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Introduction - From Advertising Products to Advertising Culture.
Over the past week or so I’ve had some professional downtime, during which I decided to put my strategic brain to use, and turn it inward to strategy itself. I have felt, both in myself and within the wider advertising circles, a growing frustration with the current state of the craft of strategy, specifically with “creative” and “cultural” strategy. These qualifiers are important, and their rising popularity reflects a shift from advertising products to advertising culture itself.
Culture in this essay encompasses things like culture around groups of people e.g Black British culture, culture as interests/passions e.g “country music” or “wellbeing culture”. At the other end of this spectrum is the culture that exists on the internet “-core, -ification, -maxing”. One end is built up over long periods of time and compounds, whereas the other is rapidly changing. However, due to the rise of the internet, algorithms, and trends — they all exist under the term culture. Cultural strategy is defining a brand's position in this space. Creative strategy is normally the tactics to be used in order to get there, from jumping on TikTok trends to aligning itself with the cultural codes of a demographic. Though they are slightly different I will use them interchangeably to describe the actions of a brand that seeks to place themselves in “culture” in order to gain cultural relevance.
This focus on culture has seeped into both brand Strategy and advertising Strategy. On the brand strategy level, We no longer create brands; we create “authentic communities rooted in culture”. On the Advertising Strategy level, it means that cultural relevance, inserting the brand into the cultural conversation, or as one job description would put it, “ensuring that creative output resonates with the target audience”. However, this idea of advertising culture itself, treating culture as a commodity, has now become so saturated it has lost its purpose and efficacy.
This slowly became apparent to me after a few years of receiving borderline exploitative cultural research briefs that serve no strategic purpose and have no tangible outcome, tik-tok dispatches masquerading as important consumer insights, retrospective championing of brands and initiatives from a purely surface level (“this is why [x] is killing the game right now!”) and the self-reflective/meta nature of advertising in general.
This has led me to an existential crisis - Having occupied the role of “creative strategist” (as well as strategist/researcher etc), I find now there is simply too much of it and it needs to evolve. I am ready to exorcise this label of creative & cultural strategy.
The Problem with Culture
Cultural relevance is a flawed marketing strategy. The idea that brands and companies, through their marketing managers, need to be up to date with the contemporary culture of their audience (i.e the things they watch, listen to, places they go etc) is obviously true and will remain true, as this forms a section of consumer research. Likewise, it is important to be able to manufacture desire for a product through advertisements in order for it to sell over the competitors, knowing what emotions or desires to tap into in order to do this constitutes good planning.
However, the idea that marketing has to immediately reflect or incorporate an understanding of contemporary creative culture is false. The desire to showcase an intimate understanding of culture, exemplified through the rise of marketing buzzwords over the past decade; “authenticity,” “relevance,” “community,” and indeed “culture” (all of these words should be banned). This has left marketing stagnated and spinning wheels in recent efforts to capture a “youth audience”.
One culture report instructs:
“Audiences want to see brands going beyond the expected and demonstrating their cultural understanding. Embrace nuanced cultural references and dive into grassroots cultural engagement".
Paradoxically, the more a brand prides themselves on their knowledge and the playback of culture i.e (what’s IN and what’s OUT) the less effective it becomes in actually creating it. Satisfied by simply adopting the lexicon of the current status quo, whether that’s by printing consumer insights (this is when ad is simply an observation playback), or collaborations with micro-influencers that brands believe are part of the audience’s “cultural world”. It stops creating products, malleable to the actual creators of culture - people, and creates fixed totems of self congratulatory content. This doesn’t “create” culture in the same way that people that champion these ideas think they do. It’s important to remember that Michael Jordan was not pondering the nature of creativity while wearing the Jordans that are so famous now, he was the best at what he did, and that inspired awe in people, and this is what made them want to wear his shoes. Cultural relevance cannot be made if the source material is culture itself. You cannot create a “Dad Shoe” without first selling to dads.
The Shift - When Strategy lost itself.
Being able to sit down and think about why this is so, has led me to the role of “creative strategy” in modern branding and advertising. I think, generally, we are accepting that “planning” (traditional agency roles that made creative briefs for TVCs, anchored in data/insights) became “strategy” (now thinking about the various touchpoints of a brand beyond TVC) has now become “creative strategy”. There is a lot to unpack into why this came about, too much for the purpose of this essay, but here are some of the additional requirements of a creative strategy role that differentiates them from planning/strategy:
- “Stay on top of the latest and most innovative cultural trends and news”
- “An ingrained understanding and opinion on the ways brands can, and should, exist in culture”
- “Comfortable identifying relevant cultural opportunities across a variety of passions”
- “Confident to play a cultural guardianship” ensuring that ideas, partners and collaborators are credible for both audience and brand”
- “Identifying the right subcultures, partners or collaborators for brands to work with and have an opinion on ‘how’”
- “Creating approaches and strategies that ensure when they do, they do so in an authentic and narrative rich way”
These are the tasks of both individual creative strategists and creative strategy agencies - it’s probably these responsibilities specifically, and their focus on social communications, that set apart a creative strategist vs a strategist.
Another way to tell the difference is if the strategy can only be explained through imagery, if the PDF is full of reference images, moodboards, ideas etc it’s creative strategy. Creative strategy is hard to write on one sheet of A4. Good planning isn’t.
This was born out of the premise that the true representation of your audience is their feed, their likes, their content consumption. In 2024, relevance is built on fame, not application or practicality or even shared values. Indeed, the whole purpose of cultural relevance is the idea of being noticed/seen/ appearing on people FYP etc. Which means that the “Strategist” could no longer think about the relationship between a consumer and a product, what became more important were the specifics (who, what, where) in the “cultural world” that exists around the consumer, hence the role of the culture/creative strategist. If Planners/Strategists were the voice of the consumer, creative strategist is the voice of the “culture”.
Creative strategy is an in-between role that came out of sort of perpetual anxiety centred around online relevance and fame of the brand itself, or the product it wishes to sell. The briefs that centre around becoming aware of and aligning with “cultural/creative pioneers”, tastemakers that are shaping culture. The briefs that encourage hoards of ideation and programming on how to connect with an audience through their cultural world, but have no tangible output. This has led to a sort of paranoid scrambling, anxiety and over intellectualisation of everything creative or cultural that occurs. e.g things that end in “maxing” or “core”, general statements about dominant aesthetics and their meaning i.e “baggy clothing is in because…”, and pseudo-sociological mood boards. It’s easy to see everything as a trend and a truism if “trends” is built into the experience of consuming content through algorithms. The rise of “content” , specifically visual, makes it easy for a strategist to develop a creative language, points of references, “vibes”. It's easy to spot the semiotics of a natural wine vs a traditional wine. The aesthetic differences between Who Give A Crap and Andrex.
As this is truly how we experience culture now, everything is transmitted through content and trends, this practice was embraced by young strategists (including myself). A new generation of strategists strove to have more creative input, abandoning the blandness of research into something more exciting, the creative director, the arbiter of taste, the Rick Rubin of vibes. It figures, if I know what’s cool and what other people like, I can also make something that is cool and that people will like. That’s rarely the case and there are several problems that occur with the focus on these responsibilities.
Problems with Creative Strategy Practice
Staying on top of trends leads to trend chasing. The responsibilities outlined above show that now It is not enough to simply understand for a strategist to understand their audience through an intimate understanding of their lives and where a product might fit in, now you must know the cultural content that fills in their world. creative strategists expertise lay in examining not what people think, say, feel or do, but what they see. Chronically online, we become experts in brand aesthetics, micro-trends, memes culture. In late 2024, we find ourselves in a downward spiral filled with pygmy hippos and liquid death.
Creative Strategy often works backwards. We do not have to speak to people to understand culture. This is a dangerous practice as it works backward, drawing conclusions based on the content we see online - e.g “Gen Z love brand [x] because it is authentic, the CEO often gives behind the scenes look at growing it, and this authenticity and journey attracts Gen Z”. How do we know this? How do we know it’s not something else like standard idolisation or perhaps accessibility? Creative strategy is based neither on understanding the people your product speaks to on any meaningful level (research) nor applying that knowledge to a predetermined output of advertising which was created and then served to this audience (planning) but based rather on general understanding of what the consumer is interested in, and how a brand might be able to fit into this world, mainly by co-opting the things already in it.
Creative Strategy is brand agnostic and removes consumer interpretation and experimentation. Identifying the right subculture, partner or collaborator often means identifying the latest or most trendy subculture, partner or collaborator. The answer to this brief is the same for every brand that wants to gain (or maintain) cultural relevance through advertising or brand, whether you’re Playstation, Nike or Apple. The problem here is that due to the nature of “culture” as it exists online, it means that all the best answers are the latest answers. If you were to come up with a creative strategy for an emerging running brand - it would look like Satisfy. If you were to build a creative strategy for a company like Muji that wants to connect with Gen Z, you will take inspiration from the people, experiences and brands that connect with Gen-Z at this current time.
Finally, knowing a lot about culture doesn’t mean you are able to make it. As cultural strategists, perhaps we fooled ourselves into thinking we were team coaches or managers, having an effect on the outcome or performance of a brand through our in depth understanding of the culture and creativity, but that is rarely the case. creative strategists are more like pundits or journalists, able to identify what other teams well or poorly, prone to offer suggestions, but ultimately we are outside of the locker room. Credibility and trend identification are not precursors to cultural creation.
Unfortunately this means that creative strategy is neither creative nor strategic. Being a creative strategist allows you to be a creative that doesn't actually make anything and a strategist without rigour. It is a misnomer, At best, it’s consumer research, at worst it's an exploitative (it simply extracts “culture”) echo chamber that goes nowhere. Perhaps a better term like conceptual creative would be more appropriate. Poor craft in strategy and impractical creative ideas has led to a strange hall of mirrors with no purpose that has led to industry wide stagnation.
Creative Strategy is based on extraction and removes cultural depth. I think another thing that has happened is that agencies started to hire “the consumer” as the strategist, someone who existed in the world they were trying to step into. Specifically POC strategists became cultural strategists for brands and agencies trying to reach POC audiences. Expected to have “insights” embedded and ready for printing in ads, or a personal network of mainly POC “cultural pioneers” we could leverage on behalf of the agency, to connect the brand to. So perhaps it is this part of creative strategy that makes me most uncomfortable. It constantly extracts “culture” made by people, brands it, and then tries to sell it back to the same people. Strategists are now wrestling with the idea of gatekeeping as a way to protect their culture.
Moving Forward
Yet Harakiri is a death with honour, and hopefully this death can lead to a sort of evolution. There were many great suggestions in the comments of my post about stepping back and pausing, and this needs to happen in order for strategy to develop. However I have thought about a few initial ideas on how we give strategy a refresh.
While creative strategy is focused on outputs, sometimes it is good to reassess and ask if “creative” strategy is truly what is needed. So while your title may be CS, it may be more appropriate to leave the creativity for a moment and focus on the strategy. This is the point of the Harakiri, it may be difficult to reject the allure of the cool culture, and the idea that if only you partner with [insert tastemaker here] the cultural relevance that follows will result in exponential growth for your brand. It could be product relevance, emotional benefit relevance etc. In short, becoming more of a holistic strategist and a node for all parts of a business, especially for those in-house.
Separate Creative and Strategy. Sometimes I think creative strategy roles are two jobs for the price of one, i.e give us information and give us creative ideas. While it is doable, it is never as good as a creative and a strategist separately. Sometimes the insights can lead to strategies that might be more appropriate to different aspects of a business, not just marketing. If we think about of Strategy as a whole, it shifts from purely cultural impact, which is a fallacy, to business impact.
If you are a traditional planner in a agency, one option is to go offline - conceding that online content is the medium of culture and creativity, it is not the only one. The obvious question to ask, why someone should care, who should care? What else do they care about? You may want your audience to be the young and cool twenty somethings hanging out in gentrified boroughs of major cities, but that might not be where your product benefit sits. Understand that the product might n capture an audience that makes you not so culturally relevant online, but that is ok. Find a consumer, be passionate about them, and then the “cultural relevance makers” will come once you’ve been beloved by your audience.
Again, I think that Strategists in agencies would do well to try and create better partnerships with actual creatives. It's important for strategists to be able to judge the merits of creative work and creative ideas, but I think that Strategists can benefit from having deeper and more “partnership” style relationships with creatives that are built on a sort of mutual trust. Because we see creativity everyday, it’s easy for us to get a “vibe” in a mood board and then wish to imprint this on the creative expression of a brand or an idea. However, sometimes you just have to give all the information to the creative and then let the creative express it in their unique way. They say strategy is about showing a human truth in an interesting / inspiring way - we need to believe that the creative process has the power to showcase this human truth in a way we as strategists cannot imagine. I believe better creative-strategist partnerships built on trust and passion can help lead to ultimately fresher work. The future of strategy lies not in chasing cultural relevance, but in creating work that naturally becomes culturally relevant through its impact and utility.
Ultimately my hope in committing this Seppuku is that we stop making things that we think people will enjoy by touching on the codes of their culture, and make work and products and experiences that we are passionate about.
N.G / Ground Zero
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