The scale a global client scores your work on.
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The setup
Every agency has had the meeting. The work goes up, the client is quiet for a beat, and then someone says they are not sure it feels like the brand. Nobody in the room can say what that means. There is no shared vocabulary to argue in, so the conversation defaults to taste, and taste defaults to whoever is most senior. The work gets smaller. Nobody logs why.
The industry's answer to this has been the creative scorecard, and the creative scorecard has a bad reputation for good reasons. Reduce a piece of work to a number and you hand every nervous stakeholder a weapon.
Steve Hill runs creative effectiveness for Kraft Heinz. He is the person you would expect to defend the scorecard. He opened by saying it frightens him.
"When I think first and foremost about a creative scorecard, I feel a little scared, because I think it implies that there is this very linear process where you can look at work and give it a clear number or rating, and that's a definitive answer."
That is the tension the session runs on. Kraft Heinz uses a scale. Steve is the one who deploys it globally. He also thinks the number is the least interesting thing about it. What follows is the most directly transferable 40 minutes of the week: a client at one of the largest advertisers on earth, on the record, describing the ladder he uses to score creative work and the specific ways he has watched it get abused.
Who was on stage, and why they're worth listening to
Part One — How Kraft Heinz got here, and what it cost them on the way
The scale did not arrive in a vacuum. It came out of a decade-long swing that most independents will recognize from the other side of the table.
About six years ago Kraft Heinz brought in a new CEO, Miguel Patricio, from AB InBev, a company that had already pushed creative excellence deep into its operating culture. Steve describes what followed as a revolution in how the company thought about creative, and then he describes the hangover.
"It led to some great work. It led to some great awards, but we probably over-rotated and went too far down this path of chasing Cannes Lions, chasing awards in different parts of the world."
Asked later what he would do differently if he could start again, he did not hedge.
"I think we got a little bit overly obsessed with awards. I think that became an internal measure of success that we started to chase, and probably led us down the wrong path a little bit."
The correction was a shift in program name and program logic, from creative excellence to creative effectiveness. Steve was careful to block the obvious misreading of that move.
"Excellence is critical in effectiveness. Like the two things go absolutely hand in hand."
He offered a number to show what the correction bought. Three years ago the company took roughly 30 Lions. This week, six. His argument is that the six are better, and that the trophy that matters now is a different one.
"I would say that the ones we have won are higher quality, and also we were named North America's most effective brand at the Effies, and that is the thing that is now the most important thing for us."
For an independent, the useful part of that story is not the trophy count. It is that a client this large publicly named its own over-rotation and then changed what it rewards. If your client has quietly made the same shift and has not told you, your reel is now optimized for the wrong prize.
The architecture underneath is a four-part framework, and Steve rattled it off without notes:
People, which he defines as capabilities, inspiration and community. Partners, meaning matching the right brands to the right agencies and then tending those relationships over time. Process, meaning consistency in how marketing gets done brand to brand so that teams can learn from each other. Performance management, which holds the metrics and the scale.
One detail in the partners pillar deserves attention from every independent reading this. Kraft Heinz in North America deliberately favors independent shops.
"We are very heavily in North America, very heavily leaning towards independence. So we want to, for the most part, stay free from the big holding company model, because we think that that gets us to the very best work, and we have a handful of key creative partners within that."
Their media agency, Carat, is part of Dentsu. The creative roster is a deliberate exception to holding-company gravity, chosen on quality grounds and stated out loud on a stage in Cannes.
Steve also named the failure mode of every framework rollout, which is that frameworks stay in the deck.
"It's hard to get these things to stick in an organization, particularly when people get in and out of them. But we try to make sure that as much as we can, these things that we're trying to embed are everyday things that people can use as they do their work. So embedding it in the day to day is the critical factor."
Part Two — The eight-point scale
This is the chapter's reason to exist, so here is the scale as Steve laid it out, with the parts he did not specify left empty rather than filled in.
Kraft Heinz uses an eight-point scale. Steve traces its lineage directly:
"We have an eight-point scale, which is actually I think based on the original Leo Burnett creative scale from way back when. Some companies have ten-point scales, some have five. Ours is eight."
Higher is better. Eight is the top. The rungs he named on stage, in the order he named them, running from bottom to top:
"At the top of it is transformative. I'm not even sure Kraft Heinz has ever done a piece of work at that level. None spring to mind. We're talking about the greatest work that ever existed."
Six rungs were named on stage. The scale has eight points. Steve did not enumerate the two intermediate rungs, and this chapter will not guess at them. If you are building your own version, treat the six as the spine and ask your client what sits in the gaps.
The generic rung got the sharpest illustration of the session, and it is worth stealing as a diagnostic.
"I think of the car advertising world, where every single piece of work has a car driving around a mountain with great music. We want to avoid the tropes that exist in the categories in which we play."
Now the part most agencies get wrong about client scorecards. Steve's position is that the score is close to irrelevant.
"The numbers don't actually matter. Where work sits on the scale is kind of not the point of it. It is designed to create a common understanding from brand to brand, from country to country, about how we view creativity."
And the mechanism that makes it worth the trouble:
"You might look at something and think it's one score. I might look at it and think it's another score. And actually, that doesn't matter. The richness is in the debate and the discussion of understanding each other's point of view."
That reframe changes what an agency should do when a client scale lands on the table. The move is not to argue your way to a higher number. The move is to get the client to say why they landed where they landed, because that answer contains the actual brief.
The scale runs in both directions in time. Steve says it skews retrospective, used to benchmark finished work against other brands in the category and inside the portfolio. It also runs forward, on work in development, as a way of asking where a piece currently sits and what would move it one rung. And it runs sideways into agency relationships: Kraft Heinz uses the same language when giving creative feedback to its partners.
Jonathan's account from the agency side is the practical payoff, and it is about money as much as craft. He described building the target rung into the brief itself.
"We like to add that as a bit of a section on our briefs, because it helps us say, all right, we know we kind of need to be here."
His shop's default ambition is the ceiling: "Because of our philosophy, we tend to want to go to an eight. That is always our mantra and our focus." The scale is what lets him say out loud that some work should not be chased to an eight.
"Let's invest the right resources, let's invest the right brain power, and let's not spend eighty hours getting to something that should be quite simple and tactical."
And the commercial consequence, stated plainly:
"We don't want to overscope or over-burn on things that might realistically need to be a bit lower."
That is a scoping argument dressed as a creative one, and it is the reason a small shop should want its clients to have a scale. An agreed ambition level on a lower-funnel brief is the difference between a profitable project and a team of senior people burning a week on banners.
The other half of the same point, in Jonathan's words:
"It allows us to be able to feel like we're not on two different planets. We're able to talk the same way."
Underneath the fluency is a premise his shop repeats to itself daily, and it is bleaker than anything on the scale.
"There's a lot of work out there. People don't give a shit about advertising. That's the thing that we tell ourselves every single day. So you have to manufacture those reasons for them to care."
That premise cuts both ways on a scorecard. If indifference is the starting condition, the work that has to break it earns the hours and the senior people. Everything else was never going to be noticed at any rung, which is the argument for agreeing the ambition before the brief goes out rather than after the invoice does.
The uncomfortable truth
The session's title promises a way of evaluating creative without killing it. The honest answer Steve gave is that the tool designed to protect the work is the same tool that gets used to kill it, and he has watched it happen at two companies.
Jonathan asked the question directly: has the framework built to protect creative ever ended up harming it?
"Yeah, definitely. I've seen that in my Kraft Heinz life. I've seen it in my previous life at McDonald's, that people can weaponize these types of scales and metrics to support a point of view or an opinion that they have, and I think that's where it gets very dangerous."
He extended it to research, which is where most agencies lose work.
"People use it to validate their own perspectives, as opposed to using it to make informed decisions and to make the work better."
His constraint on the tool is worth memorizing because it is the sentence you will need in the room:
"All of these tools, they're not meant to give you right or wrong answers. They're meant to help you get to better work."
Kraft Heinz runs Zappi to evaluate work in development, and Steve's framing of what quantitative testing is for is narrower than most clients would admit.
"It can be used as a disaster check, and that's good. Hopefully not too many of our marketers are making disastrous decisions, but that's first and foremost its role."
Where it goes wrong is a matter of resolution.
"Once you start using it to help you decide on casting and specific music and elements of the like, then I think you take it too far. You still have to rely on that creative judgment, that gut instinct, all the things that make great marketers great marketers. So that's a big watch out for me, over-reliance on insights tools in creative development."
He also declined to take the scale to its logical extreme. Jonathan asked whether Kraft Heinz averages its scores annually, or ties them to individual performance. Kraft Heinz does not. Others do.
"I know that other businesses have some quantification of that, but also link it to people's performance metrics. So if you don't score a seven on brand X, Y or Z in AB InBev, that impacts your remuneration package."
Jonathan's one-word reaction was "That's scary," and it is the correct reaction. The moment a creative score determines a marketer's bonus, every conversation about the work becomes a conversation about the marketer.
The most transferable idea in the session came out of the disagreement question. Steve's position is that polarizing work is a signal to slow down rather than a problem to resolve.
"If something is polarizing significantly, that is an interesting sign and something that shouldn't be dismissed quickly. That tension in the room is usually a very positive sign."
But tension has an expiry date, and this is where his most quotable line lands.
"Wherever you land, even if there are still different perspectives, you have to be able to hold hands and jump off the cliff together. You can't then go back once something is in the world and say I told you so. We have to commit collectively before we take the big step."
Every agency principal has been on the wrong end of that. The client who was quiet in the approval meeting becomes the loudest voice in the post-mortem. Steve's rule closes that door before the work ships. Debate hard, then commit as one, and forfeit the right to have been secretly against it.
Jonathan added the counterweight, which is that the framework has to know when to get out of the way.
"Being able to take something that happens real time in culture, and then you just move it through the system within eighteen hours, and you get it up on social, and it just moves. That entire evaluation process doesn't always happen. It doesn't mean that the retro doesn't happen, but the organization is awesome at not letting the process or the framework be a set of handcuffs."
The retro still happens. The gate does not. That is the distinction that keeps a scale from becoming a brake.
What you can use
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