Comms strategy as songwriting
Hey – Rob here.
Thank you to everyone who joined our scary good comms strategy panel on October 31st, with Joe Burns, Whitney Bryan, and Mikael Greenlief.
Apart from the colossal tech fuckup by yours truly, it was a wonderful way to spend ~70 mins discussing a discipline that doesn't get enough airtime.
Here and below is the recording of our chat in front of ~400 people (my target was like 50 at best?), plus a few short observations after the video.
Some highlights and short observations off the back of this panel:
Comms strategy is more than media planning, it's actually how we triangulate the way brands show up across audiences and channels.
One helpful analogy is to think of brand strategy as "the story to tell", and comms strategy about "how to tell it most effectively".
However we can go deeper, as comms strategy is about thinking through the entire customer journey (not just the advertising), including understanding where the real problems are in the funnel.
As more businesses expected comms strategy skills, agencies either rebranded media strategists as comms strategists, or expected brand and creative strategists to do comms strategy; neither of these scenarios helps anyone involved, really.
Comms strategy may be seen as L'Enfant Terrible of agencies because it challenges revenue models, especially if the best answer for a client may not be large media spends but more disruptive or earned media approaches, which can be much harder to monetise.
There are three modalities of comms strategy: when it comes before the idea (research, market mapping, ecosystem planning), when it comes after the idea (channel amplification, etc), and when comms strategy becomes the idea (e.g. orchestrated campaigns where the method of communication is what truly stands out).
A useful analogy for how to best involve comms strategists is to think of teams as editorial rooms or indeed bands writing songs, where everyone contribute but ultimately someone plays the 'editor in chief' role and needs to commit to an idea and carry it forward.
One of the benefits of this hybrid approach is that it ensures those who are at the helm reduce their blind spots as much as possible, because they're feeding from all sorts of views; this, of course, requires people wanting to reduce blind spots in the first place.
When knowledge is cheap (and with AI it kinda is), the most valued skill a comms strategist can bring to the table is relational, because creating trust in others is how you get involved early on.
Rather than expecting to be invited to the start of projects, we need to earn our right to be invited, either because we've proven to help make ideas better, or offer a unique perspective; it's harsh but true.
The process of comms strategy (or any strategy really) is not a phase per se but rather something that, as you do the work, you're selling the work, and as you're selling the work, you're doing it too.
As a result, knowing how to improvise on the spot and operate at speed in unpredictable scenarios is more valuable than simply showing up with some frameworks or rigid ways of working.
Another of the crucial relational aspects we can bring to any project is the relationship between the outside world and the agency and clients we work with; often this means bringing a spiky dose of reality because the endgame is maximising effectiveness.
A few useful places to start when you receive a client brief: what are the motivators and barriers this audience has around this brand, product or category? How can comms realistically help either amplify those motivations or address those barriers? What other disciplines can we borrow from to inform this brief? (E.g. If doing behaviour change work, borrow from child psychology)
Brute force 'awareness comms' is probably not the answer.
Also, here are a few other pieces I've written about comms strategy over the last several months, in case you want some extra companion thoughts:
Keep swimming,
Rob
