Who needs a strategist anyway

I read somewhere that ‘strategy’ is the biggest buzzword of 2019. It struck true to me, given how my clients have been using the word more than usual this year.

As a purveyor of strategy, it pisses me off to no extent when the word is used as a synonym to a tactic, or sometimes an activity (No Susan, putting up 10 Facebook posts a month is not your strategy for 2020).

When I started in advertising as an account executive 5 years ago, ‘strategy’ was not something we cared much about. The account team would simplify the client brief and hand it over to the design teams. They would come back with the press ads and scripts.

Clients didn’t care much for strategy either. If they liked how the ad sounded/looked, they would give us the green light. Fun, no?

I am not happy about where the word has been nor where it is now. The rest of this article is my attempt of making sense of my world. I want to go over a few things that I have uncovered in my 3 years as a strategist;

• What is not ‘strategy’?
• What then, is ‘strategy’?
• Why do (or don’t) you need a strategist?
• What kind of strategist do you need?

Throughout the article, I use ‘strategist’ and ‘planner’, ‘strategy’ and ‘planning’ interchangeably. This is because in advertising agencies in a small market like ours (Sri Lanka) rarely have strategists AND planners.

What is not ‘strategy’?

It is not just a bunch of research

I have seen (and made) decks with 50 slides of stats. After 30 minutes of agonizing monotony, the client is taken to the ‘idea’ and then pretty press ads.

Research is essential. It’s not everything. Formulating strategy is a creative process more than it is an analytical process. This illustration by Mark Pollard on ‘how to do account planning’ explains the process perfectly.

It’s not a tagline

A tagline is a simple and memorable articulation of what the brand offers. A strategy, on the other hand, answers the question “how does the brand get from A to B for their target audience?”.

A strategy statement is usually more detailed than a tagline. It is not as neatly wrapped around like a tagline either.

For example, Nike’s tagline, ‘Just do it’ will not inform anyone of which direction that brand should progress. Each one of its campaigns, Instagram stories, and influencers will reinforce the why and how of ‘Just do it’ across different contexts and layers of meaning.

It’s not a formula

A formula, like the one above, is a set of instructions for getting the desired result. There is one right result and you will get to it only by following the formula.

However, there is no one right way to do account planning. Different planners use different tools and structures to get to what they think is the right strategy. For many planners, it is 80% intuition and 20% research.

What then, is ‘strategy’?

The JWT Planning Guide defines strategy as an explanation of the relationships between a brand’s position, buyers/users and the responses the brand wants to elicit.

If that didn’t do anything for you, Mark Pollard sees strategy as the creative act of making sense out of chaos. While this makes perfect sense to me (because I have seen ‘chaos’). If you have never been part of the process, this might not make sense to you.

My working definition for ‘strategy’ is this;

Strategy answers the question “how do we change human behaviour from what they feel/think/do now to what we want them to think/feel/do”

For a strategy to work, it has to;

1. Be creative — if it’s not creative, it becomes a formula.
2. Be a cycle of assuming, presenting it to your team, trying to find flaws and assuming again — you have to differentiate between what’s yours and what’s right
3. Work within a well-defined start and end-point

Feel free to add more.

So, why do you need a strategist?

A strategist (or planner) convinces everyone else that brand should head in the direction she suggests. From the account team, the design teams and finally the client, everyone needs to agree that the proposed direction is the ‘best’ direction.

What designations would a strategist have inside an organization?

Most strategists in the advertising space hold the title ‘planner’. Some of the best strategists I have worked with also have had titles like ‘copywriter’, ‘creative director’, ‘account manager’ and ‘media manager’.

Some double-up as a strategist along with their existing job responsibilities. For some, doing strategy is a key function of their role. Some know what they do is strategy. Many don’t.

Doing strategy is a creative process (for the millionth time). And everyone is creative. So, it doesn’t have to be ‘Account Planner’. Be creative with your job title (as long as it’s not ‘________ evangelist’).

What is the difference between a Creative Director/ Copywriter and a Strategist?

It’s hard to tell where the job description of one finishes and that of the other starts. The best strategies I have worked on saw the creative director/copywriter involved from the beginning.

As a rule of thumb, I would dig out insights, work on a strategy statement (proposition) and come up with a few routes for the messaging. During each activity, I would see if the creative director/ copywriter vibes with me.

Polishing up the creative idea and coming up with the material is the creative director’s department and he will check with me whether it’s on or off-brand. For me, the most important point here is that different opinions will collide here. When thoughts collide, it’s always a good indicator of improvement (or a bar fight).

Maybe it is different from agency to agency. Feel free to tell me how it works at your agency in the comments.

P.S. These are no more than my thoughts peppered with the thoughts of some of the best strategists/planners to create some level of credibility.