Every conversation I have with a CPG marketing team eventually splits into three separate conversations: packaging, digital media, and advertising. Three different teams, three different agencies, three different sets of metrics – and almost never anyone asking how the three actually connect.
That's not a criticism of the people running those conversations. It's how the organisation is built. Packaging goes through design agencies, brand teams and retailer compliance. Paid media sits with a media agency or an internal digital team, judged on click-through and return on ad spend.
E-commerce content answers to conversion metrics. In-store belongs to shopper marketing. Each function optimises its own channel against its own quality bar, and there is rarely a single, shared view of whether the creative underneath all of it is actually any good.
That fragmentation shows up in the budget too, not just the org chart. Creative effectiveness doesn't have a natural home in a CPG marketing budget the way media buying or agency fees do – insights teams see it as a research cost, martech teams see it as a technology line, media teams see it as an efficiency play. When nobody owns the whole picture, it's no surprise nobody's measuring it end to end.
Here's what that structure misses: pack design isn't one use case among the others. Innovation in a CPG organisation comes from everywhere – R&D, insights, marketing, a regional team's own idea – but almost none of it reaches a shelf without passing through the same gate.
However big or small the idea, it eventually has to manifest as a pack design. That makes pack design the universal starting point of the innovation process, not just one creative format among many, and usually the first place an idea gets tested in front of real consumers, long before a campaign brief exists.
It's also usually the first piece of creative actually made for a product. The photography, the messaging hierarchy, the brand assets decided at that stage don't stay on the shelf – they get cropped into hero images, resized for a product page, lifted into a social ad, shrunk onto a thumbnail. Everything downstream inherits whatever was decided first.
I've lost count of the times I've seen a pack shot that looks superb on shelf get reused, largely unchanged, as an e-commerce hero image – then quietly under-perform because nobody checked whether it still worked at thumbnail size, stripped of the physical context that made it work in the first place. The mistake wasn't made in digital. It was inherited from further up the chain, and nobody was looking there when they went hunting for the cause.
Get pack design right, and every channel it feeds into starts from a stronger position. Get it wrong, and you spend the rest of the year firefighting the consequences across a dozen channels, often without realising that's what's happening – because packaging and digital media rarely show up in the same conversation in the first place.
This matters more than it used to. Average CMO tenure in CPG is now 3.5 years – the shortest of any industry, according to Spencer Stuart – and marketing budgets are under a level of scrutiny they haven't faced before: CFO pressure on marketing leaders reached 63% in 2025, up from 52% two years earlier, and board-level scrutiny rose from 33% to 50% over the same period, according to the Deloitte/Duke CMO Survey.
Nobody in that position has the time, or the political capital, to fund twenty separate creative fixes across twenty channels. What they can fund is one clear story: get the foundational asset right, then adapt it deliberately as it moves.
That reframing changes where a business like ours needs to show up. We spend a lot of time talking about digital media, advertising, e-commerce – all real, all important. But if pack design is genuinely the gateway every idea has to pass through, we should be in that conversation earlier and more often than we currently are: not as one use case among many, but as the springboard the rest of the roadmap gets built from.
None of this means pack design is the only thing that matters, or that getting it right solves digital, advertising and everything else automatically. It doesn't. What changes as a brand moves along that journey – audience, format, context – is real, and each channel still needs its own adaptation. But that adaptation works from a stronger base when the foundational creative decisions were sound to begin with, and it's a much harder job to do well when nobody checked.
Brands don't need to solve packaging, digital and advertising as three unrelated problems. They need to get the one gate every idea passes through right, then get better at carrying that forward through everything that follows. This is just the beginning of that conversation, not the end of it.