There’s a large segment of the industry that labours in the belief that the job of marketing is to win awards, go viral, or make someone on the creative team feel like a misunderstood genius. Those things might happen along the way, sure.
But the real job, the actual purpose, is simpler and much more serious.
- Marketing exists to drive business.
- Creative exists to drive brand.
- Media exists to make both of those things as big and powerful as possible.
If that hierarchy isn’t clear at the start, everything else falls apart. Teams spin in circles. Budgets get blown on vanity metrics. And eventually, the brand flatlines while everyone’s still arguing about engagement rates and brand pyramids.
Let’s break this down, one layer at a time, with some hard-earned lessons from businesses that got it right, and plenty that didn’t.
Marketing Exists in the Service of Business Growth
This should be obvious, but it gets forgotten more often than you’d think. Marketing isn’t there to “do ads” or “raise awareness.” Those are tactics. The job is to drive business growth, to unlock revenue, acquire customers, increase share of wallet, build pricing power, or defend against competitive threats.
Everything else is decoration.
Let’s take Procter & Gamble, a company that has baked this thinking into its DNA. P&G’s marketers aren’t just sitting around coming up with cute taglines for detergent. They’re running brand teams like miniature business units, each with a sharp focus on category leadership and growth. Every marketing campaign, every packaging change, every retail promotion is scrutinized through the lens of: does this move the business forward?
In fact, former P&G exec Jim Stengel once said that marketing should always be connected directly to business strategy. Not an afterthought. Not something you layer on top. Core to the commercial engine.
Now compare that with what happened at PepsiCo during the Kendall Jenner ad debacle. That campaign was technically “marketing” , there was a famous face, a polished production, a brand message. But there was no connection to the business. No strategy. No insight. Just empty optics that backfired almost instantly. The fallout wasn’t just social media backlash. It damaged Pepsi’s credibility and distracted the company from real competitive challenges it was already facing from insurgent health-forward beverage brands.
That’s what happens when marketing forgets who it works for.
The clearest signal that marketing is serving the business. The CMO speaks the language of the CFO. If your marketing leader can’t talk revenue, margin, and LTV/CAC with confidence, then what you’ve got is a costume designer trying to run a manufacturing floor.
Creative Exists in the Service of Brand Growth
If marketing is the engine of business growth, creative is the soul of brand growth. But here’s where people start to get lost.
Creative is not about being clever for the sake of it. It’s not about pushing boundaries unless those boundaries push the brand into new territory that builds long-term equity. Creative is the sharpest tool we have for shaping perception, building emotional memory structures, and ultimately earning premium pricing and preference in the market.
Let’s talk about Apple for a second. Their best work wasn’t just beautiful, it was strategic. From “Think Different” to the minimalism of iPhone campaigns, the creative consistently built a brand that stood for innovation, elegance, and clarity. It wasn’t just style. It was consistency. Discipline. Purpose. Every ad contributed to a larger narrative about the kind of people Apple products were made for.
And the result? The brand grew, pricing power increased, margins soared, and Apple became the most valuable company in the world.
Now contrast that with Gap in 2010. The brand rolled out a new logo with no strategy, no story, no rationale, just a rebrand because someone decided the old one was boring. The backlash was so immediate and intense that they scrapped the new logo within a week. What they failed to grasp is that creative without brand context doesn’t create value. It confuses people, drains credibility, and stalls momentum.
Creative in service of brand growth is creative with a job. It can be wild or weird or emotional or funny, but it has to build toward something. Something the business can use to grow, not just something the team can feel proud of when the awards season rolls around.
Want a blueprint for how this should look? Watch what Nike does. Whether it’s “Just Do It” or Colin Kaepernick or Serena Williams, Nike’s creative always ladders up to a bigger idea of who the brand is and who it’s for. It’s creative that drives loyalty, drives meaning, and ultimately drives the kind of brand premium most companies would kill for.
Media’s job is to maximise both
So, if marketing drives business growth, and creative drives brand growth, then media is the force multiplier. It’s what takes those efforts and scales them. Magnifies them. Optimises them. And, when done right, brings the right message to the right people at the right moment, with precision and purpose.
But let’s be clear: media is not just “the buy.” It’s not just GRPs, impressions, and retargeting. It’s a strategic lever, and in many cases, it’s where the real performance gains live.
Take Old Spice under Wieden+Kennedy. The “Smell Like a Man, Man” campaign is famous for its creative brilliance, but it wouldn’t have worked without a brilliant media strategy. The campaign launched online before airing on TV, leveraging YouTube at a time when brands were still treating digital like a toy. The real genius came after , with custom response videos to fans, media personalities, even random Twitter users, creating a viral loop that turned a funny ad into a cultural moment. Sales followed.
That’s media working hand-in-hand with creative, in service of brand and business growth.
On the other hand, look at Peloton’s holiday ad controversy. The problem wasn’t just the creative, it was how and where it was placed. The ad ran during the holiday season when consumers were already hyper-sensitive to issues of body image, self-worth, and consumer pressure. There was no nuanced targeting, no channel-specific creative tailoring. Just one high-stakes ad dropped into the mix and left to fend for itself. The backlash swallowed the message, and the brand had to go into damage control.
Good media doesn’t just spend budget. It protects creative, amplifies strategy, and enhances ROI.
When media teams are brought in too late or separated from brand and business strategy, the result is noise. But when media planning is fully integrated, from insight to execution, it becomes one of the most potent tools in the growth playbook.
Look at what Spotify does with its annual Wrapped campaign. The creative is bold and specific, yes, but the media strategy is what makes it unmissable. Out-of-home placements in culturally charged locations, digital amplification tailored by listener behavior, earned media from social sharing, the whole thing is engineered to explode. And it does. Every year.
Why This Hierarchy Matters
When the hierarchy gets confused, when creative starts calling the shots, when media is left out of strategic planning, when marketing forgets the business, it’s supposed to serve , things break.
You see bloated budgets with no ROI. Brand campaigns that don’t move any needles. Media plans that prioritize reach over resonance. And worst of all, teams that work at cross-purposes, defending their turf instead of pulling toward a shared goal.
But when the hierarchy is respected, when marketing owns the growth mandate, when creative feeds brand strategy, and when media scales both , the entire engine hums. Teams align. Customers respond. Growth happens.
This isn’t about declaring one function more important than the others. It’s about clarity. Sequence. Structure. Everyone can be a hero , but only if they know what game they’re playing and what their role is.
The Takeaway
If you lead marketing, you are responsible for business growth. That is the scoreboard. That is the goal.
If you lead creative, your job is to build brand equity in ways that last longer than a campaign. That’s what creates pricing power, customer stickiness, and long-term value.
If you lead media, you are in the growth business. Your role is not just to optimize buys or reduce CPMs. Your job is to make great strategy and great creative impossible to ignore.
This is the growth stack. Clear, sharp, aligned.
The companies that thrive are the ones that understand that marketing isn’t a department, creative isn’t an art gallery, and media isn’t a commodity. These are growth levers. When they’re treated that way, the results speak for themselves.