Dear CMOs: You're Not Nike, So Don't "Just Do It"
In Defense of Strategy (And Agencies)
Last week advertising LinkedIn gathered to exchange hot takes in response to a post from a CMO who ranted (her words) about her frustration with agencies. I encourage you to read the whole post (and her follow up post), but despite her #MakeAgenciesRelevantAgain hashtag and some talk about broken agency models, there was one line that gave away what she was really saying:
“I don't want to pay them for strategy.”
This is a very honest version of a refrain that has become increasingly common in recent years. As marketing leaders are put under more pressure for “results” and more immediate returns on investment, they transfer that pressure to agencies (and internal teams) to just skip to the good stuff. Don’t bother with strategy, just give me the ideas/tactics.
I once pushed a CEO for more strategic input to an overly basic brief, and their frustrated response was “Our strategy is to just do stuff.”
How Did We Get Here?
A big reason for this is the influence that immature DTC brands had on the marketing industry over the last decade. Businesses that launched on the backs of easy organic (and then paid) social didn’t need any strategy to see massive growth. They could treat marketing like an ATM, where all you need is to punch in the right code and cash comes flying out. They just needed the right combination of a few basic “digital marketing” levers.
Of course, the vastest majority of those DTC brands are either out of business, under new management, or circling the drain while praying for a buyer. It turns out once the ATM runs out of cash, just pressing the same buttons harder doesn’t work.
But it seems that instead of learning that lesson, many marketers are doubling down on the Just Do It attitude by just trying to wring more efficiencies out of their declining tactics by compressing (or eliminating) strategic development. Instead, they should recognize that strategy isn’t just a skippable step in the process, it’s a prerequisite for all the things expected from modern marketing…
Measurability
Remember in high school algebra class when you couldn’t just answer a problem, you had to show your work to prove you knew why it was the right answer. This is perhaps the most critical reason we still need strategy. In a world where everything is trackable, nothing is measurable without knowing the why. The best strategies are not just about WHAT to do (what message to have or media tactics to deploy), but WHY they will work.
Without a strategy, it’s easy to simple say something didn’t work. The proverbial baby gets thrown out with the bathwater when we are unable to explore the nuanced reasons why. Or worse, something does work but we misunderstand the reasons why and expect similar success based on false assumptions.
Technology and Platform Independence
As we accelerate toward an AI-driven future, how are we going to imagine all those content prompts? If the manual act of creation is rapidly being automated, the ability to clearly articulate what is needed (aka… strategy) from those machines will be the most critical skill set. If you want a fresh, distinctive perspective, it’s not going to come from AI, which, at least for now, generates work that is by design derivative from what already exists, so the input is where the distinction has to happen.
Because strategy, on the other hand, is about what’s not obvious. Strategy finds the truths hidden under the surface of today’s results or anticipates the disruptions to the conditions that enabled them in the first place.
On top of that, the major digital platforms don’t want brands to have strategy. The more thought you put into your marketing approach, the less reliant you will be on their algorithms. Or put better: the more understanding you will have to HOW the algorithms are or are not delivering for you.
Better Ideas
The ease of using those digital platforms have led many to believe that iteration alone will yield superior ideas, like a Darwinist view of creativity. But really that’s the monkey-typewriter method of marketing: aim for extreme volume and speed and something good will come out.
At the heart of every great creative execution or breakthrough media tactic is a truth about being human. For the absolute best ideas, that truth is something the human didn’t even realize about themselves.
In Mad Men Don Draper was portrayed as Creative Director, but only because strategic planners hadn’t been labeled yet. (You can tell he was more of a planner than a creative because he got really mad when a client wouldn’t approve a brief) The reason why fans of the show (both ad people and civilians) see him as this creative genius is not because of the ads he created, but because of the insights he drove to arrive at them.
In the real world, those insights rarely arrive in the middle of a pressurized client meeting gone awry. They’re worked at, fiddled with, analyzed, and wordsmithed until they not only inform what is needed, but inspire creatives or media planners to do it their way.
Marketing Serendipity
If everyone “just did it” then the brands with the biggest budgets would win every time. Marketing is about finding asymmetries that can be turned into a competitive advantage, in pricing, creativity, and even execution. The quest for unique insights is what unearths those asymmetries, while at the same time broadening a marketers’ surface area of luck.
I’m sure there have been world-changing, award-winning campaigns that erupted spontaneously from some creative director’s mind, but I’d bet there are ten times as many that resulted from a thoughtful, well-articulated strategy. This is because while we’re all in search of lightning-in-a-bottle ideas, strategy increases the size of the bottle, gives us a better chance of a magical moment by seeing a brief in multiple dimensions.
And on the quest for the great idea, strategy powers creative risk assessment, which decreases the likelihood of epic marketing fails…
Towards a Better Strategy
The clients that complain that there’s too much strategy are likely the same ones who give hackneyed feedback like “Is this really ownable for our brand?” or “Could anyone in the category to this?”
The CMOs and CEOs that I love working with demonstrate curiosity and expect the same in return from their agencies. Those executives’ businesses, in my experience, are also more successful.
This is not to say that how we do strategy (both at agencies and as an industry at large) is perfect.
Of course we need to evolve how we develop strategies (it was one of my main motivations for starting Reason & Whimsy):
We need to more rigorously incorporate new technology, including AI (see this great presentation from Zoe Scaman on how she uses it within her strategic process).
We need strategic thinking that is more adaptable to different types of consumers as their media consumption continues to fragment.
Most importantly, we need to do it faster, to better keep up with speed of marketing deployment and optimization.
Yes, the agency model is in danger, if not broken, but amid its myriad problems, I promise you “too much strategy” is NOT one of them. Client’s that don’t want to pay for it— that might be.
This Week’s Whimsies
If it’s possible for a product launch to be overhyped and underhyped at the same time, it was the Apple Vision Pro, but this exhaustive analysis of the product and its market from a former Oculus lead is really helpful in understanding the role of the product in the future of spatial computing.
I loved this essay about how the personalization of entertainment will make boredom might be the most important skill in the 21st century.
And I also loved the idea in this piece that because we have come to expect all the news we care about fed directly to us, when we don’t see something covered, we (wrongly) assume that it’s not.
Upcoming Topics
A preview of thoughts that are coming together for future posts...
NEXT WEEK: Girls5Eva, Kate Bush, Suits and the Allure of Zombie Media (Culture/Media)
Something about digital identity related to the French Revolution (MEDIA)
When to make the Performance to Brand Leap (MARKETING)
Something about Live Events/Sports as the Savior/Villain of the Media World (MEDIA)
Death & Marketing: A Match Made in Purgatory (CULTURE)
Why Context Matters In Marketing and in Art (CULTURE/MARKETING)
Framework Roundup (MARKETING)