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Planning for Effective Outcomes #2: How to build upon or challenge client briefs
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- [00:00]
A
This special series is brought to you by the Effie's for over 55 years, Effie has been the global authority on marketing effectiveness. They lead the way with the largest, most prestigious marketing effective awards across 130 markets worldwide. And the EFFIE Index ranks the most effective brands, marketers and agencies globally. But EFFIE is more than awards. They're dedicated to helping all marketers understand what makes marketing effective by equipping them with the insights, tools and inspiration they need to succeed. Learn more@effie.org that's e f f I e.org and by tracksuit, the affordable always on brand tracking tool that helps marketers and agencies answer the question is what we're doing working? Companies pay $100,000 or more for brand tracking, which is out of the question for many modern brands. Tracksuit provides brand tracking without that big price tag. Their in house research experts do the heavy lifting using best in class practices to craft your survey and get you results fast. Check them out@gotracksuit.com that's gotracksuit.com now back to the show. Welcome to the show. I'm Fergus O. Carroll in Chicago. I first of all wanted to congratulate EOS for winning the Iridium, which is the highest level EFFIE award granted each year. The work has been phenomenal, working with Mischief out of New York City and it was just announced this week along with and this was out of a finalist of a group of global grand Fe winners. So it's phenomenal honor for EOS and for Mischief. I'm going to be in Cannes this year actually interviewing EOS on stage and hopefully along with Mischief to really get an understanding of where all of this greatness came from. And it's not greatness, just simply in terms of driving brand metrics or driving social engagement. It's about building the business. So super excited about it. If you're going to be in Cannes, come and hang out with us Tuesday afternoon. More details will come out as we get a little bit closer. We're also doing a couple of other roundtables that same day, so it will be brilliant to see you. So back to today. We are continuing our EFFIE series. This is a six part series in partnership with the EFFIE about planning for effective outcomes. We're looking at the sort of granular level, the issues behind the issues because in effectiveness we know about the quantified factors that make the outcome successful and that's very well documented. But I love to have these conversations about what's happening in the day to day culture of an agency, day to day culture of a company that ultimately creates great work. And the theory of this series is if you don't get the initial phases right, all of the subsequent phases suffer as a result. That's the essence of this and the thesis behind this series. So for those of you who are regular listeners, you know that we started off with CMOs. We had a panel, it was a couple of weeks back. You can go back and watch it and listen to it later. But it was about CMOs giving insights into how they frame the AGENC brief. Today's episode is about what happens when that brief lands at the agency. How do they interrogate it? What are the factors that they know they have to deal with when they get it. And this is a brilliant conversation. I've done over 300 shows here. This is among my favorites. If you are a strategist, no matter what area of strategy you're in, you are going to want to listen to this. It's really good. There's so many great observations and insider tips and suggestions that it was hard to pick which social clips we were going to use out of this. So that tells you a lot. So do give it a listen. And one of the things that's pretty critical about this, that issues of effectiveness aren't necessarily what we think they are. So earlier this week I had a conversation with Juliet Hagart, the CMO of the effies. Here's some of Juliet's thoughts.
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B
The last piece of research we did trying to unpack kind of barriers to effectiveness, I thought people were going to talk about data and tools and not having the right access to that kind of stuff. Actually what they talked about was human things. So how we work, how we collaborate. And if my memory serves me correctly, I think the biggest barrier to effectiveness was seen as the client agency relationship by a 20% margin. And the reason why people spoke to that was exactly at these, you know, handing the brief over is quite a high octane moment because the client is invested, they've given it weeks of work. The agency is invested because they need to make sure it's the right springboard. And if you don't have good relationships and if you are too scared to challenge and to have those kind of honest and authentic conversations, you're never going to get the brief right. I think people, I think people underestimate the importance of the conversation that needs to happen. Off the back of it is that
- [05:38]
A
something that FE in its programs can help a lot of companies do is understand how to how do we, how do we better prepare client side people and agency side people to, to do this hard work at the beginning and really work together on this granular aspect of the whole process?
- [05:58]
B
Yeah, I mean we have a phrase that kind of underpins whether we're talking about like tools or advisory programs or all kind of training programs, which is all about, you know, effectiveness isn't an outcome, it's a day to day orientation. So it's about how we move through the processes together. But in order to do that you kind of need a common language and a common lens on effectiveness. And I think that's where kind of some of fe's tools and trainings can come in because they're specifically designed to do that. It's not necessarily just about making your skills a bit better. It's about bringing people together so that all orientated in the same direction. And it's also about bringing, you know, sometimes theories can be a bit complex. But showing proven evidence of success with other cases that have been operating in your market or outside of your market in your category that have been proven to work, that's kind of gold dust because it helps people feel more confident. So if you're able to prep your briefs with examples from other kind of evidence based work, it's going to help, it's going to help your conversation and it's going to help your argument, I think.
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A
So. This is episode two in our series, Planning for Effective Outcomes. This is a conversation with chief strategy officers. And what is the dynamic when you receive a brief from the client? Enjoy. I want to start off with that point. When a call comes, somebody puts something on your desk, Elizabeth, and somebody's like, okay, we just received this brief or briefing. Is that the way it starts? Is it a document? Mostly. Is it a conversation? What form does it come in typically?
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C
Yeah, it's a good question. And the answer is a little bit of both. Right. So at Martin, we're fortunate in that most of the brands we work with are still long term business partners. And so, you know, by the time we get a brief, it typically is on the other side of, you know, quarterly and monthly and weekly conversations about ambition and business and the levers the comms need to drive and so on and so forth. And so we probably receive fewer grenade over the wall briefs than maybe some people do, which I'm really grateful for as a strategist. So typically by the time a brief comes over, so to speak, it is the outgrowth of a bigger conversation about the business. That's certainly how we prefer to operate. And so in that regard, the brief itself shouldn't be a surprise. But it's also worth noting that sometimes a brief comes in the course of a pitch. Those are very different. Even in that everything is such a mixed economy. You may have something that is well considered and is coming through. A consultant or a procurement team or a brand team that's really thought about it and has put something in front of you that is a really smart digest about the state of the business, the goals they want to accomplish, you know, the, the focus of the brief and what they want to see back. You might also get something that's kind of like a wild hair and you know, with love and respect, a little bit of a dog's breakfast that you're looking at and you're like, I don't, I don't know exactly what this is. You don't know what your budget is, you don't know what you're asking for. We've never met before, but I would love to help you grow your business. So I think you're not, you're not necessarily knowing day to day, you're receiving all kinds of things, which is an interesting starting point because you're going to have a conversation either way. And so whether the brief is, you know, poor or wonderful, you're still going to want to have a conversation about the deeper longings underneath that brief and
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A
why are they typically so different.
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C
Some of it might depend on the circumstance or the sophistication of the marketing organization it's coming from. You know, if you are inside, you know, a more brand led organization where, you know, marketing is an engine for growth and not just a cost center, then that brief is probably the outgrowth of, you know, a lot of planning and thought. Whether we've done that together or in the case of a pitch, whether it's coming to us when they've done that on their own. And then there's, there's certainly instances, you know, maybe marketing is not as mature a function inside that organization or it's a product of the person or team from which you're getting it, where, you know, it's a little bit more of a, you know, a fever dream of, of hopes and accomplishments. But I do think the good news is in either case, a good conversation can get you to a better brief.
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D
It's, I guess it's, it's also just a really basic thing. Like every, every pitch brief, every brief is different because every problem is different as well. And so kind of to that extent it's kind of, it's a good thing that they're not uniform or consistent. The kind of the, the thing that more often than not kind of dictates whether or not that's a really exciting brief or, or not is the, the level of clarity and the level of interest in the question. And I think kind of it's. You're constantly looking for that, either in the brief that gets to your desk or you're looking to find it in the thinking that you then go and do around it.
- [11:24]
E
Yeah, I would say from a media perspective, it's kind of a spectrum as well. It can range from anything. It's rarely a surprise. I will start with that. It's rarely a surprise. We usually know that a brief is coming. We might know about some key windows or a specific activation that a client wants, and that activation has a date. So based on that, we know something is going to be coming down the pipeline. We often, as Elizabeth mentioned, we have conversations with the client along the way. So you get nuggets during those conversations and those discussions about what may be coming. So again, that's another way that, you know, there could be a brief or an initiative coming pretty soon. But a lot of times, you know, we have very longstanding clients and you know, one of the challenges, clients that don't give any brief because they feel that, you know, their business, you've been in a relationship as a partner for quite a while, and so they kind of assume that you know what they want. And in those circumstances, we do write down assumptions. You know, we, we have our assumptions that we create a list of, and we use those assumptions to have conversations with the clients so that we can get more clarity about exactly what they're looking for, what they're hoping for, and we take that approach.
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F
And that's the ideal place to be, I think. I mean, it's really the same thing. Elizabeth was getting at that having long standing clients affords you a level of intimacy that you don't get when it's just a pitch. So as Will talked about, there's a great heterogeneity in the different kinds of briefs that you may get. But at the core, what we're trying to do on the agency side is get to some truth. Right. We're trying to get to the spirit of the brief. Not necessarily what's on the page necessarily, but like what's on the other side of the page that wasn't written, that are implied, that were debated over and like why we choose that word over that One like why we choose that specific outcome versus something else, and that is that. Yeah, exactly. Is this really a red herring? Like, for whom? Is this the brief? Is this the brief the CMO gave you that you don't really believe in, but you're just doing it because you have a gun to your head, or is this actually going to move the business forward and at that point, understanding the spaghetti that is happening when it comes to, like, the brief making its way to you, our job then is to say what is true, what is real, and then parse that out such that it manages or balances all these different truths that are existing, but that requires intimacy to get there.
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C
It's such a good point because usually a brief should be a document of clarity, but too often a brief is a document of compromise and consensus. And it's not only it's not the compromise and consensus are wrong, but it's a little bit like a pork barrel buffet in Washington, D.C. like, sometimes, by the time the bill hits the floor, it's got all these little accommodations for all these people and you're looking at it and you're like, what is this thing? Again, not always, but it happens. And so, you know, often, to market Marcus's point, those conversations around, how do we get here? What is the question under the question, what are the things that died that might have been important? And honestly, you'd be amazed how often just the how will success be measured? Can help you as a strategist and a partner get them to clarity. Even if the version of the brief you got over was kind of an accommodation where everybody got to see the little part they wanted to see in there.
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D
There's a really useful qualifying word you can use when looking at briefs, which is just to add end every question you ask about it with the word really. So you end up saying, like, what's the brief really? Why is this pitch happening really? Who is the audience and what matters, really? And it's just a very, very good shortcut at getting to, like, the two things that are critical the whole time is one, what's the problem we're truly trying to solve and why? And then I think, to Marcus's point, what are the truths that unlock that in an interesting and hopefully unexpected, inspiring, visionary way? I sometimes find just like adding that last little word on the whole time just gives you a way of cutting through the swirl quite a lot.
- [15:40]
C
That's a great fact. I might steal that.
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F
That's so good.
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D
That's so good.
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A
One of the other things that when we're talking about this through the lens of effectiveness to this idea of truth. There were a lot of assumptions in. There's a lot of what we don't know that's stated in a brief that may be related to the business, that may be related to the products, that may be related to our version of reality. How do you interrogate that? Because there's a risk of accepting what's put in front of us versus what might actually be achievable. So do we interrogate the assumptions of the brief and do we spend a lot of time doing that?
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F
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I mean, for me, every brief starts with what is true, what is true to the brand, like the reality that it has constructed for itself, like what it wants to mean, what it wants its products to be seen as. And then what's true in the minds of people, like what is the reality that people hold in their minds? And essentially that delta. And 10 times outta 10 there is a delta, that delta. The job then is the marketing is to close the delta to help get to some congruence of meaning such that when the brand says X, Y and Z, people go, oh yeah, totally. And therefore they're more inclined to consume. Oftentimes that delta, that gap, the gulf between the two, are really keeping people from taking action.
- [17:09]
E
One of the things from a media perspective that we are wrestling with and continues to be an issue, like many times, our briefs are very functionally driven. We need awareness, we need to get drive traffic in the store. They're really focused on media KPIs. So the first thing we have to do is make sure that not only our teams but our media counterparts understand what are the broader business goals. So we have context for the challenge or opportunity that media has to drive some impact against. And then the other thing is, you know, media is very tangible, it is very ROI driven, it is very metric centric. And so sometimes that can have people kind of stuck in a lane. And so we created an initiative called F bleep bleep K the brief. And it was a way to give media practitioners permission to not just focus solely on the ROI metric driven information that was provided in a brief, but to take a step back and ask some essential questions so that they could get the context of the business goals. They could have the context of what does this mean to the person that's really leading this initiative? Is this something where they want to demonstrate that they have more authority inside of their organization? Are they trying to win awards? Like what is their personal or the Human motivation behind the brief. So that initiative, the brief has really given people permission and opened up the door for them to, you know, not just be so focused and narrow, cast in that, and open it to a broader context of understanding.
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C
When you talk about challenging the brief, I think there's two things I would highlight. One is the spirit of that challenge and sometimes the seniority of that challenge challenge. So I think the spirit of that challenge really matters because, you know, I. I think I have a lot of empathy for a marketer even to get to that brief. Like all of those compromises they've had to get to internally. Maybe the person who wrote it didn't have all the context or all the information, and they're doing the best they can to move this process forward. And so if the spirit of the interrogation feels like the Spanish Inquisition and they're like, for F blank, like, say, to quote Esther, like, I just need you to help me on this, it's not going to be very well received. But if the spirit of it is, I'm trying to help you win and I'm going to ask these questions so I can understand more deeply so that I can help get you what you need. I find that interrogating the brief hits different. We've all, as strategists have sat across from creatives who, you know, and I'm not saying all creatives are like this, but we all know that one who's like, inherently cynical about anything and everything. Is that really true? Do we really feel that way? Is any really going to do it? That that can be exhausting coming from an agency to a marketer, the same way it would be for any of us. And so I think the spirit in which we challenge the brief to use air quotes matters a lot. And then I think seniority wise, like, you know, I often find a more, you know, an emerging strategist might feel confident looking for some clarity, but not challenging underlying assumptions. I think as. As I've gotten more senior in my career, and I think that's true for most strategists, you get more comfortable asking deeper questions, getting to root issues, because you understand that's how you're fighting for their highest possible good. And conversely, sometimes a marketer who's newer in their career is a little bit more like, come on, just help me push the paper through. And a more senior marketer, it can be really grateful that you want to have a deeper conversation. So I think challenging the brief is really important, but the spirit in which we do that and the level at which we do that tends to produce different things.
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F
That's a really good shout. Like, a really, really good shout. I think far too often there is sort of this skepticism from the agency that when they get the client brief that they're like, let me go tell these dumb people what is what, Elizabeth, like your point that, like those briefs are like painful exercises that they have gone through to get to something and the last thing they need.
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A
Why are, why are they painful, Marcus? Because Elizabeth brought.
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F
Is that.
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A
Why is that you are.
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F
You're balancing so many different, so many different interests. You're balancing so much legacy that you couldn't touch, that might have a lot of sensitivity to it. There are things just put on you and they have to be and for you to go. Have we thought about blah, blah, blah? Like, no, we never thought about that before. Come on. Like, are you kidding me right now? I remember when, I don't know if we can name names in this episode, but like, I remember when Google Pixel came to us and I was at Wieden and they were like, you know, we're trying to launch Google Pixel 6. And our first thing was like, why are you calling it Pixel? Call it the Google Phone. And they were like, we never heard that before. Are you serious right now? Keep moving. And we were really like, this is the dumbest thing ever. Why are we doing this? That's the thing we need to solve first.
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A
Let me ask will this question because this is at the heart of it. If we are, if we are responsible for effectiveness and there is dysfunction within the organization to get to the brief, how can we be as effective? Who are we trying to please? The CMO or the business?
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D
Well, I think it's. I'm going to do that classic anti planner thing and rather than give you a singular answer, I'm going to say it's both. And I think the job of great agencies and great strategies is to connect these things in a way that makes sense not just for the business, not just for the cmo, but also for the audiences ultimately that you are trying to serve. I think one of the biggest problems sometimes is both agencies and clients thinking about briefs as a fixed process and artifact. Whereas really what it is is it's the kind of combined, distilled best bit of thinking so far. And then it's about how do we challenge that, how do we build it to the point that Marcus was making. And you say briefs are hard things to write because they should be hard, because it's about distilling thought processes, distilling knowledge, distilling strategies down to things. That is necessarily a difficult process full of friction. But that friction has to be embraced. But it only works, I think, if you want. You kind of say the job is to kind of politely, respectfully challenge it. But also, I think, as agencies, the reason I hope most clients come to us is because they're looking for an outside provocation on a problem they're facing. Right. Otherwise they wouldn't come to us. There wouldn't be a pitch, there wouldn't be a brief. And I think you've got to see that as an opportunity. And our job is to then say, right, okay, what we know about this business, this category, what's going on in culture, what we know about audiences, we think these things can help you unlock your problem. And so it's kind of getting the balance right, I think, of making it work for everyone and kind of having the right amount of provocation and also just pragmatism at the same time.
- [24:34]
E
So I think that from a media perspective, we sit in a slightly different space. So 1. And of course, the approach that you take to challenging a brief has to be respectful. It has to be in the spirit of partnership, and it has to be in the spirit of together we will win. And so that's sort of the foundation of how you challenge inside of media. Oftentimes we get a media brief that does not include many of the elements that are part of the brand brief. And so we feel it's our job to help make those connections, to bring those teams together in a way that they have not been able to do internally, because if they had been able to do it internally, we would be receiving a different type of document. And in terms of just using that as the brief sort of analogy, because media is often put in a lane, sometimes it's been a little bit harder for our talent to feel like they have permission to speak outside of the media lane that they have been put in. And so this idea of the brief gives them permission. It helps build up confidence. Because there are a couple of ways that we have developed some essential questions for them to understand how to go about getting more. So what's the essence? What's the core of the brief? What are some of the contextual nuances and realities that we should be aware of that we may not. May not have been included in the media brief? When you think about the broader business,
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A
is that the responsibility of the comm strategist or of the media strategist who is making. Who is taking those steps Internally.
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E
So, of course, like everything, there is no one structure that exists even inside of our organization. Some of our teams have comm strategists, some have experienced designers, some just have media strategist planners. Like, we run the spectrum in that. But it would fall typically in what you would call the calm strategist strategy wing.
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C
I also think the laboratory of life is messy, and I would love to say great briefs lead to great work, and I think they often do. But often briefs get better when we work on them together. And sometimes great work comes from what starts as a muddy brief. But a good relationship.
- [26:59]
F
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, the door said it best. People are strange. You know, we're strange species. And I think I, like, like the idea of that, like, respectfully challenging the brief. It's not unlike, you know, when you visit someone's family, you go, why y' all do that? They're like, don't go there. Don't. Don't even go there. Don't even. Don't even. Right? It's like knowing the spaces where it's like, like, hey, there's too much there. Don't touch on that. But, like, you know what? I never even thought about that before. Like, you know, I never smelled that before. Like, nose blindness in your house. Like, I never smelled before till you acknowledged it. Now you have. Oh, now I'm helping me think about things differently. It's. This is the relationship part that goes back to the earlier note about intimacy. It's that relationship part that you're able to pull and to push and get to some place where it's fruitful for everybody. But that only happens when you engage further than what's the words that are printed on the page.
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A
I remember during my time at Martin back in the day, I always admired the Martin agency for getting ahead of anticipated problems. For example, not all clients, as we all know, are going to come to the table with a great briefing or a great brief. They may desire that, but maybe for a myriad of reasons, they can't get to it. What do we then do ahead of it all? Are we. Have you discovered ways of helping clients internally get to a better understanding of what's needed? Are there tricks, suggestions, seminars, briefings? Day's immersions?
- [28:38]
F
I'm taking notes.
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A
Elizabeth, school us.
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F
Teach us your ways. Oh, Yoda.
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A
Yeah, because that's critical. Because there's many clients we know they're not going to. We've discovered they're not going to let us get to great work. How do we get ahead of that?
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C
Well, I'm a big believer that clarity of foundation unlocks agility of decision making. And so I think one more time.
- [29:02]
A
Say that one more time.
- [29:03]
C
Clarity of foundations unlocks agility of decision making. So when you're clear on the fundamental thing, it allows you to move faster on the opportunistic things. And it's interesting, Fergus, when you were talking about it, I think what you're referencing, and I think both ends of the spectrum are true, are outside of the brief long term business thinking. And some of that, I think some of that has been lost in the industry in modern years as the tenure of relationships have gotten shorter, as dedication of agencies has gotten sparser, and as more project work has come. And it's not that there's not, you know, benefits in all models. Right. Like every, everything has its, its pros and its cons. But I do think part of the strength of people who get to know your business over time, who live and breathe it and sleep it, you know, creatives who listen to earnings calls even though they don't have to, you know, or subscribe to things that your competitors are doing because they're thinking about it with their, you know, their available mental energy does give you those kind of unasked for moments, you know, foundational.
- [30:11]
A
More specifically, what I'm thinking about is let's pretend that we're amongst the vast majority of brands that aren't doing great, effective work.
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C
Sure.
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A
And I'm an agency who's beginning to work with one of those brands. I sense that there's a marketing manager who really wants to do it, but, you know, he or she needs help on getting the organization rallied around how to get there before they even begin planning processes. Is that a good thing to do? Sort of workshops or immersions to something to get the organization rallied around, making what you get better?
- [30:47]
C
Yeah, I mean, I had one job before I went into advertising. I was a speechwriter. And I have joked that it was like, little did I know, the best. I have written more CMO speeches and decks and internal story devices for things that were outside the remit in my career than I did when I was a speechwriter. And part of that is that we are in the business of persuasion and not just persuading consumers on behalf of a brand, but often persuading stakeholders inside of that organization to do the thing that is in their best possible interest. That is one thing that I think is really funny probably of agency people in general and strategists are who specifically how much time we spend trying to talk people into doing something that is in their best possible interest. I do think taking time on the foundations up front to really understand, to understand the business, to understand honestly, even some of the organizational quirks to Marcus's point about every family is kind of dysfunctional in its own way, to understand how they move things through the system. You know, I, I, if it's not like people word often like to understand how our clients are incentives, how are they bonused? You know, I once worked with a marketer who was like, you know, I mean, I may think personally that we have shifted so far towards demand that we are starving the brand and it's going to hurt the business in the long term. But in the short term, my quarterly bonus is only tied to those short term metrics. And so it's going to be real hard to get me to do something if my quarterly bonus is tied to something else.
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A
Marcus, you, you're, you're writing your second book currently, and I think it points to this challenge, which is how do you use a company's culture to influence marketing?
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F
I was about to jump out of my chair when you asked that question because this has been the biggest epiphany for me. What I've learned over the last almost three years now is that the company's ability to be good marketers, to be good, and their ability to engage in the marketplace is predicated on their ability to be good in the office. That is to say that their ability to optimize the front stage is 1000% dependent on their ability to optimize the backstage. It's the decisions that we make in the way in which we engage with each other, the internal culture, the organizational culture that allows the organization to engage best with the external culture, the consumer culture. Every organization, to Elizabeth's point, like the ones who took risks were basically the people who are either dispositional, like this is what we do, let's go, or you had to like speak the spirit of God into them to give it a shot, right? Like, you had to change the way they saw the world. You had to encourage them, inspire them to take a risk. And what typically happens is that if it's successful, they go great, but it's really not in them. It's not baked into their operating system. So you have to do it again or they go back to their old ways of doing things. It's when we change, when we augment the operating system, that is the organization that we're able to augment the way that we engage in the marketplace, it is the most important part of business, the most critical part of marketing that we do not talk about, which is why I'm talking about it by writing a book over it right now, if
- [34:13]
C
I can add one thing to that. But I think it is really important not to underestimate the impact of a culture of fear. Inside both agency organizations and marketing organizations right now. We know as social scientists what fear and scarcity do to human decision making. They lead us into self preservation. They narrow our ability to see and identify possibilities. And I think we are living through massive transformation in virtually every sector of society and the economy. And a lot of people are afraid. And what do you do when you're afraid? You start protecting what you have. You take fewer swings. You start functioning from a place of self preservation. You find a lot more people playing not to lose and a lot fewer people playing to win. And I think that rolls downhill. And the more you can build those relationships, actually understand how to help people win. And absolutely use the brief like the brief is a tool for clarity, but the brief is also a tool for conversation. Using that to help move them in the right direction, I think is both really important and really hard.
- [35:18]
D
So I think there's another side to this, which is that I think it's also about agencies like knowing in their soul what they do, why they do it, and how they create value and how they and what they believe and their practice can bring value to this specific brief business or pitch. So, like to give you a super tangible example, Adam and Eve, everything we do is all about putting feeling first. And we talk about putting feeling first because we know that when you put feelings first in your communications, when you put emotion into a brand, that is the single most effective thing that you can do to create impact on the bottom line, which is ultimately where this really, really matters. And we have a very clear sense of the types of work that we want to do, why we want to do that type of work, and why it's in the interest of any given client to do it. And I think particularly Elizabeth's point in a moment where everyone's feeling a little bit apologetic and a little bit kind of risk taking, being really, really clear on why, from an effectiveness perspective, you're having the types of conversations or the types of debates that you are be that about the brief, the media investment, the channel, the audience, and knowing what that ladders up to and knowing that that's rooted in what works. So it's not just you say this, we say that that's more important than Ever. And that's a critical part of the conversation when you're interrogating a brief and offering a point of view on it, but also then carrying that through to the way that you start building your strategy, your creative work, and ultimately your execution and kind of plans around it.
- [37:03]
F
Amen.
- [37:03]
E
And one of the things I think is most important to contributing to creative effectiveness is creating space in an environment where time is. Where no one has time. And so what I mean by that is when you force the time up front for integration and collaboration and you're asking to get not only the tangible, but the unspoken inputs and reasons and assumptions that are going to contribute to the team driving absolute clarity on what they're solving for and coming up with a brilliant solution. So in addition to the tangible business goals and what's going on from the organizational perspective, getting into the human side, what are their internal aspirations? What do they, what do they want to be known for inside of their own organization? What do they want their brand or what do they want that initiative to be known for within the industry or the category over time? What do they want their family to take away from all of that time that they're spending at work? I mean, all of these things are inputs that help us become sharper in delivering a solution. But back to the integration and collaboration. When you bring in all of the functions at the beginning of the process, even the ones that may be more distant from strategy. So, for example, your precision teams or your activation teams, which typically aren't involved in a strategy conversation, when you have all of those elements involved up front and you're giving them, you're allowing them to space to provide based on their experience with the category or the client inputs into why things matter and why they're important before we're landing on what is that strategic thread, I think all of these are important contributions that can really enhance the ability to deliver a solution that is highly effective in driving creative effectiveness.
- [39:01]
F
And oh, by the way, what Esther and Will both just identify are all cultural conventions of an organization. These are all the elements that allow us to do what we do around here. These are all the components that are driving the operating system of our organization. Being an agency, their organization being the client, and finding congruence between them is how we get to collaborative work.
- [39:25]
A
Yeah, it's. You know, one of the things that always has bothered me is maybe I'm just plain wrong, but I don't think strategy should be a collaborative process. I think that somebody should be responsible for it totally. Because collaboration oftentimes dilutes. I want everybody to be happy, therefore I gotta soften the edge. I gotta where for the business. There's this idea that maybe that sharp edge was the right answer and we've just destroyed it.
- [39:58]
E
Getting collaborative inputs is very different from who owns the process of, you know, crafting a strategy. That's my thought on that.
- [40:07]
F
You gotta be like Quincy Jones on this one. He's like, you know, you've got like this guy playing this guy's writing lyrics. That guy's the vocal arranger, she's playing guitar. You got all you have. You are, you know, you're curating the different contributions. But it's your job to make sure that the one sound, the one song is perfectly balanced. You even have someone doing the mixing for you. But your job is to make the decision. So to your point, the author who ultimately is responsible for. Here's the strategic path forward. It's not going to be at its best if it's not representative of the pinata of meanings that is reality and that requires sourcing it from other people.
- [40:51]
D
One of the things that we all inherently recognize as strategists, but sometimes don't keep ourselves and our clients honest enough too, is that fundamentally strategy is the act of making choices and taking things away. It is not the act of building lots and lots of things into one. Kind of like slightly crazy soup, right? Kind of. So like to Esther's point, it's absolutely around like getting inputs, but ultimately it's in service of distilling, refining, removing and getting to the one key thing, the one key question that unlocks growth. So like to put it re. Again, like to put it really, really tangibly. Back when we worked on John Lewis, it was all about how do we win at Christmas? Because that is the time where the vast majority, in a six week window, the vast majority of their sales and revenue comes from. That's a strategic decision that we make where we say, you know what? This is not about us winning everywhere or winning here or winning there. It's the act of saying everything that we need to do to solve this client's business problem, we will do by making this strategic choice. Another example with, you know, Marmite has always been how do we get, you know, kind of how do we get parents with young kids who have never tried Marmite to eat a piece of Marmite on a toasted bit of bread, right? And there is specificity to every single bit of that, which is we know who our audience is by extension, who it isn't. We Know when and where we are trying to engage people. By extension, all of the things we've ruled out. Do you know what I mean? Like, it, like strategy is about being brilliantly reductive in an inspiring way and getting to the key thing around which you can then orchestrate and do all of that stuff.
- [42:38]
C
So here's my yes. And we, I think as strategists, we have to hold two things together at the same time. On one hand, strategy is an informed opinion on how to win. And if what you walk away it with is it potpourri where everybody sees a little bit of something but you didn't land on the right answer, then you've lost. At the same time, we don't do this in a laboratory where the smartest person just gets to bring the wisdom down the mountain and everyone is forced to follow them. I always say to my kids, do you want to be right or do you want to be in a relationship? We could be right. But if we have not galvanized a group of people, be them creatives or clients or other constituents around it, your right answer will die in the wilderness. And so I think in between those two things is the task of a strategic leader. You've got to take it all in. I love the Quincy Jones analogy and actually produce that. The insight, the opinions, the needs, the wants, the, you know what, the pressures on the business into something that can honestly lead them to victory. But you've got to also bring other people along or the work doesn't get made, it doesn't get bought. And I have seen so many brilliant strategies die in a deck because the soft skills couldn't like, rally the troops around it. So it is both.
- [43:51]
A
Effectiveness is determined by as much, it's, it's determined as much by the people that are brought together to work on that particular client at that particular time.
- [44:02]
E
Yes, I agree with that. And the, the other thing I want to raise for your thoughts is it has to always be in service of the consumer. Like, we have so many strategic decisions to make in the process of bringing a solution to bear. We have to take into consideration the context of the business. We have to understand what's going on with our client. We can get lost in all of that. We've got to drive traffic into the store. We have to do all of these things. But if we don't keep at the center or at the forefront of, of our contribution to all of this, the person that we are trying to impact, then we too can get lost in what's going on. And so, as I think about the importance of that person in the center, one of the things that I still am hammering home is we have this very broad use of the term culture. And Marcus, I'm sure that you'll understand this. And so we're always chasing to make sure that we're in lockstep with what's going on in culture. And it's constantly conflated with cultural identity. People's identity based on their heritage and traditions also plays a really important part in our ability to motivate, to have things that resonate with them and to have them act on the. On behalf of the brand, to drive whatever outcome is out there. So I just want to make sure in our conversation about strategy, because it's very vast and nuanced at the same time, it really is very narrow cast about the consumer that we want to impact.
- [45:35]
F
Amen.
- [45:36]
C
Yeah. Strategy, like grief are not monogamous words. Even when we were having the conversation earlier about how you have to use the brief as this jumping off point, there's a very big difference between a macro brief to change the trajectory of someone's business and a micro brief that's like, I just need to a piece of paid social and I don't have. I was cognizant we were talking about that earlier. That, like, brief means more than one thing.
- [46:05]
F
I just want to make one add on Esther, because I think the point is so well said. It's like, you know, we're in service of the customer. And as I start doing as I'm thinking about this work about, like, organizational culture as well as consumption culture, there's also an internal customer that we're serving. And that customer is maybe the client, maybe it's the crew. If you're in a qsr. I remember again that work we did with Google we put out in the world. I remember getting a note from Lorraine Tuhill and she was like, people feel really proud to work at Google today because of that work. We're serving an internal customer as well. And because of what they feel, they now feel more connected to their collective labor. And ergo, the organization works better. Like, we are in service of the customer, the external customer, and the internal customer.
- [46:57]
A
So let me move on to one point I want to touch on. Will we go through this process? We get this briefing or some form of brief from the client. We interrogate it. We then develop some strategic options. How do you go about ensuring that those options are valid?
- [47:21]
D
You do the work of a strategist, right? Like, without wanting to Kind of be overly facetious, like, you know, kind of there's no value to me in a client's room if I'm just kind of going like this equivocating because I think it's something good. It's like the provocations you bring to a brief are about, you know, the experience of an audience and representing that in a room or it's what you know about how communications actually works and you know, kind of, to use Marcus's like language, the delta between that and how they're actually showing up in market, you know, kind of it's it that's the kind of like the deep and wonderfully geeky work of being a strategist, taking all of that and then applying it meaningfully to the problem, the brand, what, whatever it is before you. So I think that kind of the, the key thing there is that's where you really do your work and you earn your keeper.
- [48:16]
A
I'm sort of leaning in on this because this again to me is another critical point where everything down the road can fall apart. Because I think all of us at one point in our career have seen strategies being developed because they're different from each other. Option A, option B, option C, and they look rationally good and distinct and interesting. But if we're trying to create effectiveness, do we validate those before or after exposure to the clients? How do we make it not about our opinion that it will work?
- [48:53]
C
I figured that's kind of where you were going in the spirit of the question was around validation. And I think it's interesting because I think we are working through an era where there is an obsession with short term validation and a disregard for medium and long term wisdom. So when Will was talking about the cumulative knowledge on how decisions are made, how growth works, how consumers respond to things, and bringing all of that to bear in the strategy that I think can be hard to be seen as the validation because it's not as concrete as. I did some proposition testing and this one won. And I'm not anti proposition testing, but I will tell you, I think sometimes that can be tantamount to a paper shield. And I have had conversations where a marketer might be more comfortable with something that a proposition test said. Even though I could argue that self reported research is subject to all types of cognitive biases, but will disregard the behavioral economics for which someone won a Nobel Prize and say, well, you're not interested in data. And it's like, no, no, no, we have so much data, we are making choices between the Data that we listen to. And right now I see a real deprioritization on validated truth of how human decision making works, how branding works, how marketing works, how growth works. In favor of, well, this one got a green and this one got a yellow because one feels very, very close to us and comfortable and the other requires judgment. And I would argue that a lot of the brands that are winning are either leveraging more of that judgment and less of the I have to measure seven times in order to cut once, or are we moving more into things like in market testing where, you know, in the digital age that we, we work in, where increasingly it will be less expensive to make things, less expensive to put things out. I would argue you will get to more effective work. If we leverage the communal research and data, the wealth of knowledge we have, we put more things into the world. And in that laboratory of life, you see what real people respond to versus asking people, if I said this, would you like this? Which the data would actually suggest. We are very bad at predicting what we're going to respond to in real life, but it's comforting in the moment.
- [51:19]
E
And one thing I would say from a media perspective, obviously we're maniacally focused on measurement. So we know specifically what a campaign does digitally do, drive traffic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So for us, it's like pulling back and not only understanding the short term goals, but what is the contribution to long term brand building. And so that's working in concert with a, with our advertising partners and the other key players on the team. One of the things though, that gets really difficult is when you're putting something new in the world that might not necessarily be captured in the traditional metrics in which the organization speaks and is comfortable with. And so I think it's really important part of the process too, at the beginning, in a collaborative environment to determine what are going to be some transitional metrics that give us a common foundation of how we're going to talk about the work that we're doing and sort of of incubating in the marketplace so that we can assage people's concerns and fears and gives us a little bit of a longer Runway to get to those metrics that they are more comfortable and familiar with. So identifying as a team what those transitional metrics are going to be and that language that you can use to talk internally about the initiative and its progress, I think is really important.
- [52:39]
F
This is why theory is so important. Elizabeth was just cooking. This is why. Right, because theory is the most accurate depiction of reality that we have. And to Esther's point, we have all the data possible. That's great, but data doesn't have an opinion. What we're doing with theory is we're trying to understand why the phenomenon is happening. Why are we seeing people respond to this, why are we seeing people act this way? If we use the causality based theory and apply it to what we see in the data, then we can make better predictions. They won't be perfect. They're never 100% right, they're black swans. And we never know what's going to happen. But all we can do is increase the likelihood of a particular outcome happening. So the more that we marry what we're able to capture in the data, the zeros and ones, specifically data, with what we know of human behavior, the academic, scholarly data, the theory that increase our likelihood to get to outcomes that increase our likelihood to get to better effectiveness.
- [53:40]
C
Exactly right.
- [53:42]
A
So, Esther, I've got to come back to the and you and I have talked about this in separate conversations. The media agency versus creative agency working relationship. Where does it stand in your mind? How can it be improved? Because there's duplications of roles. We see this happening maybe increasingly comm strategists are living in agencies. They're also living in media shops. What do you think the state of it is and how might it be improved?
- [54:13]
E
Again, I mean, that's a very broad spectrum of relationships. But I think for the most part it's not a duplication of roles. And if you understand how each of the entities work together and what they specifically contribute to the ultimate solution, then there's less of this tension that's happening. So in this conversation, we've all talked about strategy in different ways and how we bring that perspective to the party. And we need those inputs and contributions to make a beautiful whole. So when I think of a comm strategist inside of a media organization, it is not in place of the comm strategy at a creative organization. The comm strategist at a creative organization is providing direction to the creation of advertising. The comm strategist inside of a media organization is providing direction into how media is going to unfold and make sure we have all of the right places and spaces to illuminate the creative that has been developed. Those are different roles, they require different skills. They are different tasks that are put into the ultimate solution. So I think making sure we all have that clarity, we can have and do have in many cases, beautiful relationships together.
- [55:30]
A
So you Use the word advertising, that an agency creates advertising. I hear that a lot from media shops and it almost feels like a limiting statement. Is that what you think the agencies do? They just create the ads?
- [55:44]
E
No, I don't think that at all. I mean, we are all creating advertising. Agencies are creating linear ads. They're creating social. I mean, they're creating a vast array of content. Media agencies are also creating content. And given the voraciousness in which consumers are consuming content, we all need to contribute to that content engine. So I'm not trying to short shift anyone. We all provide content, and it, it all fits in the many vast lanes and platforms in which consumers are consuming media and messages.
- [56:20]
A
Let me go to Will now. I'll go to Elizabeth. Will, what are your thoughts on that relationship between the two organizations?
- [56:27]
D
I think when it works collaboratively and in a spirit of respect and creativity, I think it's brilliant and crucial. And I think now more like, I can't believe I'm using now more than ever, but here I am, used to it. Like, the industry needs to get back to being way more integrated. Like, one of the worst things I think happened was media went this way. Creative advertising comms, call it what you will, went the other way. And actually clients just don't get great work out of that. And all too often the media thinking, the creative thinking is too disconnected when you bring it together. And I think when you recognize that brilliant creative thinking is fundamentally an act of media thinking and brilliant media thinking is fundamentally an act of creative thinking. And actually there's way more kind of proximity to those things at their best. That's when you get the best work and that's when you get the most, like, impactful, imaginative things that sometimes they're ads, but sometimes they're like, I don't know, fucking like social interventions at scale, which are then kind of driven by, you know, paid media and whatever else. But like that, that level of integration is so, so crucial. Does it happen anywhere near as well or as frequently as it should do? No, but I think the creative businesses, and I use that term very specifically, that win in the next three, five years and beyond will be those that recognize that actually the more distance you create between those two sets of skills, the less effective and brilliant your work is going to be, whichever side of that fence you sit on.
- [58:06]
C
Yeah. One of the reasons I'm actually very excited to read Marcus's book, and I'm not just saying this because he's my friend, you know, when you ask the question about the Relationships between creative agencies and media agencies. You're asking a question about perspective, power, incentive structure, like every system, is perfectly designed for the results that it's getting. It's one of my favorite maxims in organizational psychology. And so I think most people, whether you're on the media side or the creative side, have had amazing partnership experiences, and you've had terrible partnership experiences. And it often comes down to those things. If the creative agency is incented on one thing and the media agency is incented on another, that might be a tough relationship. If there's a power struggle between who's driving, who's leading the IAT and who's supporting, that impacts the relationship. You know, to a woman with a hammer, everything's a nail. It doesn't matter what discipline you came out of. Your perspective on what seems primary versus secondary to you, what feels like the lead measure and the lag measure is driven by your perspective. So how we set these relationships up matters a lot. And I've been on both sides of it. You know, I kind of came up in the era. Every industry just goes through cycles of bundling and unbundling, and I'm now getting. Getting old enough that I've. I've seen the pendulum swing back and forth. You know, when I started in this industry, you know, media agencies were being spun off because the whole conversation was it's about scale, and you can't get the good rates if you don't have the scale and the media and the creative agencies don't have the scale. So, you know, that's not going to work. And then we went through the era of, like, contextual creative, and they need to live together then. Now we're in the era of, like, big tech. And so it was like, we've got to be able to afford the data. They all spun out again, and now we're realizing that was a mistake and they're coming back together and. But what I've seen is there was an era where creative was king and media felt like it was subservient to creative, and that didn't feel good for them. The last 10 years have very much been the opposite, where media has had the power because they've had the data and so on and so forth. I think there's been value to that. It's not been a golden age of creativity in our industry. And so now you're seeing the pendulum starting to swing. I don't know that it's going to go from one extreme to another, but if we don't fix the system of how those disciplines collaborate, you're going to miss out on either side. Marcus, I'm curious your perspective because I have to imagine you touch on this.
- [60:38]
F
I mean 1000%. I mean what you are hitting on is at the core of this, that are these good organization to organization fits, right? Just like the people you hire, are they good person to organization fit? Do our organizations work well together? And the, the bits that you identified there, Elizabeth, are spot on, like power. What's the hierarchy here and how do we engage in it? How are we incentivized? But more importantly, what do we believe? How do we see the world? That perspective, the change of perspective or the incongruence of perspective can make the best creative folks on both sides, media and creative agency side, never see eye to eye. Not because they are enabled to work together, but because they're operating in two different worlds. This is the incongruence of culture. And if we want to optimize how we work together to serve our clients, then we have to get better at understanding what is culture, what is our culture and who's the best fit to work with.
- [61:43]
A
So in closing here, just one or two very final things. First one will be since the next step in the process, the end of this process is engaging with the creative teams. How are you guys doing it? Will, what have you discovered works best? And is it really a creative brief or is it a creative briefing that's important?
- [62:09]
D
First thing is that if the first time you're speaking to creatives is when you're talking to them about the brief, to them, you, you've probably missed the boat. Kind of the best pitches, best briefs I've ever worked on. Your creatives are there from the start because more often than not they are as good and probably better strategic thinkers and problem solvers than we are on our own. So the first thing I would say is if they're over there doing their thing and they're not involved in the actual, the client problem and that briefing and you're not bringing them in, you probably need to change something. And then to your point around, is it a creative brief? Is it a creative briefing? It's both kind of. A creative briefing is the way that you make the problem, your strategy, your best thinking to this point, inspiring and interesting. And the brief is simply the artifact that you leave them with so that they can kind of remember what you said to them. But like, again, like I'm, I'm a huge believer that like these things are their processes and their dialogues at their Best they're not a document, a meeting, off you go. Like, we don't have time to behave like that anymore. And frankly, like, it's just more fun, I think, when you're kind of in the room talking about a problem, talking about an idea, an interesting get to buy, an interesting proposition. What if it's this? What if it's that? You know, that kind of positive friction is where the good stuff happens. I think there's a danger sometimes, interestingly for this series, in thinking it's all very, very linear, and it's stage one, stage two, stage three. We can dress it up to look like that, but the reality is that it's wonderfully messy, particularly the creative process, particularly the moment where strategy hits creative. And that's a good thing because that's where ideas are born. But, yeah, I think thinking of it as a briefing and a continual process is a way more enriching, interesting way to get to good time.
- [64:10]
C
Also, in one of the places where the compressed timelines and everything we do may have been a gift because you don't have so much time. Well, I do wish we had a little more time to think. You don't have so much time to marinate and to just craft before anyone sees it. A few years ago, we started briefing our designers and our strategists at the same time, particularly in pitches. And there have been a few instances where the strategic unlock came from design. I'll never forget, a few years ago, we were pitching Chevy, which we were in the finals. We didn't win, sadly. Still to this day, some of my favorite pitch work I've ever seen. And the consultant did say, nobody beat our idea or our strategy, for what it's worth. But the design, the insight came from the designers because we were talking about the strategic challenge of this brand that really is, you know, has to span across, you know, across audiences, across price points. And one of the designers came back, and he was looking at Chevy's bow tie, and he said, it's an intersection. And, you know, the. The platform was the great American intersection. And, you know, this creative we worked with, Blake, wrote this beautiful manifesto about the intersection of hard hats and church hats, of, you know, Friday night lights and Sunday morning blues. I mean, it was beautiful and really captured the spirit of the brand. And I remember when we presented it, the clients were like, that bow tie is what they call it. They were like. We never realized it was an intersection. And the strategic insight, you know, came from the designer. And after that, we started, you know, we started Briefing designers and strategists, particularly at the same time, because the best designers are strategists. You know, like, they. They think about reduction, they think about the elements, they think about distinction.
- [65:57]
D
It kind of reminds me as well that, like, actually the role. Nine times out of ten, I think what you're really trying to do as a strategist is not say the cleverest thing, but hear the most interesting thing from someone else.
- [66:09]
C
Yeah.
- [66:11]
D
My old boss Martin Beverly, who's just set up his own business. Shout out to him whatever. He always used to say, like, two ears, one mouth for a reason. And I think, like, particularly in strategy, that's such a kind of superpower.
- [66:25]
F
The thing is that there's no line of demarcation. Like, there is no. Like, this is where strategy hands it off to the creative and creative goals. Cook. It certainly shouldn't be. I think about the best creatives I've worked with. Like, the best ccos I've worked with Carl Lieberman at Wieden and Jason Gabariel at Doner. Like, I felt like I was a creative. I legit pitched an idea to Carl. He was like, go write it. And I'm like, I'm not a copywriter. He's like, doc, do it, man. Go, go. Like, whatever's there, put it out there and collectively we'll find the stew. One more last music metaphor. It was like Chad and Pharrell when they were in the Neptunes. It's like Chad is like Pharrell maybe had like a drum pattern. Then Chad had laid chords on top of it. And Pharrell writes some lyrics while Chad is adding these other extra ambient sounds into together. You had this collective song, but who made what didn't matter. It's the feeding off of each other. It's the back and forth, the ping pong that gets to better Work this. Like, you do that and I do this and step back while I go create that. That gets to nothing. Worth listening to, worth looking at, worth engaging with.
- [67:36]
D
I love that analogy of like, you know, kind of a ping pongy process. Right. But I think that's also about. At its best, that's what you do between agency and client. So like that kind of that idea that you get a brief off you go. Like, I would really challenge that. And in the best relationships that you have, the best work, even when it's a pitch that kind of to and froing. What if it's this? What if it's that? What do you think you guys, like, you guys are experts. In your business, we kind of are really expert in this. Like, that kind of collision of different ideas and thinking. If it's done in the right way, like, that's where the magic happens, I think. And like, that that's what we have to do more of. I think as strategists, like, always hated.
- [68:20]
F
I've always hated the ta da in advertising that, like, just wait till we reveal it for you. No, no, no, no. I'm texting the client on the side, like, yo, what do you think about this? That's kind of cool, right? Like, the back and forth is necessary. The dialogue, it gets back to the original. My original thing that Elizabeth said I started off with. It's the intimacy that allows us to work better together inside the walls of our organization and with people outside the organization.
- [68:46]
C
I think there can be this false belief that the creative agency wants to make the most interesting thing and the client wants to make the most effective thing and the media company wants to make the most efficient thing. And those are not aligned incentives. I have never met an agency person who wants to make something that is beautiful but unaffective. And I certainly never heard a marketer say, I want to make something that is effective. And I have no interest whatsoever in people enjoying it, like, just as a human in the world. And I think while we each have a primary lens through which we believe, it goes back to, like, what is your core belief about how brands grow? What is your core belief about what makes for great work? Like, my core belief, you know, is that work that is more creative and more culturally resonant will be the more effective work. And work that is paint by number and perhaps follows a lot of best practices will be functionally invisible. And it won't work very well. Like, getting alignment on the belief structure in the beginning that undermines that relationship is really important because if you have that, you know, Fergus, I was going to say earlier, I'm like, poor Fergus. He asked us questions about briefs, and we basically have been like, yeah, yeah, yeah, the brief. But the relationship, the conversation, the system, the culture, the structure through the sweating that all out. That brief should be something you get to together that is an object of clarity, that is a touchstone that you can come back to and say, did we do the thing we set out to do? And often another organizational maxim I love, if it's a mist to us, it will be a fog to them. And so actually sweating the brief together and getting to something that is clear and true and interesting and reflective of the consumer, you know, and getting that alignment actually does allow you to move faster and to get to something better. Skipping past that because you don't have the relationship or you don't have the time or maybe you just don't have the will because we're all a little beaten down sometimes lands you with something that is a mist to us and a fog to them. Them being the creative and ultimately the consumer.
- [70:58]
A
I want to just ask each of you to give me 20 seconds on the last question, which is what should we be doing as strategists? What should we be doing less of and what should we be doing more of? So less of and more of. I'll start with Will, then I'll go to Marcus, then I'll go to Esther and we'll close with Elizabeth. Just give me 20 seconds. What should we be doing less of and what should we be doing more of? Just give me one thing for each.
- [71:28]
D
We should be doing less slide building and we should be doing more thinking. Great.
- [71:36]
F
Less desktop research and more getting out into the world, engaging people in their cultural spaces. More meaning. Making Esther more.
- [71:51]
E
Bringing that cultural identity to the forefront of our solutions. And less doing work that is for everyone but still specific to a category or brand.
- [72:05]
A
And close out with Elizabeth,
- [72:09]
C
less telling people what what we think they want to hear to get through the meeting. And more speaking hard truths with positive intent because that's how we fight for each other's highest possible good.
- [72:19]
A
Love that it is. ET Franklin, Chief Strategy Officer for Publicist Media. She's here in Chicago. Will Grundy is Chief Strategy Officer at Adam and Eve tbwa. Hurts me to say that Marcus Collins is a professor of marketing, best selling author and all around visionary with new book coming out which when's it coming out, Marcus?
- [72:43]
F
February2027.
- [72:44]
A
Brilliant. And Elizabeth Paul is EVP Chief Brand Officer for the Martin Agency. Thank you all for being a part of this. I really enjoyed it and I appreciate everybody's voice.
- [72:55]
F
Thank you.
- [72:56]
E
Thanks.
- [72:57]
A
And we will see everyone on the next episode.