What a Strategist in Advertising Does

A strategist in advertising is the person responsible for translating business problems into briefs that creative work can solve. They sit between the client’s commercial reality and the agency’s output, making sure the work is pointed at the right problem before anyone writes a line of copy or opens a design file.

The role sounds simple. In practice, it is one of the hardest jobs in the industry, because it requires holding a clear point of view under conditions of ambiguity, incomplete data, and competing opinions, and then convincing a room of smart people that your reading of the situation is correct.

What Does a Strategist in Advertising Actually Do?

The formal job description usually involves things like audience research, brief writing, competitive analysis, and presenting to clients. All of that is accurate. But it misses the core of the role, which is making judgment calls with imperfect information and getting other people to act on them.

I remember my first week at Cybercom. We were in a brainstorm for Guinness. The founder had to leave for a client meeting and, without ceremony, handed me the whiteboard pen. I had been in the building for less than a week. My internal reaction was something close to panic. But the room was waiting, and the work needed to move forward, so I made a call about where to take the session and ran with it. That is strategy in its most unvarnished form. Not frameworks or slide decks. Someone has to decide what the problem is and what direction to go in. In an agency, that person is usually the strategist.

The day-to-day work breaks down into a few distinct activities. Strategists spend a lot of time in client conversations, trying to understand what the business actually needs, which is often different from what the brief says. They spend time in research, both formal and informal, looking for the tension or truth that will make a campaign land. They write briefs, which is where most of the real thinking happens. And they present, defend, and iterate on strategic recommendations, often in rooms where not everyone agrees with them.

If you want to understand where advertising strategy fits within the broader discipline of go-to-market thinking and commercial growth, the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers the wider territory in more depth.

How Is Advertising Strategy Different From Marketing Strategy?

Marketing strategy operates at a higher altitude. It covers positioning, pricing, product, distribution, and how a business chooses to compete. Advertising strategy is a subset of that. It is concerned specifically with how communication can change what people think, feel, or do in relation to a brand or product.

The distinction matters because strategists who confuse the two tend to either stay too high-level and never get to anything actionable, or go too tactical and miss the bigger picture entirely. The best advertising strategists I have worked with are fluent in both registers. They can talk about brand positioning and consumer psychology in the same breath as conversion rates and media efficiency.

There is also a difference in time horizon. Marketing strategy tends to operate over years. Advertising strategy tends to operate over campaign cycles, which might be quarters or seasons. A strategist has to be clear about which game they are playing at any given moment, because the decisions that make sense for a short-term activation campaign are often the wrong decisions for a brand-building effort, and vice versa.

One of the persistent tensions I have seen across agencies and clients is the pressure to make every campaign do everything at once: build the brand, drive immediate sales, grow share, and retain existing customers. That is not a strategy. That is a wish list. A strategist’s job is to be honest about what the work can and cannot do, and to make a clear recommendation about what it should prioritise.

What Skills Does an Advertising Strategist Need?

The skill set is broader than most job descriptions suggest. The obvious ones are research literacy, brief writing, and presentation skills. But the less obvious ones are often what separate good strategists from great ones.

Intellectual honesty is near the top of the list. Strategy involves making a case for a point of view, and there is always a temptation to cherry-pick the data that supports what you already believe. The strategists I have trusted most over the years are the ones who actively look for evidence that contradicts their hypothesis before they commit to it. That discipline is harder than it sounds, especially when you are under time pressure or when a client is already leaning toward a particular answer.

Commercial awareness is another one that gets undervalued. A strategist who does not understand how their client makes money, what their margin structure looks like, or where they are under pressure from competitors is operating with a significant blind spot. The brief might be about an emotional brand story, but the decision to run it will be made by someone who is also looking at a P&L. Strategists who can speak to both dimensions are considerably more useful.

When I was running agencies and managing teams across multiple clients and categories, I saw a consistent pattern. The strategists who grew fastest were the ones who were genuinely curious about how businesses work, not just how advertising works. They read earnings calls. They understood category dynamics. They could explain why a client was under margin pressure without having to be told. That commercial grounding made their strategic thinking sharper and their client relationships stronger.

The third skill is the ability to synthesise, not just analyse. Gathering data is not the job. The job is finding the one thing in all of that data that changes how you think about the problem. That requires a different kind of thinking, more editorial than analytical, and it is something that takes time to develop.

What Is the Difference Between an Insight and an Observation?

This is the question I have asked in more job interviews and creative reviews than I can count, because the answer tells you a great deal about how someone thinks.

An observation is something you can see. People check their phones before they get out of bed. Parents feel guilty about screen time. Shoppers compare prices even when they have already decided what they want. These are all true. They are also not insights, because they do not tell you anything that changes how you approach the problem.

An insight is an observation plus a tension. It captures something true about human behaviour that is slightly uncomfortable, slightly surprising, or slightly contradictory. It opens a door rather than closing one. The best insights make you think: yes, that is true, and I have never quite heard it put that way before.

The reason this distinction matters so much is that creative work built on observations tends to be competent but forgettable. Creative work built on genuine insights tends to resonate, because it reflects something real about the audience’s experience. That resonance is what drives the commercial outcomes that advertising is supposed to produce.

There is a useful parallel here with how behavioural feedback tools work in digital product contexts. The data shows you what people do. Understanding why they do it, and what that means for how you communicate with them, is the interpretive layer that sits on top. The tool gives you the observation. The strategist provides the insight.

How Does a Strategist Write a Brief That Actually Works?

The brief is where strategy becomes real. Everything before it is thinking. The brief is the output that the rest of the agency acts on. A weak brief does not just produce weak creative. It produces creative that solves the wrong problem, which is worse than no creative at all, because it costs money and time and still does not move the business forward.

The best briefs I have seen share a few characteristics. They are short. They make a single clear ask. They contain one genuine insight, not a list of observations dressed up as insights. And they give the creative team enough context to understand the business problem without so much constraint that they cannot find a creative solution.

The most common mistake in brief writing is trying to include everything. The client wants to talk to everyone. The brief lists six target audiences. The campaign needs to work across twelve channels. There are four key messages, all of them equally important. What you end up with is not a brief. It is a document that describes the problem without making any choices about how to solve it. That is not the strategist’s job done. That is the strategist’s job avoided.

A brief should force a choice. Who specifically are we talking to? What one thing do we want them to think, feel, or do differently after seeing this campaign? What do we know about them that makes us confident this approach will work? The answers to those three questions, written clearly and honestly, are the core of any brief worth acting on.

There is also the question of what the brief is not. It is not a creative execution. Strategists who write briefs that are too prescriptive, specifying the tone, the format, the visual language, tend to get work back that looks exactly like what they imagined, which is usually not the best the creative team could have produced if given more room to think. The brief should define the problem and the destination. The route is the creative team’s job.

Where Does Strategy Sit in the Agency Structure?

This varies significantly by agency type and size, but there are some consistent patterns. In most full-service agencies, strategy sits alongside creative and account management as one of the three core disciplines. The strategist is typically the bridge between the client’s business problem and the creative team’s output.

In smaller agencies, the strategic function is often absorbed by the account director or the creative director, which creates predictable problems. Account directors tend to prioritise client relationship management over strategic rigour. Creative directors tend to prioritise the work over the business problem. Neither is wrong, but neither is a substitute for someone whose sole job is to make sure the right problem is being solved.

In larger agencies, strategy tends to be more specialised. You might have brand strategists, digital strategists, social strategists, and comms planners all working on the same account. The challenge there is integration. When strategy is fragmented across specialisms, the risk is that each channel or platform gets its own strategic logic, and the overall campaign loses coherence.

When I was growing an agency team from around 20 people to over 100, one of the structural decisions I spent the most time on was how to organise the strategy function. The temptation is to hire specialists early, because clients want to see expertise. The reality is that generalist strategists who can think across channels and disciplines are considerably more valuable in the early stages of growth, because they force integration rather than allowing silos to form.

Getting that structure right has a direct impact on whether the agency can scale without losing strategic coherence. BCG’s research on scaling agile teams makes a similar point about the importance of cross-functional integration over specialist silos, and the principle applies as much to agency structures as it does to product organisations.

How Does a Strategist Influence Creative Without Overstepping?

This is one of the more delicate parts of the role, and it is something that takes time to calibrate. The strategist’s job is to give the creative team the best possible foundation to work from. It is not to tell them what to make.

In practice, the line gets blurry. Strategists have opinions about creative work, and they should. They are in the room when work is presented back, and they are often asked for a view. The question is how to give that view in a way that is useful rather than directive.

The most effective approach I have seen is to always bring the conversation back to the brief. Does this work answer the brief? Does it reflect the insight? Will it connect with the audience we identified? Those questions are legitimate strategic territory. Questions about whether the headline is funny enough, or whether the visual treatment feels right, are not. That is creative judgment, and the strategist who wades too far into that territory tends to erode trust with the creative team over time.

There is also the question of how to handle creative work that is strategically correct but not very good. This happens more often than anyone in an agency likes to admit. The brief was clear, the insight was strong, and the creative team produced something that technically answers all the right questions but does not feel like it will land. A good strategist can name that problem without making it personal, and can usually identify whether the issue is in the brief (which is their problem to fix) or in the execution (which is a conversation to have with the creative director).

What Does Strategy Look Like in a Performance Marketing Context?

This is where the role gets more complicated, and where I have seen the most confusion about what strategy actually means.

Performance marketing has its own version of strategy, which tends to be more focused on audience segmentation, bid logic, creative testing frameworks, and funnel optimisation. These are legitimate strategic activities. But they are not the same as brand strategy or communications strategy, and agencies that conflate them tend to produce work that is efficient at capturing existing demand but poor at creating new demand.

Earlier in my career, I overvalued the lower funnel. I thought that if you could optimise the conversion path and capture intent efficiently, you had done the strategic work. I was wrong. What I eventually understood is that a lot of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The person who was already looking for your product was going to find it. What you actually need, if you want to grow, is to reach people who were not already looking. That requires a different kind of strategy, one that is more concerned with creating demand than capturing it.

The strategist in a performance context needs to hold both of these things at once. Optimise the conversion path, yes. But also think carefully about who is at the top of the funnel, where they are coming from, and what they need to believe before they are ready to convert. The reason go-to-market feels harder than it used to is partly because the easy demand has been captured, and the remaining growth requires reaching genuinely new audiences with genuinely new messages.

There is also a measurement dimension that strategists need to understand. Performance channels are very good at measuring what happens close to conversion. They are much less good at measuring what drives someone into the funnel in the first place. A strategist who only looks at last-click attribution is making decisions based on a partial picture, and that tends to produce an over-investment in the bottom of the funnel at the expense of the top. Vidyard’s pipeline research points to exactly this kind of untapped potential that gets missed when teams focus exclusively on late-stage metrics.

How Do You Develop as a Strategist Over Time?

The honest answer is that it takes longer than most people expect, and the development is not linear. There are strategists with ten years of experience who are less useful than strategists with three years, because the ten-year person has stopped being curious and the three-year person has not.

The things that tend to accelerate development are exposure to different categories, honest feedback on briefs and strategic recommendations, and a genuine interest in how businesses work beyond the marketing function. Strategists who stay in one category for too long tend to develop very deep pattern recognition in that category and very shallow thinking outside it. Breadth of experience, across industries, client types, and channel contexts, builds the kind of lateral thinking that makes strategy interesting.

Judging the Effie Awards gave me a different kind of development that I did not expect. Reading through hundreds of case studies, and having to make a call about which campaigns actually drove business results versus which ones just looked good, sharpened my thinking about what effectiveness actually means. It is very different from what most agencies celebrate internally. The work that wins industry awards is not always the work that moved the business. The work that moved the business is not always the work anyone would put in an award entry. A good strategist knows the difference and is honest about which one they are being asked to produce.

Reading widely outside advertising is also underrated. The best strategic thinkers I know read economics, psychology, history, and category-specific trade press alongside the usual marketing literature. Examples of growth thinking from outside traditional advertising often contain more genuinely useful strategic insight than another article about brand purpose.

Strategy in advertising does not exist in isolation. It connects upward to business strategy and downward to execution. The strategists who understand that connection, and who can move fluently between the two, are the ones who end up with the most influence and the most interesting careers. If you are thinking about how advertising strategy connects to the broader commercial challenge of taking a product or brand to market, the work covered in the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub gives that wider context.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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