26 signs that creative strategy is alive

This is a post Tom Roach wrote after our final judging for the 2023 APG Creative Strategy Awards. It's fascinating to see the diversity of the papers that were shortlisted.

14th July 2023

I spent two days this week with a group of amazing people, hearing 26 presentations from some incredibly talented strategists. Each presentation skilfully condensed a 2000-3000 word case study into just 5 very short minutes. These were the shortlisted entries into the 2023 APG Creative Strategy Awards, the top 20% of a record-breaking set of entries they received this year.

The APG Awards is about demonstrating the value of strategy and planning in the advertising industry. If the IPA Effectiveness Awards is about proving the value of advertising, the APG Creative Strategy Awards is their more creative, less data-obsessed sibling, whose role is to prove the value of strategy in the creative industries.

It was an honour to play a small part at the end of a rigorous process. It made us jurors think a lot about what a great strategy is and what makes a great strategist. About how great strategies, insights and ideas are born. About how they get sold, protected, kept alive, executed and measured. About how personal, passionate, and emotional the best strategies were.

Strategy is about ideas. A creative strategy has to be expressible in a simple line to really make an impact.

And it was really clear across the two days that great creative strategy is powered by an individual with passion and energy. Yes, of course we work in teams, but all of the best work we saw was advocated and championed passionately by someone who clearly loved it and pushed it through their agency and the client organisation. Good ideas are easy to dismiss and kill, and great ones are uncomfortable, different and are often surprisingly specific and unusual. They need passion and advocacy to survive.

A lot is written about advertising strategy. But it’s too often about the theory, frameworks, platforms and data. (I’m aware I’m as responsible for that as anyone else). But weirdly one of the things that’s written about less is the actual strategies themselves.

So I reckon the best way to make the point I want to make, which is just that strategy is still alive and well, is just to share, as simply as possible, the brilliant strategies we heard.

We heard about how:

A football game went deep, not broad, to help British South Asian representation.

A Taiwanese drink sponsored a pilgrimage to take it on a journey from sports to sweat brand.

A retailer transformed how menopause is perceived by normalising it not sensationalising it.

A small car brand got bigger by narrowing its focus to dog owners.

A charity showed that suicide doesn’t look suicidal.

A holiday camp transformed itself into an entertainment brand.

A mobile network became a customer champion against rising prices.

A healthcare brand broke the taboo that sex is just for the young.

A yoghurt brand heightened anticipation by saying nothing at all.

A counselling service used humour to get older people to take STIs seriously.

A biscuit brand drove salience by teaching people British Sign Language.

A software brand invented a new C-Suite role to reinvent the future of the workplace.

A cancer support charity stuck out by showing its nurses are angels with sharp elbows.

A dog treat brand drove new sales with good old-fashioned advertising. 

A city enlisted men to help tackle violence against women by showing it can start with words.

A life insurance brand reframed itself as a death insurance brand.

A sanitary brand helped reduce period poverty by making people angry.

A plant-based spread depositioned butter by making it seem weird.

A ‘f*** it’ moment made us all fancy a burger.

A sports event started the largest ever human rights movement for people with disabilities.

An army embraced strategic rigidity but tactical flexibility to drive recruitment.

A confectionery brand dropped its most distinctive asset for Pride.

A fast food brand discovered a big role at Christmas with its smallest product.

A tea brand climbed to no.1 with a proper long-term brand platform.

Another fast food brand redefined its brand world and rediscovered its voice.

A serious haemorrhoids remedy found its tone of voice in humorous Amazon reviews.

Everyone will be able to enjoy the full brilliance of these strategies when they’re published in the APG’s Strategy Awards book, at https://www.apg.org.uk/think-tank and on WARC.com once the winners are announced on 28th September.

Reading these will give everyone in the industry their own sense of what strategy is or should be.

For me, reading the papers, listening to the presentations, questioning the authors, and discussing them with the jury told me the following.

Strategy is:

more imagination than process, more personal than corporate, more progressive than conservative, more emotional than logical, more creative than we strategists ever usually admit.

View the full shortlist here: https://www.apg.org.uk/awards-2023-shortlist

Tom Roach

VP Brand Strategy at Jellyfish

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