Planning for the Best: Finding Opportunity in the Tension with Jon Crowley
Jon Crowley is the senior vice president, head of strategy at FUSE Create, and a strategy leader with more than 15 years of experience.
Including tenures at the likes of Sid Lee, Cossette, Publicis and Diamond, with roles ranging from connections planning to managing strategy departments, he has covered nearly every type of strategic work ad agencies do, most industry verticals, and global, North American, and Canadian mandates.
With a passionate focus on figuring out the intersection point between what people actually think, and what brands need to say, Jon has led work for brands including Pfizer, McDonald’s, The Home Depot, Rogers, Tim Hortons, The Heart & Stroke Foundation, and more, from which he’s gained valuable experience, knowledge, and insights into the world of strong strategic process.
LBB> What do you think is the difference between a strategist and a planner? Is there one?
Jon> The terms are used interchangeably, which has always annoyed me a little. There’s a clear difference between a strategy and a plan, so you’d assume the titles would reflect that difference. I’ve been called a strategist, a planner, and a strategic planner, but normally the work is more about developing strategies than it is plans. Usually, you can guess which term someone prefers based on where they started their career, and which one they think sounds more exclusive.
LBB> And which description do you think suits the way you work best?
Jon> I prefer the term ‘strategist’, largely because I think a plan should be one outcome of a strategy, rather than created via the application of best practices.
LBB> We’re used to hearing about the best creative advertising campaigns, but what’s your favourite historic campaign from a strategic perspective? One that you feel demonstrates great strategy?
Jon> If we’re talking all of advertising history, I’ve never seen a better strategic creative line than Avis’s ‘When you’re only No. 2, you try harder’ – maybe the best example of a universal truth turned into a business advantage, and an idea from DDB that ran for nearly 50 years in different forms around the world. I love it not only because it’s a weakness turned into a strength, but also because everyone has been an underdog in some way, at some point, and this makes you feel a slight emotional connection to the brand that understands working harder to get ahead.
LBB> When you’re turning a business brief into something that can inform an inspiring creative campaign, do you find the most useful resource to draw on?
Jon> The core task of getting to a creative brief is translating a business challenge into a creative communications challenge. I usually want to try to talk to a person who is deeply immersed in something (often a client) and a person who is only loosely aware of it (often a consumer) and see what areas of the discussion do and don’t overlap. Desk research is great for dimensionalising a problem, but I find landing on the right metaphor or example from media (news, novels, TV, movies, whatever) can be the thing that brings a creative challenge to life, rather than getting stuck on ‘we want to increase sales by XX% YOY’.
LBB> What part of your job/the strategic process do you enjoy the most?
Jon> I love the first glimmer of a signal in the noise of research. The moment where I get excited not because I (or we) have figured it out, but because something really interesting just came to the surface, and I know we’re going to figure out why it’s so interesting soon, and I don’t want to miss any of that journey. It’s even better when a colleague, whose work you respect, gets super excited in the early stages, and you don’t know why, but you can tell something just clicked for them, and soon they’re going to be able to explain it to you. Real world moments of magic.
LBB> What strategic maxims, frameworks or principles do you find yourself going back to over and over again? Why are they so useful?
Jon> I love to push on any conflict between the target consumer (who you think you are selling to) and the consuming target (who is actually buying your product or service). The tension between who a brand thinks the customer is, and who they actually are, is a huge source of opportunity.
I also lean heavily on strategy’s role, usually being about simplifying the complex, but occasionally about acknowledging the complexities in things we think are simple – especially when it comes to consumer motivations or perceptions, where it’s tempting to say, ‘Oh they buy it because it tastes good’ and call it a day. A (heavily modified) quote attributed to Einstein comes to mind - ‘Everything should be made as simple as it can be, but no simpler’.
LBB> What sort of creatives do you like to work with? As a strategist, what do you want them to do with the information you give them?
Jon> I always get unreasonably excited by a creative who does a little bit of their own research after they start exploring an idea. I don’t mean fielding a survey, but one of my favourite campaigns I’ve ever worked on (for the TTC) came together because the copywriter was reading forum posts about harassment on public transit, after we’d gone through the research and the brief. That led to an idea (‘#ThisIsWhere’) that used on-transit media to force people to confront that transit isn’t always a safe space, even if they felt safe at the moment. I love when a creative partner is interested enough in the subject to want to learn more.
LBB> There’s a negative stereotype about strategy being used to validate creative ideas, rather than as a resource to inform them and make sure they’re effective. How do you make sure the agency gets this the right way round?
Jon> I actually think the problem is the way we can vilify validating creative ideas, in addition to inspiring them. There’s nothing wrong with a strategist back-rationalising work, assuming the idea is actually worth that effort. If there’s an incredible creative idea that solves the client problem in a way that doesn’t align with the brief, I’ve always been happy to put in the work to help prove it out (or disprove it so we can move on). It’s only an issue if you’re trying to sell work you don’t believe answers the client’s needs. The purpose of strategy is to increase the probability of breakthrough and effective work, not to dictate what that work will be.
LBB> What have you found to be the most important consideration in recruiting and nurturing strategic talent? And how has Covid changed the way you think about this?
Jon> No one wants to work in a strategy factory. Too many agencies push a very narrow lens on what strategy is (and how to do it ‘right’) onto teams, and it leads to people who aren’t comfortable improvising or innovating. The key is to help people deliver the work in THEIR best way, not necessarily the way you as a leader would do it. If you offer (and deliver on) helping people develop their own unique strategic POV, you’ll have better and happier strategists working for you, and the output will be way more engaging to creatives and clients.
LBB> In recent years it seems like effectiveness awards have grown in prestige and agencies have paid more attention to them. How do you think this has impacted on how strategists work and the way they are perceived?
Jon> In my experience, the rise of effectiveness awards primarily leads to strategists writing a lot more award submissions. But (more seriously), it also leads to earlier conversations with all involved about how we’re going to deliver on KPIs beyond just doing the best work we can; so, media planning, go to market plans, and strategies for niche communities or platforms are getting much more well-deserved attention.
LBB> Do you have any frustrations with planning/strategy as a discipline?
Jon> A lot of people think they want a career as a strategist, but actually they want to give TED Talks for a living (which is cool - it’s just not what the job of a strategist is). It’s not just about having opinions. It’s about having informed opinions and being able to express them in a way that is clear, compelling, and solves a problem.
As well, it can sometimes be difficult for strategists to respect the barrier between our strategic advisory role and what the client business strategy is, but in general, that’s an ‘us’ problem, not an issue with the discipline itself.
LBB> What advice would you give to anyone considering a career as a strategist/planner?
Jon> Be aggressively informed. Great research and writing skills will get played back to aspiring strategists constantly as the things that will make them stand out, but those are very basic building blocks.
What I’ve seen work more regularly is having a lot of stuff in your brain, all the time – so that when your client, your creatives, or your accounts team brings up a problem or an opportunity, you have a starting point for that conversation and that research – even if it’s just a half-remembered article or news segment. Be a broad and voracious consumer of information, theory and culture, and not just what is trending at the moment. That deep archive of ‘stuff’ is of huge value early on in your career, and later it shares space with an equally deep archive of first-hand experience that you can use to drive strategic development.
