SVP Strategic & Creative Planning,
Ketchum
Marc Levy provides creative and strategic counsel to client teams and specialists across Ketchum’s entire North America region to catalyze the planning and creative process and help to evolve program concepts from idea to execution.
He has introduced two tools to the agency that changed the conversations Ketchum now has with clients regarding creative.
The first is called the “Break Through Barometer” – so named for the agency’s positioning and commitment to help every client “break through” in meaningful ways. This diagnostic, developed in partnership with our in-house organizational psychologists, is often used at the beginning of a client relationship to establish a creative benchmark. It enables a dialogue between agency team and client team to establish the right level of creative expectation… asking questions like, “What’s your threshold for risk?” and “Tell us one idea you’ve seen that scared you and would never get approved here… now, how could we get it approved?”
It’s a tool that facilitates open dialogue and ultimately connects teams from the outset, while resulting in better briefs and more efficient paths to ideation and execution.
The second tool is called “Idea Court,” and it’s built on Marc’s premise that there are bad ideas that haven’t been pushed hard enough to become great ones. When the occasion arises, Marc convenes an Idea Court– comprised of entirely objective colleagues from various divisions of the agency, at all levels– ready to evaluate the creative and find the problem, challenge the strategy and demand a deeper human truth.
Despite the fact that his bosses describe his office as “a college dorm exploded inside an IKEA store, inside Jackson Pollack’s brain,” Marc applies rigor to the creative process, and it’s this discipline that is now part of Ketchum’s creative arsenal.
Marc Levy was born in Brooklyn, New York and his communications career spans countless US cities, the UK, Japan and Australia. Few realize that Marc was in the US Army; he was stationed in Hawaii, Korea, the Philippines and Alaska. It’s one of the reasons he has such an interest in international affairs. He has just joined the Marketing Faculty at Fordham University in the Bronx teaching strategic communications.