Planning for the Best: Getting to the Heart of Fan Communities with Ant Firth-Clark
Ant is a strategist, consultant and writer with 13 years experience helping top-tier brands such as Google, Jameson and Barclaycard connect with creative and culture-driven audiences. His career has spanned across digital media, cultural research/insights, culture marketing, and marcomms, and is currently a lead strategist at M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, the passions agency. Ant also set up his own consultancy, Movements, to support the career development of renowned freelance artists and creators, and is ex-co-founder of creative collective, O.G. Studios.
LBB> What do you think is the difference between a strategist and a planner? Is there one?
Ant> Time-old question, eh? My hot take: a strategist sets the (well-informed and logical) course for a project, planners will leverage their respective specialisms or perspectives to make sure the course is kept. But here’s the thing… It. Is. The. Same. Skillset. Semantics and pedantry are the only things that get in the way of this clarity. What is this skillset? Curiosity, logic, analysis, writing, and a healthy dose of comfort in throwing the dice. In ad land campaign work, specifically, it’s an uncompromising commitment to the space where the ambitions of the brand collide with the needs, perspectives and behaviour of its audience, and the broader cultural narratives at play. Also, the collective of strategists under our roof (called Passion Pulse) are specialists in different passion spaces – and that tends to be the way we approach problems, meaning the strategy and planning work often merges as one scope, rather than being considered separate roles or modes.
LBB> And which description do you think suits the way you work best?
Ant> I feel quite happy in both modes. I’ve worked in digital media planning, start-up marcomms, research consulting, and, of course, in the cultural/creative marketing space – and they all have phases where you need to do upstream strategic thinking and then more focused planning. It really just depends on where you are in the lifecycle – and everyone should really be comfortable in doing both. Personally, I identify more with the strategy role: I like getting lost in the weeds of big juicy problems and sweating over them until an answer is spat out. Then I have a breakdown. And then I go again.
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?
Ant> Without a shadow of a doubt, it’s unpacking cultural concepts and simplifying them into engaging stories. Everyone always talks about words, communicates with words, uses words to define objectives, but few really take a beat to unpack what those words and concepts really mean to people in their everyday life. Google dial into Helpfulness, but what good is it to say this without really understanding the human dynamics (and emotional baggage) that comes with seeking and receiving help? I’m biassed with this example because I helped them to do it. Ultimately, do this well, and you can unlock whole worlds to inspire the creative brief by identifying emotionally rich, real life contexts that everyone can relate to.
LBB> What part of your job/the strategic process do you enjoy the most?
Ant> There’s three.
First, The A-HA Moment. When you’ve been noodling around in all this information, lost, feverishly trying to solve some kind of problem (or reconcile multiple!), and then suddenly something clicks and an idea, an insightful articulation, presents itself – something which feels human and true and emotive and all encompassing. That flip never stops being rewarding. If you’re a nerd. Like me.
Second, working at the passions agency, we get the amazing opportunity to help brands connect with different cultural spaces. As part of this, we get to explore all the amazing communities and behaviours that exist within passions. Being anthropologically minded, the study of these (often surprising) communities is a never-ending source of inspiration and interest. At M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, we call this study Fancom, and it’s such a rich way to get far more under the skin of how audiences really manifest and coalesce in culture.
Third, is that first tissue session with the creative team where you get to see how your thinking and hard work has filtered into their brilliant minds and become something otherworldly, something you could never have got to yourself. That moment is so inspiring, and exciting, as you then have the launchpad to build together and get excited about the potential of what’s to come, and what might very well come to exist in the world.
LBB> What strategic maxims, frameworks or principles do you find yourself going back to over and over again? Why are they so useful?
Ant> The four C’s is the best analytical framework. Period. It forces you to look at a problem from all possible angles: company, competition, consumer, and culture. Find a solution that reconciles tensions discovered in all these areas and you’ll always get towards something juicy that everyone can’t but get behind.
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?
Ant> Talented ones? Ha. Ultimately, I love working with all kinds of creatives, they’re my compadres, the people who get my Seinfeld and Alan Partridge references, who I talk to about music and film and fashion and basketball, and who, ultimately, I like to get greased up with. They’re my people. That might sound quite irrelevant, but that stuff builds respect, trust and a genuine motivation to collaborate and value each other’s perspectives. So when I’ve gone and spent my time, effort and whatever else to help solve a client problem strategically, and then the same on helping create a space, launchpad or blueprint for creatives to succeed, where I can say “Yo, if you keep your ideas bouncing around the inside this box, you’re going to produce something real special for the client, the consumer and the culture. Like, go wild – but within these guardrails.” Then I want to work with creatives who pay attention to that, trust in it, value it, and build from it. Being “smart” is a prerequisite, the quality of your relationships is what does the rest of the heavy lifting. Well… that, alongside a heavy dose of humility and self-deprecation.
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?
Ant> It depends. Retrofitting does happen, and it’s (sometimes) disappointing when it does, because you see how much better ideas could be if things happened the right way round. If it could have been avoided, I’d probably flip some tables and try and affect some change to prevent that happening again. But there’s also many contexts where it can’t be helped. Clients don’t feel like there’s time (or money) for strategy, ideas now now now, etc, and account teams have to oblige. Also, often pitch timelines are brutal, and in the spirit of ‘one-team, one-dream’ you just have to all pull together to shape something really good, really quickly. It’s also important to check your own ego and remember what The Dude had to say in The Big Lebowski: “yeah, well… you know… that’s just, like, er, your opinion, man.” Just because you’ve got a brief to a creative space, doesn’t mean it’s the only creative space that can solve the problem. Creatives might discover ideas that speak to a completely different territory – which is also brilliant. Maybe it’s a more fertile ground for actual ideas compared to your over-intellectualised waffle. If this is true, then the job is now to do your best to help make it work and make sense for the client and their objectives.
In terms of getting the agency to make it work “the right way round”? My personal belief is that you will be able to do this when you’ve made yourself a trusted and valued person who your peers and senior leaders want/need in the room – get yourself to that point, the righteous way will follow.
LBB> What have you found to be the most important consideration in recruiting and nurturing strategic talent?
Ant> In terms of recruiting, never second guess your gut. Obviously challenge your biases, but generally, the vibe you get from someone can give you a massive sense about what they will be like to work with and the attitude they’ll bring. You can test for hard talent/capability through tasks, but the characters you bring into your team have the power to make or break a culture (let alone screw up client work and relationships), so you shouldn’t rush it, in spite of the pressures of urgency. Through having made these mistakes in the past, I’d recommend always working towards the principle: Don’t know means no.
Nurturing strategic talent, much like any discipline, differs for every person – each with different personalities, needs and hang-ups. In strategy, imposter syndrome is especially rife, and so a lot of it is about helping people feel confident in their own abilities, ensuring they have the opportunity to be exposed and accountable, whilst also ensuring they know you’re there to support and coach when they ask for it – ensuring they don’t fear they’ll be discriminated against for seeking help. In short, arm them with the skills and process they need to do the work, then step back – and then depending on how that goes, you lean back in, or step back further. Dancing about like this isn’t easy to do, especially when work quality is always priority, but the growth of your team is just as critical in order to help everyone step up – so it’s worth the effort and investment.
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?
Ant> I would hope it hasn’t impacted what strategists do at all! The whole gig is – like I’ve already said – about identifying the spaces that solve for the relevant tensions at the intersection of brand objectives, consumer needs and cultural context. Great strategists have always done this. I feel like what the rise in effectiveness awards has really done is incentivise agencies to take more accountability for their creative work so that it actually delivers against what their clients need it to. This is, ultimately, what they’re paying for. Hopefully it will usher in the end commercial creativity that “pisses in the wind” – that stuff helps no one. Just look at that whole Solo Stove X Snoop Dog debacle, for example.
LBB> Do you have any frustrations with planning/strategy as a discipline?
Ant> Over time, ideas change.
Ant> Especially as they travel through the minds of more (excellent) people – be they at your agency, the client, or the legal & PR guillotine. This is a necessary process, but can also mean ideas evolving and warping into something very different than what initially excited you (and saw you giddily imagining a swagged-out saunter onto the awards stage at Cannes). This is part and parcel of the gig. If you really want to fight for an idea, of course work out ways to keep close to the project as it progresses. But also pick your battles, and trust in the host of amazing, talented, skilled people tasked with bringing ideas to fruition – who will make the work as great as it was destined to be. And, most importantly, take pride in knowing that this real thing which is now out in the world was, at some point, solely commuting through your brain.
LBB> What advice would you give to anyone considering a career as a strategist/planner?
Ant> Give it whatever sexy name you want, at the heart of strategy and planning is swaths of information and analysis. First and foremost, you are an analyst. This is a profession about solving problems – losing yourself in the details, the love of making sense of it, and the joy of seeing your thinking become something in the world. The adage there’s more than one way to skin a cat is totally true, people are different, they think differently and have different skill sets and backgrounds and this offers no end of creative potential in being a strategist – but the central truth is that we are all analysts. The nature of that analysis is rich and diverse – it’s the discovery of insights hidden in numbers, words, structure, semiotics, opinion, behaviour, business, science, popular culture, GIFs and memes and so on. If you’re down with that, then go for it! But if the idea of that makes you wince, you might do best pursuing other career routes.
