marxepunx:

By: Noah Brier

Strategy 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.