STRATEGY VS CREATIVE
SANTOSH DESAI
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President - McCann-Erickson

is there room in advertising for strategy? Does anyone really look to advertising agencies for strategic solutions anymore? Pious platitudes aside, should strategy at all be a central concern or are we better off putting all our efforts behind producing better creative, because eventually isn’t that what we exist for?
There was a time when this question would not only be heretical but also deeply foolish. After all, how could we do any creative, whether good or bad, without a strategic starting point? How could we determine what the brand needs to say without doing a lot of homework on the market, the consumer and competition? Only then could we hope to emerge with a solution, which we would then plug into creative.
This was a time when the agency was seen as a strategic partner, or at least spoken of as one and it in turn took its role as custodian very seriously. Today, a curious change has taken place. On the one hand, creative has become much more important to clients, and on the other the agency’s role has shrunk. More and more creative people are on the frontline when it comes to dealing with brand issues; clients increasingly demonstrate respect for people with superior creative abilities and yet agencies as a whole are no longer looked upon as equal strategic partners.
What has changed? Why is an agency becoming a downstream supplier of creative services? Why is its strategic contribution seen to be carrying less weight?
To some extent, perhaps because agencies have never really been strategic contributors and it is only now that clients have woken up to that fact. Most agency strategy presentations are depressingly similar. 80 slides of market and research findings and 10 slides of strategy that juggles phrases like fuddy-duddy, attitude, contemporary, rub-off, TOM salience and leadership stance. For years this has passed as strategy. For years creative departments have struggled to use these vapid soggy equivocations and make something worthwhile out of them.
Which is also why there are agencies today that don’t really bother with this charade at all and focus simply on what will produce impactful creative. Take a category promise, choose one that has creative possibilities and then just go out and create noticeable advertising. Forget about strategic niceties, forget about arcane brand arguments. If agencies are all about creative, why not just cut to the chase and deliver just that? There is an appealing honesty in this view. There is also a pragmatic acceptance, perhaps too pragmatic, of a limited role that agencies can play. Is this the only option left to agencies today or is there another way to respond to the changed environment that we see?

The traditional division between strategy and creative is that while the former figure out what to say, the latter works out how to say it. This is a classic print view of the world

I believe there is a need to reconstruct conceptually, the role of strategy in today’s marketplace. There is no going back to the good old glory days of agencies; we have to look for a new way to become vital partners with marketers. To my mind, there are 3 fundamental drivers that call for a re-examination of the very meaning of strategy in advertising today.
The first is that in the last decade, our understanding of brands has become much deeper. The idea of branding has changed, not just conceptually, but even operationally. The realisation that a brand is something abstract that underpins and shapes the destiny of the product, is a new one. The whole notion on brand extensions is rooted in seeing the brand as an idea that gets expressed in many forms, including the product. If earlier, the focus of advertising was almost always on communicating the benefit in a compelling way, today there is an additional responsibility of speaking in the voice of the brand. Questions like what is the spirit of the brand, what language does it speak in, what world it lives in and what belief system does it espouse, all call for a new kind of strategic thinking.
The starting point is no longer limited to the product-market. It is no longer enough to go on market visits, sit through focus groups, wade through U&As, and interrogate the product till it bleeds. What is needed is a more inspired, a more life-connected view of the brand as an idea, as an integrated system.
The second big driver of change has been Television. The arrival of the commercial as the essential creative unit has radically altered the meaning of strategy. The print medium operates through the mind; it works by separating the senses. Our eyes read characters that have no intrinsic meaning, which our mind associates with corresponding images. There is no direct sensory input; it is the mind that processes data. The idea of logic, of sequential processing is thus at the heart of print. TV appeals directly to the senses; it bypasses the cerebral mechanism. TV also operates in the perpetual present; there is no going back.
This fundamental difference has a huge implication on strategy. The traditional division between strategy and creative is that while the former figure out what to say, the latter works out how to say it. This is a classic print view of the world. The separation of content and form, message and personality, intent and slant. Television doesn’t work this clinically. In TV, everything works simultaneously, the neat division between message and tone is simply not possible.
What this means is that advertising is not about messages. What we say is really not that important. The only thing that matters is what consumers receive and that often has very little to do with the message. The distinction I am drawing is not just the good old stimulus-response one where the question is still posed as ‘what do I have to say in order to get the response I desire’. What is being said here is that we need to forget about the centrality of the message and worry only about the effect we want communication to produce.

We are moving from a time when the source of individual identity was rooted in a collective past to one where the individual constructs it in the present

Quite simply, what this means is that strategy needs to worry about content and form both. No longer can strategists argue that form is a creative problem. Today, a bulk of communication uses form as the lead variable. As audiences become suspicious of and bored with ‘messages’, content will need to become more and more invisible. If advertising strategists are not comfortable with representational forms, they will be able to provide very limited value in the communication process. This has profound implications on the kind of abilities that agencies need to develop. In many ways, this means a shift away from the MBA as the pivotal strategic resource that agencies need to chase. What is required is instead people who understand communication forms, narrative structures, scientists of imagination.
The third driver of change is the changing nature of the consumer. The change I am talking about is not in the consumer-is-becoming-more-demanding-sense, but in a more fundamental way. The world over, consumer identities are becoming more fluid. Take gender, for instance. From a time gender was rooted in biology, what we see today is the notion of gender as a choice, as a mindset, an outfit that you don to send out a certain signal. The much-touted Metrosexual phenomenon for instance points to the blurring of the masculine-feminine divides. We are moving from a time when the source of individual identity was rooted in a collective past to one where the individual constructs it in the present. Brands are increasingly playing a crucial role in an individual’s quest to construct a self-identity, one which is flexible enough to accommodate changes in contexts that he goes through.
What this means is that the individual’s relationship with a brand has become much more fluid. The fixed unchanging idea of a brand is now rapidly becoming outdated. The same brand plays a different role at different times in different people’s lives. It’s meaning is no longer contained in a single benefit. We need new mental models of consumers and brands; we need to see the brand as an open system that keeps evolving with changes in context.
This again calls for a new kind of strategy; it requires people who are able to understand macro-consumer cultural trends and meld them with the evolving brand. Semiotics, cultural analysis, decoding of popular culture and everyday life are some of the new tools that we need.
In short, strategy as we knew it, in its first order avatar is terminally ill, and deserves to move on. What we need and what will restore advertising strategy to a central place in the marketer’s scheme of things is a second order understanding of brands and consumers. This is what will help us add value both to brand as well as to creative people who are looking for some meaningful direction.
The brand is becoming more central to businesses and we are becoming more peripheral. The consumer is at the heart of today’s business discourse and we, who were best placed to interpret consumers, are marginalized. The problem lies in our inability to add real value. Today, we specialise only in ho-hum generalities. The solution is simple, its time to become specialists again.

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