Does the world need digital strategists? A response.
Noah Brier
Head of Strategic Planning : New York
topics: User Experience, Strategy, Internet Culture, Social Media, and Internet Culture
filed under: Strategy
http://tbg.cm/ikm4Te
Over at House of Naked, my friend and former colleague Jared wrote a post asking whether the world needs digital strategists. I’ll let him summarize:
My simple vision of the future? Planning departments hire people who are especially adept on the information superhighway, while training up whomever they feel is getting left behind. Don’t make digital strategy a specialty, make it cost-of-entry to all planners. After all, for all of its complexities, the digital world is just another platform that’s part of our world — not an alternate universe.
Not surprisingly, I have a few thoughts on the subject. For those that don’t know me, I run the strategy department here at The Barbarian Group. Anyway, first off let me say that broadly I don’t disagree with Jared, many functions of strategy (especially problem definition and insight-based stuff) is the same no matter what medium you’re working within. I also agree that there is a real danger in disconnecting all these different departments and have them all running in different directions. However, I don’t know that I think not dividing by skillset is the answer. Also, one last caveat before my thoughts: I feel no need to defend digital strategy, it’s just a word and I’m not really worried about job titles. It might be the contrarian in me, but I just felt a need to respond when I read Jared’s post.
So … Here are my thoughts:
- It imagines an idealized view of strategy as something pristine and not touching creative. This is not reality. Strategists come up with ideas too and it’s been my experience that people who don’t use the internet much don’t come up with great internet ideas.
- To me it kind of suggests that no division of labor should happen within strategy, which I definitely disagree with. I think few would argue that there is a place for media strategists, since media buying and selling has its own ins and outs. That same could be said for brand strategy. It’s not that these things don’t work together or that your average strategist couldn’t hold their own playing these rolls, but it seems the industry has decided that they’re better off as specialists.
In thinking about point two, I actually came to my real conclusion on this: The split between digital strategy and traditional strategy (or whatever you want to call it), is not based on the medium but based on the product. It’s about advertising strategists versus experience strategists, and I definitely think there is a place for that distinction. Here at TBG Justin (head of UX) and myself have had many conversations about the overlap between our departments. Our goals as a department are the same and reflect the goals of the company as a whole: Build awesome things that people will use and enjoy. Though our deliverables may be distinct, how we approach that problem is similar: We dig in with whatever we can get our hands on (users, the brand, content) and look for insights that will drive how the brand behaves.
Anyway, I would argue (and am right now) that understanding the messages that resonates with people (advertising) is far different than understanding the experience (digital). (I’m generalizing here a bit, obviously digital can include advertising, but I am speaking from my own experience at The Barbarian Group, a company that mostly focuses on building experiences.)
So yeah, that’s my two cents for what it’s worth.
6 comments
I think part of the issue is focusing too much on the differences between advertising strategy and digital strategy or any other subset... I think in this discussion should shift its focus to the overarching customer experience, not digital vs ad. By that I mean the sum off all experiences a person has with a brand. These different experiences manifest as "touchpoints." Touchpoints can be advertisements, physical stores, digital services, products etc. When brands are at their best their touch points are well orchestrated. By that I mean two things....
1) Their is continuity of experience between each touchpoint. You feel the presence of the brand viscerally and behaviorally from touch point to touchpoint as if you are in the same "place."
2) Their is harmony between the experiences at each touchpoint. In other words, the sum of all the touchpoints adds up to something more important to the customer than the experience at a single touchpoint.
I think orchestrating the harmony and continuity of customer experiences falls in the hand of a strategist of some sorts. The presence of "digital" in our lives has magnified this need for orchestration. We are interacting with brands at so many different levels and mediums these days. But the second we stop paying attention to the advertising touch points or customer service touch points, or any "digital" touchpoints we screw ourselves as a strategist.
Most of this thinking rubbed off on me from a certain school of people that tend to talk a lot about "DESIGN" ... so I offer up a another job title just to perpetuate the semantic soupiness.
Design Strategist (because what does "digital" really mean these days?)
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Any strategist worth his salt, regardless the type of business he works in, puts no limits on his thinking. A true strategist identifies all possibly paths, digests information, through critical reasoning and revelations to build a plans, and generate a solution.
Many digital strategists, limit their possible solutions, by only being digital. If I was a client, I would prefer a UX or information architect to provide the deep technical analysis and propose opportunities, that can be folded into broader thinking. Unless of course the way the budget or assign agency roles is siloed. Which we all know doesn't reflect actual human behavior.
Ultimately strategy is about human nature, while it may exist uniquely within the digital sphere, it's still human nature, which has no boundaries.
That said, strategists or planners, who want to find new strategies or insights into human nature should be, and better be, leveraging new tools and insights only enabled by the tools in the digital sphere. Frankly, the old tools keep outputting the old insights with slights tweaks. To find something completely new, requires a completely new approach.
The other piece Noah hit was the strategist/planner as creative vs. the creative as strategist. The most successful projects have both. But everyone has to be open enough to acknowledge good creative and strategic thinking where ever it may come from.
Should we get rid of digital strategists? I call myself one but the reality is few people know what that means. I help businesses succeed online (and offline too!).
It's too bad egos and labels are so tightly tied together.
I know i'm late to this party, but this party is still going on. I think Rich hits the nails squarely on its head. traditional folks see the internet as a channel - another way to push and guide. digital (or can we call them neo) people realize there is even more than a 2-way stream. I think pre-Internet the second part of the 2-way stream marketers called 'the purchase'. Today, there can be a genuine 2-way stream, and of course the potential for more than a 2-way stream. consumers can exchange at various stages with the company and each other - more easily and more visibly. and i think this exchange carries a legitimate impact on the decision making process.
thanks,
keep fighting
Ed