. Understanding your league mates’ tendencies allows you to anticipate their moves and adjust your strategy. In marketing, finding gaps in the competition’s offerings can lead to new opportunities — just as spotting weaknesses in your opponents’ strategies can give you an advantage in your fantasy league.

Using KPIs to Make Decisions

In marketing, we rely on key performance indicators (KPIs) to guide our strategies. The same logic applies in fantasy football. Your league’s scoring rules should help you make informed decisions. For instance, if one quarterback is on a hot streak but facing a tough defense, while another has been cold but is up against a weak opponent, you need to analyze the data to decide who to start to give you the best chance to score. This mirrors how marketers use data to forecast outcomes and make strategic decisions with media spends and direct marketing tactics.

These are just a few basic marketing lessons that can help you gain a competitive advantage in your fantasy league. But just like in marketing, the more you pay attention to the trends and watch the way markets move, the more likely you are to have success in fantasy football. Start putting these principles to use this year and before you know it, you won’t just be playing fantasy football — you’ll be mastering it.

Good luck to all my fellow fantasy footballers out there.

Introducing a new measure of an employer’s brand strength that is more inclusive than Net Promoter Score.

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?

If this question looks familiar, then you’re probably already familiar with Net Promoter Score® (NPS)¹. For 20 years, it has been a bellwether metric for quantifying customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. With one easy-to-answer question, organizations of all sizes have been able to calculate the health of their customer engagement with a remarkably simple formula:

(Brand Promoters (scores of 9-10) − Brand Detractors (scores of 0-6)) ÷ Sample Size × 100

While the NPS formula is highly valuable in distilling customer sentiment down to a single number, the strategy team at Aloysius Butler and Clark (AB&C) felt we could develop a more robust measure of brand loyalty, especially in terms of recruiting and retaining talent. We put our 50-plus years of experience with qualitative branding research to use to develop a more complete measure of an employer’s brand strength, one that includes audience satisfaction, perception of employer reputation and NPS. It’s a calculation we call Employer Brand Strength Index™ (EBSI).

While it has the ease of use and simplicity of the traditional NPS, our proprietary EBSI measurement tool brings in more metrics that are tailored to individual organizations and their specific industries. Our measurement includes perceptions of current employees as well as external audiences, allowing us to benchmark external assessments of employer brands against internal reflections of employment experiences. Organizations are able to include their NPS and employment reputation into a measure that allows them to monitor the success of what is being promoted in the market.

And with the introduction of factor weights measured with a five-point Likert scale (see table below), we can refine the EBSI to help calculate overall employer brand health.

The EBSI can be used as a reliable predictor of employer brand strength and employee engagement. The inclusion of the EBSI in a recruiter’s toolbox provides talent acquisition and talent engagement teams a comprehensive additional key performance metric. The EBSI is a benchmark measure that should be reviewed over time to adjust operational practices and recruitment marketing messages to continually improve an organization’s employment brand to attract prospective employees and enhance employee loyalty.

1. In 2003, Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, Inc. created the NPS metric.

In January 2016, I wrote a blog titled “Four Marketing Resolutions for 2016.” I cited research identifying that “people who write down their specific resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t make specific resolutions.”[1] So I made my marketing resolutions public:
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By David Brond and Kathleen Doyle

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Inevitably at some point during your healthcare marketing career you will be faced with bringing a new brand to market. As you do, it is critical to stay focused on the strategic and business objectives of your organization, while also protecting the equity of your brand. The following scenarios describe bringing a new brand to a market, assuming you currently have standing or brand value. The goal in both cases is to leverage the equity of all the brands to enhance your brand, differentiate you from competitors and better serve your customers.

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Over the past four-plus decades, AB&C has worked with some of the most premier healthcare systems across this country—large and small—and we greatly value those relationships. But great agency-client relationships just don’t happen; they take true commitment by both parties to be successful. And over the years, we have learned what makes a great working relationship and want to share that knowledge with you, because agencies, while a source of expense, are also an investment, and have a key impact on your organization and your ability to meet patient and provider needs, delivery quality care and build your brand.

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If you followed a systematic approach to build a new brand (or refreshed an existing one), you started with discovery research. You then developed a brand mantra to inform how your brand would be articulated to internal audiences and the outside world. Finally, you created or refined the outward expressions, such as the name, mark and colors.

All of this hard work was done in preparation to share your brand with stakeholders and customers. This is when the rubber hits the road. It’s important to invest as much time, and as many resources, into properly socializing and managing your brand as it is to develop, create and refine it.

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In professional communications of any kind, proper punctuation is essential. But this is especially true for marketing communications, where the copy helps define a brand. Grammar and punctuation mistakes can result in a loss of credibility—for both the agency and its clients. Here are a few tips for avoiding common mistakes.

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As branding experts, we have developed our own vocabulary for what we do and how we help organizations define and present themselves to consumers. We use terminology like “brand architecture,” “platform,” “positioning,” “promise,” “proof point,” “personality,” “identity” and “tag line” to describe how we create, communicate and control the attributes of a brand. An important but often overlooked step in the process of building or revitalizing a brand is the development of a brand mantra.

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You’ve heard about it. You’ve seen the results. Maybe you’ve even been part of a rebranding effort. But do you really understand what branding means?

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