Last week, the WFA and Mediasense published their survey of 166 industry professionals — across agencies, brands, platforms etc — which found that strategic thinking is marketing’s most acute talent shortage.
From my point of view, there is no such shortage. There are only problems with finding the talent, hiring it, making the most of it, and keeping hold of it.
I run a community for independent and freelance strategists called Outside Perspective (OP), where I can see (*checks notes*) over 1,000 experienced and deeply talented strategists doing some of the industry's best work. Not to mention, another 4,000 of them in our extended network.
OP isn't the only community of this nature, either. There’s Salmon Crew, Ladies Who Strategize, Strategy Mondays, Exposure Therapy, Group Think, The Strategy Hub... the list goes on.
The people are out there, but many members of the communities mentioned above have, in recent years, been pushed around and out of agencies. Rounds of restructurings and redundancies have left agency strategy teams demolished and downsized.
When strategists are being hired, it is far too often for low day rates or salaries, or with crazily narrow hiring criteria, or a job description better suited to a team of three. There are now countless ‘strategy teams of one’, in which the individual is pulled between client work, freelancer management, agency commercial strategy, product development, thought leadership and new business.
As a result, strategic talent is being dispersed. Where once the big agencies exerted the strongest gravity, today strategists are working in small indies, for clients, or within collectives. Or they are self-employed, starting their own thing, or moving outside of the creative industry entirely, applying their critical thinking to other challenges.
For those wanting to work with people that have developed that strategic capability and experience over time, this creates both an opportunity and a challenge.
The opportunity is that strategy is no longer hidden behind or within the big agencies. There are now more strategic free agents, which means any organisation can obtain independent and impartial thinking, which isn’t muddied by the desire to sell some service or another downstream. And these organisations get to apply that thinking when it matters most, rather than sitting around between the projects on FTE.
The challenge is in how organisations can work effectively with this talent because bringing in someone for the first 20% of a project was never the right way to think about strategy.
In the businesses that I've seen achieve the most success, marketers do four things to close that gap in strategic capability.
- Build relationships not just briefs: It's risky to bring in an untrusted outsider last minute. Don't let your best walk out the door at the end of a project; keep them close and build a strong contacts book.
- Focus on challenges over titles: Ignore the ill-defined and inconsistently used job titles. One agency's planner is another's strategist. Focus on the challenges you're facing and the outcomes you need, and let the people with the right experience — rather than the right job title — shape the approach with you.
- Embrace adjacencies and breadth: Don't discount people just because they haven’t done the specific thing you're asking them to do. Lean in to people with broader and adjacent experiences. That was always the benefit of working with agencies — the diversity of inputs and ideas, rather than too narrow of a focus.
- Don’t put strategy in the corner: Avoid bringing in strategic thinking only for the beginning. Keep strategic thinking integrated as the work develops, goes live, and gets evaluated. It's a multiplier at every stage, rather than just a foundation.
Most importantly, clients have to be willing to pay for strategic thinking. The WFA/Mediasense report clearly identifies strategic work as one of the most valuable ingredients of both creative and commercial success. But if it's also the first thing to get skipped, cut or squeezed from the budget, skilled practitioners will be forced to leave industry, and then we really will have a shortage on our hands.
Matthew Knight is chief freelance officer at Outside Perspective, a community network of over 5,000 independent and freelance strategy professionals, across brand, comms, innovation, social, content, insight and beyond.
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