Planning for the Best: Be Curious and Pay Attention with Andy Craig

Andy> In simplest terms, strategy is the “who, what, and why”, planning is the “when, where, and how”. I view them more as stages of the work vs. separate roles, though larger agencies seem to have a person for every job.

Andy> A planner. I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the very best brand strategists in the business and have learned to do a passable impression of them. But my pragmatism and morbid love of process have me tilt towards the planner side of the Venn diagram.

Andy> Shot on iPhone. It may seem facile to cite the greatest brand in the history of consumer marketing, but it’s made a hero of pure product functionality. In the early years it was a way to differentiate their device from Samsung and other competitors and has since evolved to show what’s possible when you upgrade to the latest model. But the fact that most iPhone brand marketing is shot on it is so rigorous and true. And as a social strategist at heart, I love telling producers “If Apple can shoot their ads on an iPhone, why can’t we shoot this CPG TikTok on one?”

Andy> Every brief can become inspiring when you view it as a problem to be solved. Sure, it’s fun to make booze and sneaker and entertainment marketing, but if you can find a way to turn life insurance into a challenge that will shove the team off their equilibrium… you’ve got a real one cooking.

Andy> Finding and developing great talent. More specifically, that magical moment when they make me redundant in whatever space they occupy because they’ve become so damn good.

Andy> It is strategy’s job to seek order out of chaos and simplify complex problems. Whether it’s distilling the vastness of a client’s business into a clear and inspiring challenge, zeroing in on a breakthrough creative territory, or developing a roll-out plan across myriad channels and placements, a strategist should be able to explain anything to a layperson in a compelling sentence or two. 

Andy> I want them to be fluent in the media channels that they are tasked with creating for (at this point in 2023 if you aren’t watching TikTok, you aren’t doing your job). We are required to show up where consumers are spending the greatest amounts of time, and play a role in their experience that’s believable, salient, and additive. I want them to see creative opportunity in new platforms and products, not more rules that constrain ideas, or a chance to retrofit a personal ambition.

Andy> By treating the brief as a binding contract. A bad brief is a jumping off point, a good brief helps everyone to decide not just what the challenge and opportunity are, but what the right idea will look like, and act like in the real world to effectively deliver the intended results. To become a true contract, the brief can’t just be a strategy deliverable. It deserves workshopping and input from creative leads, media leads, and other stakeholders. It’s worthy of discussion when brought to the teams tasked to activate it. But before creative development begins, everybody must sign up for the task at hand, and hold themselves to their word.

Andy> COVID has irrevocably changed the dynamic between employers and workers in this industry, but it’s fostered a more honest approach that values transparency, empathy, and directness as the cardinal virtues of shared success.

The veils of tenure and loyalty as one-way expectations of labor were pierced when thousands of agency folks were laid off overnight, and they see tech companies’ 15% workforce reductions being rewarded with a surge in stock price. The post-pandemic job market showed many that leaving your company isn’t a cataclysmic event, that job-hopping and gaps in your resume aren’t automatic red flags, and it even de-stigmatized unemployment benefits. The last three years laid bare what employment truly is:  a value exchange between company and labor. If the value tilts too far in either direction, a parting takes place.  

If it sounds transactional… that’s at-will employment for you. But it’s how both sides need to approach recruitment, development, and productivity. Whether I’m making a hire or mentoring a direct report, I’m looking for a human being on the other side of the table whom I can have an honest conversation with about the opportunity before us, and the associated challenges we’ll need to overcome in order to achieve sustained success. If they’re up for it, amazing. If they’re not, glad we found out early enough. I believe that if you give competent, talented individuals the complete set of information, they’ll do the rest.

Andy> The force behind this is a growth in full-funnel work, driven by the ability of social and digital to move consumers from awareness to purchase in a few taps of their smartphone. This gives strategists a responsibility to participate in the total lifecycle of the work, not just writing the brief and popping in for reviews. At every stage—concepting, production, execution, and reporting—is the agency’s work and decision-making oriented to achieve the stated objective, and prove measurable ROI? It’s our job to ensure this by enforcing the contract of the brief.

Andy> High-minded brand statements and “Beautiful Mind” comms charts that play well in the theatre of a pitch but are less than useful when the rubber meets the road of making work. “Vision without execution is hallucination” is a variously attributed quote that’s always on my mind when crafting a strategy.

Andy> Be constantly curious. Learn a little bit about a lot of things. Pay attention to the behaviours around you: what people watch, wear, talk about, care about, order at the bar, and put in their shopping cart--and on occasion, very casually, ask them “why?”