Planning for the Best: Delving into the Unfamiliar with Peter Wilson

In his role as executive strategy director, Peter is responsible for leading Iris’ integrated strategy department. His specific focus is on finding meaningful ways for brands to participate in communities and culture.

During a career of 20 years, Peter has won the top creative strategy and strategic effectiveness awards from the industry’s two preeminent strategic bodies, the APG and the IPA.

After 13 years in London, Peter moved with his family to Sydney, Australia for three years before returning to the UK in the middle of the pandemic with new born twins. Today he is still recovering from that experience, living with his wife and four children on England’s south coast.

LBB> What do you think is the difference between a strategist and a planner? Is there one? 

Peter> The facetious answer is that this is precisely the sort of question that gives planners a bad rep – cardigan shufflers using words like ‘parochial’ to navel-gaze over a semantic interpretation. I guess strategy sounds bigger, more expensive and less parochial than ‘planning’. But the word ‘strategist’, like ‘strategy’, has never been so overused, probably because of the interminable fragmentation of the industry’s disciplines. 

LBB> And which description do you think suits the way you work best?

Peter> At the risk of contradicting my last answer completely, there is an important distinction between upstream diagnosis and downstream execution. I try to balance both and know enough about each discipline to call on the right people who are much more accomplished in their respective field than me. It’s also a generational thing – I’m comfortably in my 40's so I prefer to call it planning.

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?

Peter> AMV BBDO and Bodyform over the past decade, encompassing campaigns such as bloodnormal and Womb Stories. As a body of work it has it all – a long term commitment, a deeply empathetic understanding of its audience, a cultural bellwether. Category-breaking. Brave. Effective.

LBB> When you’re turning a business brief into something that can inform an inspiring creative campaign, what do you find the most useful resource to draw on?

Peter> People. We’ve got more tools and resources and data and subscriptions than ever before, but nothing beats spending time with the human beings who truly represent the communities you’re trying to engage. We should obsessively understand what genuinely matters to them, feel the texture beyond just ‘an audience’ and ultimately work out how the brand is going to participate in their culture in a positive way.

LBB> What part of your job/the strategic process do you enjoy the most?

Peter> Delving into anything that feels unfamiliar or foreign. It’s liberating when you accept you’re beginning a new project without any pre-conceptions or baggage. You have to start from scratch and challenge yourself not to make assumptions. I’ve been working a lot with skateboarders for the past year or so as part of our work with Samsung, and it’s been incredibly rewarding to learn about the skate culture that I deeply envied growing up but didn’t feel cool enough to take part in. Now that I get how brilliantly positive and inclusive skateboarding is I’m just going to gently push my children in that direction and live vicariously through them.

LBB> What strategic maxims, frameworks or principles do you find yourself going back to over and over again? Why are they so useful? 

Peter> Just as every brand is different, there is no singular way to ‘do strategy’. Frameworks can be useful short hands but if followed too dogmatically they can lead to generic and dull work. The way ideas travel between people has changed beyond recognition in recent years, so increasingly I focus more on what will generate earned reach beyond paid broadcast channels alone. By its nature, this requires a less prescriptive approach.

I do love a maxim though. Supposedly Bill Bernbach kept a business card in his wallet bearing the words ‘maybe they’re right’. It’s important to remind ourselves that while we should always strive for clarity and conviction, dogma can be really damaging – both to creative expression and client relationships.

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?

Peter> I want to work with them well before we get to the stage that I can ‘give them information’. I want it to be a genuine partnership. I want them to help me build the strategy and creative brief so they’re invested in the objectives from the outset. I want us to challenge each other and shape the creative idea together, constructively. One way of doing this from the outset is giving them a window into the communities we’re working with so we can really feel what matters to them. For skateboarders, this meant travelling up and down the country, visiting skate parks and talking to skaters in their environment. Even if it did make me feel like that Steve Buscemi ‘how do you do, fellow kids’ meme.

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?

Peter> If you invest in representing the culture of the people and communities you’re connecting with faithfully, your strategic work will always play an integral part in the creative idea. If you don’t, your role is reduced to subjective commentary, ‘plansplaining’ your way through meetings like a GB News co-anchor. 

LBB> What have you found to be the most important consideration in recruiting and nurturing strategic talent? 

Peter> While agencies should have a discernible culture, it’s dangerous to recruit for cultural fit – everyone should bring a different dimension. And then once they’re in, give them space to breathe and let them find their voice and their own ‘brand’ of doing strategy. Our most recent senior strategy director recruit, Karen Correia da Silva, has a brilliantly diverse background that combines cultural research, social channels and academia. She’s helping our clients navigate new grounds and teaching us at the same time.

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?

Peter> On the upside, it instils more rigour and has the potential to earn agencies more credibility and establish planners as true partners to their clients’ businesses.

On the downside, an effectiveness culture often disguises a safety-first culture. The obsession with pre-testing leads to a lot of flawlessly logical but infuriatingly bland work.

LBB> Do you have any frustrations with planning/strategy as a discipline?

Peter> There are two extremes that are equally awful. In some corners, planning is still fetishized as the sole reserve of the intellectual doyen, desperate to be perceived as the smartest person in the room. Planning is nothing more than a means to an end of effecting positive change for our clients’ businesses and the lives of their customers.

In other corners, there are those who take that definition too literally and treat planning as a resource that can be turned on and off when the time or budget permits. It requires time, space and craft.

LBB> What advice would you give to anyone considering a career as a strategist/planner?

Peter> I believe that any aspiring planner with a good dose of curiosity, empathy, imagination and analytical ability can learn the fundamentals of the job when they’re on the job. But you do need to train your brain in a certain way.

Be a sponge. Not just for what is cool or popular, but what is real and populist. Obsess about people and the culture of communities. Old and new. Highbrow and lowbrow.

Listen. Focus on being empathetic, because this will help you develop more rounded perspectives, which will in turn help you be useful, interesting and valuable.

Keep asking questions, because insights don’t lie in ‘what’ happens, but in ‘why’ that thing happens.

And don’t be afraid to ask for favours: planners tend to be very generous with their time and advice and there are brilliant, welcoming organisations like the APG that hold untold strategic riches.