It can be said that strategy is the separation between art and advertising. Of course, advertising is an artform in its own right, but it’s shaped by an aim to impact a business using creativity. Like great works of art, advertising resonates with audiences when it speaks to the truths of human existence—big and small—and strategy is important to understand the sentiments and needs of people.
 
Before joining Decoded (which recently merged as Media.Monks) as Chief Strategy Officer, I practiced strategy in all its forms in my past lives: at creative agencies, on the client side through innovation-focused strategy, upstream strategy focused on positioning and more. Through each of those experiences, I’ve found that strategy plays a deep role throughout the creative process, but it’s in my current role that I’m seeing how it can enable experimentation and generate outcomes that could never have been discovered otherwise.
 
But bringing this form of creative strategy and performance marketing to the table means reevaluating how strategists integrate and work alongside teams, as well as redefining creatives’ relationship with data. When pulled off well, teams are better equipped to free themselves of preconceived notions, expand their perspective and ultimately deliver on what people actually want. Here are some principles that you can leverage.
 
Strategy should open a new dimension in creativity
 
I like to think of the traditional approach to strategy as a baton race, in which one team passes things off to the next. Strategy gathers insights and uses them to build a brief, which is handed off to creatives. They put together their ideas and pass them off to production to execute. After the work has gone live, strategy comes back to do a post analysis, which is often focused on proving that everything worked perfectly.
 
But the relay race no longer works in today’s chaotic era, in which opinions and values can shift at the drop of a hat (not to mention a competitive digital landscape where brands must appeal to the taste of many different audiences at once). Creative teams must equip today’s brands with a plurality of solutions—and strategy, when deeply embedded throughout the creative process rather than being brought in at the beginning and end, can help unlock these opportunities and drive performance.
 
Think of the core strategic deliverable, the brief. Classically, this is used to define a square for the creative team to play in. The parameters you’re working with are informed by initial insight and research, but it’s still limited and inherently static. By integrating strategy and creative processes, my team goes from defining a square to defining a cube, iteratively opening and expanding new possibilities through experimentation. So rather than pointing toward a singular solution, creative strategy becomes more about mapping out interesting angles to prototyping and test out before audiences.
 
Strategy integrates and focuses the team
 
Having the wherewithal to strategically test and iterate several creative ideas is key to building a more resilient brand, but it also requires close integration between creative and data-focused teams. As audiences react to creative, both disciplines can incrementally shape the work as input rolls in. And as the work evolves, creative strategy helps focus the team on where to direct their efforts.
 
In this respect, think of “brief” as a true verb, not as a noun or static document delivered at the beginning of the creative process. You should be in a process of continual briefing—constantly bringing in new inputs and taking creative shots accordingly. If you think of an integrated team as an amoeba, strategy functions as the force that fluctuates and stretches it out as it moves into these new directions. Thus, strategy should involve everyone in the team by guiding them and ensuring the work authentically connects back to audience response.
 
Strategy should come from (and lead into) different directions
 
People are multifaceted. If you want to truly understand your audience, your approach to gathering insights needs to be multifaceted, too. Consider back during the 2016 US presidential election when everyone was convinced Hillary Clinton would win, because that’s what all the polls said. But people may often say one thing and do another, or they may have difficulty articulating their true thoughts once prompted. You always want to have different inputs for insights, so you don’t get caught up in just one angle.

When creativity and data are enmeshed, strategy helps create a better picture not just of what’s working, but why. On my team, we don’t brief creative solely to resonate and perform—we consider how we can learn from it, how it can generate new data. This means bringing together both qualitative and quantitative data to open pathways for consumers to help co-create.
 
Strategy should challenge ideas
 
Adopting a strategic approach that keeps teams open to learning is what enables true creative experimentation. You could rely on dynamic creative optimization alone to throw everything at the wall and zero in on a single solution, but you won’t learn much in the process. You also won’t take the creative leaps that make this industry special.
 
I’ll share with you one of my favorite learning moments from the past year. While working with a client to build a campaign combatting vaccine hesitancy among a Gen Z audience, we used creative strategy to develop and iterate a high volume of strategically and creatively diverse pieces of content. After the campaign ran its course, we polled marketing experts outside our organization to guess which assets they believed performed the best among the audience. Across the board, they selected the assets that didn’t ultimately resonate with our audience.
 
My point is that strategy should be used to challenge our preconceived notions. Data is often seen as a dictator, something that creates a limited range of ways to move forward. I reject that notion; it can, and should, be used to take bigger creative leaps and unlock new territories for exploration. And that’s strategy’s true vision: experimenting to discover what people truly want and bridging together creativity and insights that authentically and honestly deliver on those needs. And hopefully you have some fun uncovering surprises in the process!