Creativity makes marketing matter.

In an industry focused on channels, formats, and endless output, it’s easy to lose sight of the one thing that moves people: ideas.

So, we interviewed Andrew Griffiths – Orchard’s Head of Creative – to explore why creativity remains the sharpest commercial tool in marketing – and what it really takes to create work with impact.

Q: What role does creativity play in marketing today?

Creativity is what makes marketing matter. Without it, you have information, but not communication. The job of marketing is to make someone feel something, change their mind, or take action. That requires more than a message and a media budget. It requires a core idea.

My background is in visual communications, and at its heart that discipline is about taking a core truth, a brand story, and making it resonate in a way that builds genuine loyalty. The best creative work doesn’t just reach an audience. It says something they weren’t expecting, in a way they weren’t prepared for, about something that actually matters to them.

Everything else is infrastructure. The channels are just the preferred platforms. The idea is the thing that travels across all of them.

At Orchard we put it plainly: we cut through the noise and achieve measurable outcomes, not just output. That distinction matters. Output is activity. Outcomes are the reason you were doing it in the first place.

Examples of our creative work for We Swap:

Q: Is creativity valued enough in marketing?

The brands that genuinely value creativity treat it as a business argument, not just a preference. They understand that a distinctive brand commands more attention, builds more loyalty, and is less exposed to price competition. That’s a commercial case, not a creative one.

In my experience, clients always want to be brave in the initial meetings and brainstorming sessions. But that tends to waver the closer you get to a launch. You end up falling back into safer territory, and I think that’s precisely when the most talked-about campaigns stand out: when they’re truly distinctive, when they make people smile or make people think.

Q: What makes a great creative partnership?

Trust matters just as much as talent. Brands want a partner who understands their business well enough to challenge them when they’re wrong, and who delivers work that moves the needle.

The best client relationships are the ones where we’re brought in early, before the brief is even written. That’s when we can add the most value. When we’re handed a finished brief and asked to execute it, we’re a production resource. When we’re in the room while the problem is being defined, we’re a genuine partner. That’s a very different thing.

One of the most common frustrations with agencies is the bait-and-switch: senior people in the room at pitch, juniors on the account from week two. Being employee-owned means everyone at Orchard has a genuine stake in the quality of what we produce. Senior involvement isn’t a selling point for us. It’s just how we operate. Everyone is involved from top to bottom of a project.

Q: Why work with an agency – and Orchard specifically?

Perspective is the main one. Internal teams can know an organisation too well. They can become straightjacketed by what’s gone before: we can’t do that because we weren’t allowed to, we already know the answer to that. It creates a fixed mindset rather than an open one, full of organisational biases that are hard to see from the inside.

An agency brings the outside view, the honest question, the challenge that a colleague simply can’t give you. It’s the difference between being inside the jar trying to read the label and standing outside it.

There’s also breadth of experience. Working across broadcast, financial services, tourism, sport, healthcare, transport, and manufacturing means we bring thinking from spaces that internal teams rarely have access to. A solution that worked in destination marketing might be exactly what financial services brands need.

With Orchard specifically, you get integrated thinking across strategy, media, creative, digital, sponsorships, and live experiences from a team that’s invested in the outcomes because they own the business. You’re not buying access to one discipline and hoping the others follow. And you’re not getting a senior team at pitch and a junior team on the account.

What you see with Orchard is what you get.

Examples of our Creative work for Wexford-Pembrokeshire Pilgrim Way:

Q: What kind of work do you enjoy most?

Work with something real at its centre. Campaigns that have something genuine to say about their audience, not just the client.

A lot of what I’m most proud of sits in destination and heritage work. One project that stands out is the Wexford-Pembrokeshire Pilgrim Way, a 260km cross-border pilgrimage route linking Ferns, Ireland with St Davids, Wales. At the heart of the project is an extraordinary story. Two sixth-century saints, St Aidan and St David, whose shared love of bees helped save the bee population of Ireland, and whose meeting across the Irish Sea sparked a flourishing of Celtic culture that’s still felt today.

We’ve done a lot of destination work: Salisbury, Celtic Routes, Carmarthenshire, Llanelli, Ceredigion, Cardiff. Each one is different, but they all share the same challenge of finding the truth about a place and making it resonate with the right people.

Admiral is a very different kind of client but one I genuinely enjoy working with, because they value creativity and give us room to use it. The summer events we’ve delivered for them, including one at Cardiff Castle, have been some of the most creatively satisfying projects we’ve produced. When a client trusts you and lets you flex, the work shows it.

We’ve also done campaign work with genuine social purpose at its heart, like Own The Night for Welsh Athletics, about keeping women safe running after dark. That kind of brief brings out the best in a creative team.

In an age of automation, templates, and algorithm-driven output, creativity isn’t just alive, it’s more essential than ever. Brands that invest in ideas, truth, and emotional resonance will continue to rise above the noise.

Because creativity isn’t decoration.
It’s differentiation.