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TL;DR:

• The strategist role, essential in the creative industry, involves consuming and simplifying vast amounts of information and making educated judgement calls (or “creative leaps of faith”) to maximize impact.

• The profession faces the paradox of needing to balance innovative, judgment-based planning with systematic, predictable approaches for effective work.

• As the strategist role evolves amidst technological advancements and data-driven strategies, there's a need to protect creativity and resist oversimplification of predictable outcomes if we are to unleash the full power of advertising.

Column: The Strategist’s Paradox

For as long as I can remember myself as a free-willed human being, I’ve always had varied interests that on the surface had absolutely nothing to do with each other.

I loved playing chess with my buddies, then go bomb some hills on a skateboard in the afternoon.

I was a basketball junkie but, unlike my teammates, I preferred jazz instead of hip-hop.

On my weekends I would binge-play Zelda on Nintendo, then go indoor rock climbing with my sister.

My parents couldn’t quite figure out what I loved, and so they encouraged me to explore everything. It was freeing but I didn’t realize how lucky I was for having such supportive parents.

This rotating wheel of interests led me down a path that, by the time I got to university, I realized was quite uncommon.

Generalists Are Outcasts

The older I got the more I realized how uncommon my upbringing was.

My friends were all picking their lanes, majoring in quite specific areas of study, and going on to take specialists jobs in big firms.

But me? I had no clue what I wanted to do. I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that I HAD to pick a lane. I loved all my lanes equally but didn’t know how to channel that generalist approach to living into a productive way of making a life.

Luckily, I ended up getting my first job out of school at PepsiCo, through their leadership development program. It was a rotational system in which I did roles from the ground up all the way to leadership.

I drove Frito-Lay trucks in terrible weather, stocked 7-11 shelves at 4 in the morning, hauled pallets around Costco before sunrise, and so on. All the way to a couple years later when they moved me to Lethbridge and entrusted me with a leadership position heading a group of 22 sales reps across one of the largest sales districts in Canada.

It was scary to say the least, but it taught me to always bet on myself.

Eventually I went on to become a sales analyst for Western Canada, then move to Toronto to work in the marketing department, before moving back to Calgary and entering the advertising agency world.

The reason why I outline this trajectory is because my path, like many others, was not a straight line.

I zig-zagged all around, continuously battling this expectation to specialize in anything.

Until I stumbled upon the strategist profession in advertising.

Strategists’ Noble Task

If I had to boil it down to ONE thing, I loved learning new things.

So, when I learned that there was a job you could get paid for doing just that I had a hard time believing it.

But the strategist in marketing and advertising is just that person. Someone who must consume copious amounts of information, process it, simplify it into actionable direction, to then create innovative marketing solutions to business problems.

As I look back at the history of the strategist role, I now understand why these unicorns are so important to the effective functioning of the creative industry.

This month, the JWT Planning Guide turns 50. Some would argue that this single document marks the official birth of the strategist profession, when the accounts role was split into two: executives and planners.

Legends such as Stanley Pollit, Stephen King (the author of the JWT guide), Jane Newman, and several others went on the carve out a productive place for the generalists of the world. And for that, I regard them with the utmost respect as a disciple of their work.

But 50 years on, account planners (or strategists, how they’ve come to be called in most places today) are still battling the inherent contradiction of the job to be done.

In a masterful article published by BBH_Labs this week, the author describes planning as:

“Apply[ing] a process of systematic thinking to innovative thinking, to maximize the certainty of possibility. The old ‘give me a first of its kind idea… backed up with a case study that shows how it has worked in the past’ chestnut.“

What a gorgeous task. The pure paradoxical impossibility of it is what makes this profession so thrilling.

The Paradox of Planning

The author at BBH_Labs uses the below graph to capture this paradox:

Simply by looking at it, we can infer:

• The more innovative a planner is by tapping into their human judgement, the greater the possibility of breakthrough success or a flopping failure;

• The more systematic a planner is by leaning into frameworks and “best practices”, the more predictable the outcome of mediocre caliber.

This means that strategists need to live in the gray. A scary place of uncertainty and assumptions. One which business managers loathe with all their bodily cells since it is not predictable and therefore does not instill shareholder confidence.

But as a planner our job is to absorb information and make calculated leaps of faith that COULD lead to creative breakthroughs. Lean too much either way and we risk underdelivering.

The beauty lies at the cusp.

The Next 50 Years

Our ability today to measure every click and eyeball movement, has pushed the strategist profession to the fringes of box checking.

Safety and predictability above all has funneled advertising into a dangerous territory. One in which the over-intellectualization of communications has pushed us to overinvest in short-term, immediate ROI maximizing initiatives (which, the fastest way to maximize it, is by reducing costs to zero); while cutting back in long-term effective investments in emotion-based storytelling (investments that appeal to the heart, and not the mind; proven to reduce price sensitivity, drive market share gains, and maximize profitability 3 years on).

The sheer amount of technological tools and data at our disposal today would not be comprehensible by Pollit, King and Newman had a time-traveler paid them a visit.

Yet the work hasn’t gotten much better.

The greatest and most effective campaigns in history still are the ones that came before the advent of all these fancy tools.

Remember Apple’s 1984? How about Nike’s Just Do It? Or Volkswagen’s Think Small? Oh wait, Got Milk?

I could go on forever here. But the point I’m making is that as strategists we must resist the temptation to oversimplify our profession. We must reject certainty and instead swing for the fences with a high batting rate.

We do not live in a black and white world. Breakthrough work only spawns from the gray.

It necessitates the heart. It demands a creative leap of faith.

So, may the next 50 years untangle some of the snarls we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Generalists, strategists, planners… your best years still lie ahead.

📢 Community Shout Out

Interested in more marketing and advertising content or have unanswered questions? All you have to do is the following:

• Share this week’s newsletter on LinkedIn.

• Write something nice about it and add a question.

• Tag me on LinkedIn so I can see it.

I’ll answer it in the post comments and pick someone to give a shout out in my next column!

Inspiration: Stella Artois x Beckham “A Taste Worth More” Campaign

This Stella Artois campaign is a masterpiece for so many reasons. But here are a few to give you an idea:

1️⃣ First they dropped the big idea through TV spot to drive mass reach:

2️⃣ Then they made some noise on social: 

3️⃣ Then they reintroduced the big idea from a different angle:

4️⃣ Finally, they went for the kill — hire David Beckham, but don’t show his face. Let your brand steal the spotlight: 

Absolute masterclass in omnichannel planning, strategic insight, and creative depth to drive memorability. Expect to hear a lot about this campaign in the next few weeks.

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 🍻 Come by the WJ office for a brew

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • How To Create Billboards That Drive Results

  • How B2B Buyers Make Decisions Emotionally

  • Fixing B2B Marketing

PPA