Partnership is messy, cutdown crackdown, need codes +++
Hey – Rob here.
Every now and then, I like to curate the best that the Salmon Crew community has to offer. Here is the latest instalment. I think you'll like it.
As the social web splinters into pockets of strangeness, it's good to know there are safe refuges out there where constructive discourse can happen.
Come join 200+ others and ditch the reply guy energy of your LinkedIn feed for a bit.
Right, let's get on with some other things that have been on my mind.
Partnership is messy
Here's how you can slowly but surely go mad as a strategist:
Read up on how strategy should be done, the frameworks, the processes, all the elements we need to do things well, and so on
Do the job for more than two seconds, only to realise reality and business are never that clean or linear or devoid of interests
Go back to step one, feel reassured that you're right and the entire world is wrong, and eventually use your bonus to pay for therapy
Or, there may be something else we can do. I've been thinking a lot about this because I keep thinking about the difference between someone behaving like a provider, as opposed to behaving like a partner.
Now, of course, most of us would say, "I want to be a partner not a provider". And that's probably the right thing to do, especially if you want to command a higher price premium over time. But here's what bugs me: partnership is actually not a very clean state of affairs. You know what business partners do? It's not just the sexy stuff. That's the narrative.
But that's not reality. The reality is partnership is as much about unlocking opportunity as it is about managing bullshit and ensuring the wider team don't get exposed to it. It's rewarding at its best, but also not always fun. Full of meaning and sometimes contentment? Yes. But messy as fuck too.
The reason I'm pointing this out is that perhaps our expectations of what partnership is are too aligned with what the expectations of being a provider is. A provider needs a clear brief and all the elements in place before they can get started, and until they have a brief and task and all the elements in place they can't get started. "Computer says no".
A partner also needs a brief to get started, but what I observe is that, more often than not, not all the elements are in place yet. And you need to get started anyway! Why? Because as a partner it's in your best interest that, as imperfect as the starting point may be, you're there to help the business be more effective. And that means starting before you're 100% ready.
There is such a thing as a terrible brief (we could do a horror stories series on this alone, maybe next Halloween), but that doesn't mean we should expect every single time to receive a perfect brief and set of circumstances before we can start moving a single finger to solve a problem. That's what providers do, it's not what partners do. A partner works with what they've got, instead of just complaining about what they don't have yet.
I've done comms strategy projects that often begin without a budget, or from a very tactical starting point, only to then a couple of weeks in the actual brief being officially revealed and we need to see what survives from the original thinking now that we have more elements in place.
Is it annoying? It can be. But what do I, and the agency I'm working with this, as partners to this client, do about it? Complain? Sure, can do. But you need to move on from that pretty soon. Can we help the client learn how to brief us better? Possibly, but that will take time to do right.
What I suspect is going on with situations like these is: there are conflicting interests within both the agency and the client's business to get going on some of the work (production schedules, stakeholders demanding to see some stuff), while we wait for the full final brief to come. So you don't have the full picture yet, but you have enough to get started.
So within this, sure complain and reiterate what you need for a bit, but it feels to me that the worst thing you can do is just... wait for the final thing to finally emerge, like a Pokémon who's perfected its final form. No, your role as a partner is to sit with what you have, identify what you don't have yet, and get on with it. Maybe I'm becoming too British stiff upper lip about some of this stuff, or maybe I'm learning what being useful means. And as strategists, by not being indispensable (sorry we're not, great work often happens despite strategists being involved), we need to be useful.
But what do you think? Is this a thing? Am I being too permissive of 'bad briefing practices' and lack of clarity in others? Or is this a reality check that more strategists could do with to get their heads out of their own ass? And that, indeed, when faced with what feels like chaos, our role is to act as agents of clarity and integration by ensuring we can take onboard all that is being discussed, and put together a simple picture that makes sense, encourages thoughtful choices, and ensures elements reinforce each other?
Let's start a discussion on this. You can email me with your thoughts. I may run a panel if there's enough appetite. It feels like a significant tension that I don't see discussed, and yet affects so many people.
Cutdown crackdown
In which I remind myself, and you too, that it is 2025 and talking about social cutdowns is the quickest way to signal you have no idea how social works or that you have the capabilities to deliver effective social work.
Look, let's be real with this shit. We don't talk about OOH cutdowns. We don't talk about audio cutdowns. We don't talk about print cutdowns. We don't talk about partnership cutdowns. We don't talk about creator cutdowns. Why? Because we know different media require different creative approaches. Simon Andrews talks about the grammar of different media. David Wilding describes it as "dress code" which I love as well.
And yet, the dress code of most social campaigns is like going to the Oscars and realising you look like a knock off Leonardo Di Caprio. It's like you're dressed like the man, you look like the man, but your nose is a bit crooked and your actual name is Leonardo Di Cambrio. If this sounds ridiculous, that's what I genuinely feel when I hear "cutdowns" mentioned.
This isn't a problem of scale, but a problem of status. Social commands the lion's share of ad spend, so the problem here isn't that we think social is niche and too targeted and not enough real people will see our work. The problem is there's still very little status attached to social compared to, say, doing a fancy pants TV shoot in Kuala Lumpur and obsessing over the edit for weeks. This feels high status, "what we got into this business for". But concepting some stuff you can probably shoot and edit on your phone? Bah, I – a big ideas person! – ain't getting out of bed for that. Begone.
Not saying TV edits are bad. I'm saying we need the same level of care for other media as well. You see so much work being done to do design exploration for a poster, print, in-store display, and so on. And all of this is necessary. Then when it comes to looking at social? It's either "ah I don't want to deal with it", or "put the logo upfront", or "resize the TVC to 4:5".
It's boring, it's disrespectful, and it's an extremely naive way to alienate some of your most talented workforce who eventually decide to fuck off because the last thing we all want is to feel like our work has no worth. And although I'm thinking of specific instances over the last 15+ years where this happened, time and time again, I know I'm not alone with it.
So yeah, it's time we crack down on the cutdowns. Let's drag ourselves to the 21st century and talk about not how you cut something for social, but how you craft something for social. How you take an idea and craft its execution in a way that will make it noticeable for social (hooks, link to CEPs, etc), but also memorable for the right reasons (distinctive assets).
Dorky chart district
Is he a strategist? Is he a collector? The answer is yes. For a few weeks I've been sharing on my LinkedIn all my favourite strategy charts and some advertising work, with some lite commentary, and it's going well.
So, in the spirit of sweating those assets across media (ew), I'm gonna start adding some of those here as well. In fact, the full collection of charts (I wanna say maybe 3-4 a week?) are gonna be shared here first, because exclusivity, and then spread out as more atomic bits elsewhere on socials.
Right, let's get in, my fellow dorks.
I love me a table, and this table by Behavio Labs (who are partnering with Dan White) is quite good. Here's the original research, and there is a webinar coming as well, but I quite like where they're going with this.
Basically there's a growing recognition that we not only need to get people's attention, we need to encode something so that attention yields some sort of a) memory structure b) linked to the right brand. What this is doing is taking that a little bit further and being more precise about the memory structure needing to be specifically linked to a buying occasion.
This is what 'me codes' (who is this brand) and 'need codes' (when should I think about them) are about. And it sounds pretty simple, and it sounds like the sort of stuff we all know, but sometimes you need someone to capture in words what you've felt for a while. And this does that very well.
"We need to brand early" doesn't just mean plaster the logo like it's the unwelcome guest at a party that you invited because their dad is rich or something. Here are slightly more interesting ways to make social-first work feel branded without looking quite shit. Let's be smart not strict.
Next time someone mentions something about maybe your campaign going viral, use this chart and tell them in earnest, "good luck with that".
By the way, it's very easy to interpret this as just another riff of the old argument that TV is great and still not dead etc (it's not btw, and anyone who tells you anything is dead is is just trying to sell you their own thing).
But a slightly more useful interpretation is simply to acknowledge that if you don't have sufficient media support for the creative work you're doing, you are literally doing your campaign and client's business a disservice.
I forget the source for this (if you know it, please send it to me and will update here) but quite like this breakdown of the role of brand building depending on business maturity. Best practices always need context yo!
Keep swimming,
Rob
Ps. Come read this deck I did with some of the top hits from Salmon Crew members. Probably the best 'high IQ low ego' community on the internet.
