AI is a powerful tool to help us get messy quicker
The first time i met Joe Burns, i was a newly launched solo consultant and curious about his thoughts on how to blend strategy and creativity more seamlessly. Probably born out of a LinkedIn post of his, but what i really remember is mentioning to him a funny image i had seen that day only to confirm it was… an image he had created.
Good start.
But what followed was a series of casual chats, and i finally got time with him to go deeper into comms planning, agency ways of working, and the role of AI for the strategy process. Here’s the full conversation!
Some reflections on the things we discussed:
The fact we still tend to categorise people as more creative or more analytical indeed feels old school. I’ve worked with creative directors who were very good at analysis, not just ideas. And if you’re a strategist, in a job market that continues to be crunched and requirements to do more with less, “i don’t do the numbers” feels like another way of saying “i can’t adapt to the inevitably changing nature of what you will need”. Or… we can learn things.
In the same way we are now more used to saying that strategists are creative too, it feels like we need to normalise this narrative for comms strategists as well. The best comms strategists i’ve worked with have consistently had the ability to unpack client problems conceptually, and to deliver recommendations that were designed to reinforce the creative potential of a campaign, not stifle it. It’s almost like media and creative should be proper integrated, yo!
Anyone who’s ever touched a dataset knows that we can use it to tell myriad stories. In other words, data objectivity is a lie. Data is not just about introducing a sense of objectivity into the work, it’s about introducing enough confidence into the teams working on it that our version of the truth is probably not wrong. If this sounds more metaphysical than absolute, that’s because all we ever do is place statistical bets on the market and then, once the results come in, we will know how correct or incorrect we were. The faster we accept this, the saner we remain doing the job.
Sequentialism. Maybe this should be a thing we talk more about as a problem between strategy and creatives, but also between different types of strategy. No doubt that a project needs a strategic lead, but this doesn’t mean that the brand strategy needs to be fully formed and only then the other disciplines can come in. This feels like an old school way of thinking from a time where we had, well, the luxury of time. And often we don’t. The answer to sequentialism? Synchronised thinking. Everyone gets involved at the beginning and thinks of the problem from their own respective disciplines’ perspective: brand, CX, media, social, whatever. And, like a newsroom, the team then pitches their diagnoses to the editor, who can decide what the narrative will be. Collaboration is not an excuse for lack of assertive leadership.
AI is a powerful tool to help us get messy quicker. Joe said this, and it stuck with me ever since. I suspect it will be for a long time. If we’re up against shorter timelines and crunched scopes, and we still want to preserve the exploration phase to get to potentially novel or distinct ways of looking at a problem, AI is brilliant. Mind you, it can’t solve the problem for you (not very well, anyway). But it can think alongside you as you test all your weird hypotheses, and prove or disprove them, without wasting days. Always remember, AI can offer basic reasoning, but it’s your job to apply taste and judgement in the end. Editor in chief, baby!
The productisation of strategy is a fascinating concept to me. At VCCP we did this for the social unit, where each deliverable was turned into a ‘thing’ we could call, and an artifact we put on a slide (so for example our audience pen portraits were ‘Audience Lenses’ that were this cool looking hexagon shapes), and it worked pretty well for business development purposes. Which means the role of frameworks, processes or productisation isn’t to replace your thinking, but rather to help you sell your thinking, and to automate the repeatable tasks so you can protect time to think better. I feel like many haven’t quite grasped this yet.
Follow Joe Burns on LinkedIn, where he is running laps around the industry with his epic carousels on ~the state of things~.
