A day in the life of a Strategy Director

Hi, I'm Aaron. My role as a Strategy Director is a varied one. I wear many hats, perhaps a lot more than a Strategy Director in a larger agency. Having lots of hats comes with its challenges, but the positives are I'm doing different things each day to help the agency, my team of four and of course, our clients. As a creative strategist, my responsibilities span research, writing creative briefs, overseeing the creative process, project management and developing innovative approaches to meet client needs.

What are your responsibilities?

• Weekly budget meetings to review reporting on numbers for each client, ensuring we stay within project budgets
• Directing some client accounts, overseeing the team on delivery and reporting, and defining success metrics
• Writing creative briefs for creative campaigns, brand campaigns and/or new business briefs
• Facilitating workshops with clients
• Developing Leopard's proposition and new website to strengthen our brand identity and competitive advantage
• Responding to new business enquiries to drive business growth· Working on pitches and tenders, using storytelling to engage potential clients
• Line management and 121s with four team members
• Staying abreast of creative strategy, behavioural science and planning principles, including how AI can be used to support the process

What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Creative strategy in advertising, for sure. I enjoy the full process from Client Brief, Research & Analysis, Strategy & Creative Brief, Creative Ideation and Execution. I love working with our creative team to develop creative concepts then presenting these and getting positive client feedback. It makes it all worth it! Seeing a well-crafted creative strategy come to life is incredibly rewarding.

What is creative strategy?

Creative strategy is firstly understanding the landscape through research then providing the direction a creative team should head towards that results in a change of behaviour.

What are your go-to frameworks?

The '4Cs' framework is a useful framework for research & insight when developing a creative marketing strategy. We use desk research to cover off 'Company', 'Competition' and 'Culture' then overlay quant and/or qual for the 'Consumer' part, depending on the scope of work.

The easier part is gathering the research, but the harder part is understanding what it means. Getting to audience insights is the holy grail. Sometimes we get one, other times we get some interesting observations that are useful for informing the creative plan.

The other framework we use is 'Get/Who/To/By.' It's used to develop a short-hand creative strategy, often in Creative Briefs. A simple framework to understand yet can be oversimplified if not applied correctly. Creative Directors I know love this sort of brief because it's concise and gives them a few words to give them a 'springboard' to producing creative advertising ideas.

GET — the target audience — demographics and psychographics (behaviours and attitudes)
WHO — the current behaviour / the problem or challenge
TO — The desired behaviour of people that you want them to change and transform
BY is a big idea, the core marketing message, the proposition

What's challenging about your role?

Having lots of responsibilities is a blessing, but can also be challenging, especially when focused work is needed. Managing this requires negotiation skills and communication. In fact, most jobs require these two skills! Talking to your colleagues about each other's priorities allows a positive and open conversation to get work done and keep everyone happy and motivated. Balancing deliverables across multiple marketing channels can be tricky.

What advice do you give budding Strategists?

Having the opportunity to work on campaign briefs is rare for new Strategists coming into the scene. A lack of experience often holds people back, however there are ways to demonstrate an understanding of what creative strategy is – reverse engineer ads! And what is that I hear you ask? Go for a walk and look out for ads in the wild on buses, posters and trains. Then, decipher what you think the ad strategy was (you could even use the 'Get/Who/To/By' formula mentioned above). This will give you great practice analysing consumer behavior, identifying the target audience, and working out what the insight and proposition was in the creative brief.

Understanding creativity in advertising and what makes the best marketing campaigns successful is key. Study famous marketing campaigns, recent marketing campaigns, and successful marketing campaigns to learn from their creative strategies. Notice how they use visuals and copy together to grab attention and persuade. 

Building skills in social media marketing, content marketing, and other key marketing channels will also make you a stronger creative strategist. And don't forget the importance of project management - using tools like SMART goals will keep your creative campaigns on track.

With practice analysing ads, studying creative marketing campaigns, and expanding your skillset, you'll be well on your way to excelling at creative strategy. The world of marketing creative is an exciting place to be!