Longform: On Building a Strategy Practice
A strategy leader isn't automatically an architect or builder of capabilities and process
“We’re building the plane while we’re flying it.”
Agency people love this phrase. You’ll hear an account lead say it when a client’s business challenge doesn’t have a straightforward solution. Or a hiring manager when describing the ambiguity a candidate will find in a role. New business teams, too, who underscore the reality of a fast and furious pitch with it.
Our favorite saying illustrates what it feels like to put something in motion while you’re still figuring it out–communicating not just the necessity of “keeping things moving” but also the nature of acting with incomplete instructions. In the marketing and advertising corner of the world, the unknown is where we thrive, discovering creativity and innovation within. We pride ourselves on being entrepreneurial and–here comes another thing we say often–doing first and seeking forgiveness later; the goal is to get it right so no apology is ever necessary. Most agencies excel at taking calculated risks and that’s ultimately the appeal of working with one and why clients keep coming back.1
Unfortunately, agencies tend to be pretty bad at being their own clients. We kick internal projects to the bottom of our to-do lists in favor of billable hours.2 We take liberties with our ownership. It’s easy enough to get away with this when we’re talking about a blog post, but when it comes to the creation or refinement of a specialism it spells disaster. This is most often when we forget that the plane we are building and flying at the same time eventually needs to land.
What makes building a department so hard?
For one thing, the complicated nature of our systems. Building (or rebuilding) a department and its capabilities requires us to consider many components that are knotted up like a ball of string lights, and some knots can’t be untied so we have to work with or around them. In other words, it requires systems thinking, which is never particularly easy but takes on a unique shape in an agency setting.
One of the first mistakes I usually see with specialism creation work has to do with how far into the system it treads–or rather, how shallow it stays. Part of what makes an agency an excellent problem-solving partner is its objectivity over a client’s challenges; we are being paid to diagnose problems that aren’t ours. We’re more short-sighted when those challenges directly affect us and struggle not to succumb to our feelings and biases. In the context of this work, it means there’s often a blind spot to the world outside the agency and department or capability-building work fails to consider things not right under its nose.
Key components within our systems
The business: Agencies sell marketing and advertising services to other businesses. Our intellectual property (IP) lives and dies by the departments we sort those services into, the way we structure the teams within those departments, and the talent we hire onto those teams within those departments. Agencies that are part of holding companies have additional considerations and restraints that impact what they sell, how they sell, and who they sell.
The people: Human beings are already complex as individuals, but in groups things intensify fast because we don’t all think, feel, or behave the same way. We may all agree as agency leads that agencies make money by selling services, but opinions are likely to differ on exactly what those services should be or who on the agency’s employee roster should be offering them. Interpersonal dynamics morph into politics (good or bad). Politics create complications (good or bad). Any holding company in play will only deepen these impacts because there are more interpersonal and interprofessional objects.
The market: Speaking of complex, there are multiple subcomponents within “the market” that influence the success of an agency as both a business and a collection of people. At a high level, agencies have to design for:
Clients, who are the ones buying an agency’s services. We have to think about the ones we want to work with and the ones we already have. What is the business reason they’re looking to hire an agency for their brand? What do they expect from an agency generally? What do they think about us specifically? Why would they choose to explore working with an agency at all?
Competitors, who are also courting our clients. How do they talk about themselves and the things they sell? What do they offer that we don’t? What’s our edge? How do our agency brands compare and contrast? What would make a client choose one agency over another? What happens if we’re put in a situation where we have to work together?
Market health and integrity. There is a well-documented cycle of agencies falling in and out of favor that keeps repeating, as cycles do. Major influences like the economy and industry culture determine where we are within the cycle or when it advances to its next stage. It looks something like this:
Clients love agencies and have healthy appetites for AOR relationships with full-service shops, keeping as much of their work as possible with one shop or holding company
Niche agencies and partners emerge with new technologies that challenge the AOR model and clients diversify away from those relationships in favor of a specialized SME roster
Too many SOWs create too many headaches and clients pare back, reverting to a more comfortable AOR-like model
Clients question why their agencies are charging so damn much for services they can get for cheaper by bringing talent in-house on a salary instead, usually because they’ve had budgets slashed or have matured as a company and can now support a robust marketing function (though sometimes for no discernible reason at all)
Clients feel their in-house marketing services are missing the right talent, expertise, and/or scale and they decide to RFP agencies to provide supplemental support
Agencies use the foothold project-based work gives them to pitch for additional services, increasing SOWs and strengthening relationships
Agencies typically zero in on a department and decide it’s time to create or transform one because some aspect of the system demands it: the business needs to be more profitable, someone has an opinion that things should be done differently, competitors are stealing clients, or the market is entering the next phase of its cycle and the agency needs to adapt.
As we embark on this department-shaping and capability-building work, we have to identify the weak points within the system that have caused agency leadership to want changes. What broke down and why? What factors can we control, and what factors do we have to compensate for? What relationships exist between different components and what effects might we observe when we make changes?
What challenges does being strategy present?
Strategy as a practice is commonly misunderstood, even by a great deal of strategists. This is why many of us can’t describe two strategy roles we’ve held in the same way; there may be common skillsets and frameworks but application is subjective, to quite a degree.
Making matters worse is our industry, whose culture tends to place strategy on a pedestal and gate-keep it. This understandably breeds resentment and an inherent dislike from others of the discipline and the people practicing it. Watch how agencies in pursuit of an Effie or Lion speak about their submissions during awards season and you’ll see the toxicity rise.3 Take a scroll through your LinkedIn feed (if you can stomach it) and you’ll run across the same exclusionary discourse year-round.
When it is insinuated that only the “strategist” can be the smart person in the room, quiet rebellion ensues. Sometimes, that looks like strategy being cut out of projects and scopes. Other times, it emboldens anyone in an agency to declare themselves a strategist. In both cases, the practice of strategy gets watered down and its value becomes harder for our partners to see.
One of the biggest mistakes a strategy department can make is with communication. When a strategy function hasn’t been effective with this in the past, they leave behind a brand that labels strategy as expensive and valueless. Other agency functions own both idea and execution, but strategy does not. A creative duo comes up with the concept for a campaign and also owns the art and copy for its TVC or social or OOH, for example. But a strategist? It’s what we think, and how the output of our thinking turns into the ways other departments (or our clients) keep thinking and then execute. Our slide decks and briefs and POVs are all means to an end, not the end.
Another common issue originates from how strategists behave as cross-functional partners. The most beloved strategists use their practice to champion the ideas of the team, whereas the most unpopular dictate an approach of their own that must follow. Our work does not start and end with a client deliverable and has to work for our partners if it’s going to work for our clients.
The reality of who and what we are
Strategists are both cartographers and navigators. Our job is to map out the world around our destination–where our clients or brands want to go–and chart a way through. When there’s a change in the weather, an obstacle in the road, or a desire to move in a different direction it’s our job to adjust and re-route.
In the context of department-shaping and capability-building work, we can’t be successful if we don’t understand how healthy the brand of strategy is. Do people around the agency love us or hate us? How do they describe us? What experiences have shaped their opinions, good or bad? What do they think the solution looks like?
What should strategists do when shaping their discipline and its offerings?
Doing things the right way involves a thorough work-up of the system, intentional cross-functional collaboration, and room for trial-and-error. Without any and all of these things, a flashy capes deck with some big language and a few persuasive one-liners becomes the output–but it’s not the answer.
The order from leadership to build or fix the strategy department isn’t usually given with a lot of direction. There’s a problem with the business, and we need strategy to make it better. Figure out what that looks like and report back.
It’s on the strategist in charge to discern how to get to “better” and what it should look like. It’s also up to the strategist in charge to push back when the pressures of time or office politics try to exert undue influence on the result. The discipline of strategy must be applied to the design of its functionality.
Strategy department and capability-building work that succeeds:
Adopts a client-first approach that looks at how strategy partners with other departments to service a piece of business as an agency
Adopts language to describe itself from how others already speak
Operationalizes itself through existing pathways that build connections between strategy’s “ideal state” and how other departments already work
Follows an entrepreneurial SaaS-like model to launch–pilot an MVP, collect feedback, iterate, improve, deploy additional features/capabilities, continue to analyze and refine/build; the process is constantly in motion
In contrast, work that is likely destined for failure:
Follows a practice-first approach forcing everything revolve around strategy
Uses complicated or unfamiliar language to describe itself
Measures its successes exclusively through a P&L
Forces net-new ways of working on internal partners that require immediate and unilateral adoption of processes to function
Launches all at once to achieve instant scale, at the cost of a more agile test-and-learn infrastructure; changes require going back to the drawing board every time
One will discover what it needs to be and the other will get stuck in a never-ending identity crisis. One will experiences growth while the other experiences attrition. One is intentional about its success and the other relies on blind luck. Even planes that are being flown during assembly have enough structure before take-off to ensure they stay in the air.
Success is defined by the how, not just the what
As with most things in life, it comes down to our timing and when we ask people to travel with us. The departments that fail ask too soon or too late–before they’ve put enough rigor behind something, or after it’s been fully baked. To a degree, the “sweet spot” has to be intuited by the strategist in charge and that’s what makes the work feel mysterious and important.4
If you’re not sure of your instincts, think through it as a workflow. We have to sell in our ideas for how strategy should be practiced four times:
To our cross-functional partners
To agency leadership
To our clients (the ones we have and the ones we want)
Most importantly to ourselves
Once you’ve worked out what you believe as a strategist about strategy–in other words, your vision–you’ve arrived at the right place to start travelling around and then up the chain.
At the risk of using yet another cliché saying, the real difference between success and failure is just as much about the journey as it is the destination. It’s how you got there, in addition to just getting somewhere, period. If strategists are going to be effective navigators for other agency disciplines, we have to be confident in our own sense of direction first. ⚡
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This is a reductive look at the agency model. Even the cycle outlined further in this post takes a high-level view that favors the agency model in the end, every time. There’s a lot more to explore here that should be its own post (or series) and agencies need to prepare for the eventuality of the cycle completely breaking down.
I have a lot of opinions about classifying internal work as unbillable. Everything, especially management and leadership work, is essential for profitability even if you can’t invoice it as-is. We need to find a better way to label these tasks so they don’t become the can we kick down the road in perpetuity.
This is another complex thing that warrants its own conversation. Great work deserves to be recognized and celebrated and awards aren’t a bad thing. There are, however, a lot of problematic behaviors that stem from our pursuit for greatness in this regard which agencies need to recognize and stop doing. Maybe I’ll write a post about that someday, too.
IYKYK.