Smooth transitions
I tripped and fell into doing strategy at agencies after business school. I learned a bunch of stuff there that’s been applicable to the work, but I had no idea how campaigns were made before I stepped into Conill.
Over time and through the patience of plenty of great leaders, I’ve slowly learned to write briefs. If I were to guess, in 10+ years I’ve probably written 300 briefs, with the highest frequency in 2014, when I worked on Hyundai retail at Innocean, and 2019, when I worked on tons of pitches for small branded content projects at Conde Nast.
I’ve had practice writing briefs for lots of different purposes and people. Through that I’ve had to learn the difference between an assignment and an offer to collaborate.
An analogy is helpful here. Anyone who has tried to learn a second language will likely have had an experience where they know the words but not the sentences. The way one letter passes off to another if different in each language, and like a monkey swinging from branch to branch, fluency feels like a beautiful dance.
For example, the French translation of the phrase “Where is he?” is “Où est-il?” Those are three of the first words you learn in French class. But this pronunciation is tricky because the “t” in “est” is normally silent, but because it comes before a vowel it’s said aloud. The word is considerate of its neighbors.
Playing the piano works the same way. I have personal experience with this because I can pluck keys at about 10% speed and can confirm it sounds very little like the song the staffs suggest. Rhythm is what makes it stick.
A brief is a handoff between a business need and a creative expression. Early on I treated handoffs more literally, a jumpy transition sloppy pronunciation that left the details to be solved by creative or media partners.
It took me a long time to realize that a strategist’s role can be thought of in two parts: pre-briefing, and post-work. A smooth transition requires doing both well.
Pre-briefing is when we use the thesaurus to find a punchier word for “authentic.”
Post-work is when the kitchen is open, the beautiful mess has begun, and the food will only be as tasty as the simplicity of the recipe. The food is also almost never fully baked. So we’re not a thumbs-up-thumbs-down baking show judge; we’re there at the service of the ideas we now collectively own. This service can mean helping them better address the business challenge, better fit the needs and mind-states of audiences, offering further research to ground an idea in truth, and/ or ways grow legs in media.
If pre-briefing is an act of reduction, post-work is a process of expansion and open-mindedness. An old boss and mentor cautioned us as strategists to not be the ones who kill the work, and I’ve tried hard to make it a practice to use the post-work period to find ways to say “YES!” to things that aren’t what I’d imagined in the pre-briefing period.
As the media world moves father from traditional media plans and owned experiences, each touchpoint requires a lot more care. How should we approach this platform? How much should we act like ourselves as brand vs. a participant? This part of the job is going to get much more important.
This is the part of the campaign when the whole team is the most exposed to other people — each other, agency leaders, clients — forcing us to go back to the drawing board. Now that I know my briefs are going to come back to me for some additional fuel, I try to create the best chance to turn that exposure into collective excitement about where we can go.
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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben
