Creative Flexibility Starts With Knowing Exactly What A Brand Stands For

The most durable creative work grows out of a clear sense of what a brand exists to do and the real problem it can solve, which is what lets that brand stay consistent while still moving fast when culture opens a window. Attention on its own has become cheap, and the strategies that hold up are the ones built on a foundation solid enough to support both a long-term position and quick, reactive plays without the two pulling apart. That foundation is getting harder to lock down as formats multiply and AI floods the market with forgettable output, which is exactly why the discipline of knowing what a brand stands for has become what separates work that lasts from work that simply happened.

Bethany Omeri is Head of Strategy at Special in Wellington, the independent agency's New Zealand operation, and was named Strategist of the Year at Campaign Asia's 2025 Agency of the Year Awards. Her work has run across some of New Zealand's trickiest brand problems, from racism and drunk driving to climate change, and she recently returned from judging the Creative Strategy category at Cannes. What she saw in that room shaped how she now talks about what strategy is actually for.

"Strategy has to do much more than create a jumping-off point for a campaign. It has to uncover something that fundamentally changes how we think about the problem," says Omeri. The judging conversations kept circling the same question: whether a piece of work was just a clever way to say something, or whether it reached the nub of a problem and unlocked real change. The distinction between packaging and reframing became the line she used to separate the memorable work from the rest.

Value over attention

The pieces that stood out at Cannes were the ones adding something people could actually use. Heineken took the Grand Prix in Creative Strategy for The Pub That Refused to Die, which followed a village in County Limerick that pooled savings to buy its last remaining pub, with the brand stepping in to provide training and an online resource hub so other communities could do the same. "The best ideas aren't just creative, they add genuine value. They're business solutions, not just marketing campaigns," says Omeri. It is the same shift running under a lot of award-winning work now, where the brand promise gets delivered rather than declared.

A campaign out of Kenya for the dairy brand Too Good took a Grand Prix for Paid Sick Leave for Cows, which solved a stubborn public-health problem with almost no media weight. Kenyan law requires farmers to withhold milk for several days after a cow is treated with antibiotics, and the lost income pushed some to sell it anyway. Too Good built a low-fi program, run entirely through WhatsApp, that pays farmers for the milk they legally cannot sell, letting the brand deliver on its no-antibiotics promise while protecting the people who supply it. That is the version Omeri rates, a strategic unlock built as a utility that never needed Super Bowl money to land.

Foundation before flexibility

The brands that react well to cultural moments are usually the ones that settled their positioning long ago. "If you have a strong brand foundation, reacting to cultural moments becomes second nature because you're activating the same idea in different ways," says Omeri. Heineken's For the Love of Pubs platform in Ireland sits so far inside the business strategy that the brand cannot drift too far even when it wants to, because every reactive move plugs back into the same deep well of pub culture. That linkage between business decision and creative platform is what gives a brand room to move without losing itself.

Brands without that anchor tend to grab at whatever is passing. When a company keeps redoing its brand strategy or never had one, it ends up chasing the moment it happens to be in, and consistency becomes nearly impossible to hold while still flexing when the situation calls for it. Omeri is clear that the fundamentals have not changed. They have just become much harder to apply, and the job now is making sure the foundation is set and has enough give inside it to allow real reactivity. She describes the result as a series of lily pads, a set of moves a brand can leap between while still playing in the same pond.

Pilots over big bets

Playing in unfamiliar formats or markets tends to stall on internal buy-in, and Omeri traces most of that resistance back to a missing outcome. "Doing something new just for the sake of doing something new is always going to be a hard sell. You have to be clear about what outcome you're trying to create," she says. The argument usually falls apart when a team wants to experiment without a clear picture of what the experiment should produce, and without a logic flow the CFO can follow from the first move to the eventual business result. Those results rarely show up straight away, which makes the reasoning behind the bet matter as much as the bet itself.

The way through, in her experience, is to frame these moves as pilots. Most businesses carry some appetite to try new things in the name of pushing forward, as long as nobody pretends the pilot has to deliver the quarter's entire number. Positioning it as an innovation test, with a plan to demonstrate the effect and then scale, tends to clear the internal hurdle that kills more ambitious work. This is a familiar tension for smaller and local advertisers too, who now have far cheaper ways to test into new channels than they did even a year ago.

Culture as the unlock

No amount of remote planning substitutes for people who actually understand a place. "There's no substitute for boots on the ground. Without people who understand the culture, you miss the nuance, and that's often where the best ideas come from," says Omeri. The Cannes judging drove that home, with a diverse panel surfacing why certain ideas were brilliant in ways an outsider would never have reached on their own. That cultural read is also what stops a brand from spending heavily on work that will sail straight past the audience it was built for, a risk that grows as AI-generated production makes it easier than ever to ship a high volume of technically polished, culturally hollow work.

Working from a smaller market has shaped how Omeri thinks about all of this. New Zealand strategists often cut their teeth on smaller brands without global budgets, so they learn to make an impact through the sheer potency of the idea, since the spend to carry it simply is not there. There is a self-consciousness in it too, a quiet sense of having something to prove against the bigger capitals, which she credits for a lot of the resilience and hustle in the region's work. It also produces a distinct creative signature, shaped by what New Zealanders call tall poppy, the instinct to cut down anyone who gets too big for their boots. That reluctance to take yourself too seriously runs right through the work, giving it a self-aware, self-deprecating humor even on serious subjects, and it is a sensibility increasingly picked up in other markets. As Omeri puts it, a bit of dumb fun wrapped around a smart idea does more work than polish ever will.