What does a strategist do?
The strategist is the thinker before the making. They take a business problem (we are losing younger customers, nobody knows what we stand for, the launch has to land in six weeks) and turn it into a brief a creative team can act on: who we are talking to, what we need them to feel or do, what the brand truthfully has to say and why anyone should care. They read the data, the culture and the competition, and they find the insight that makes the idea inevitable rather than arbitrary.
The title covers several specialties. A brand strategist works on positioning and identity. A campaign strategist works on a specific piece of communication. A content or social strategist works on what to publish, where and how often. At a small agency one person does all of it, and the best strategists move between the levels without noticing the seam, because a campaign that ignores the brand's positioning and a positioning that cannot produce a campaign are both failures of the same job.
Why it matters
Why a strategist matters
Creative work without strategy is a guess, and expensive guesses are hard to defend in a boardroom. A strategist gives the idea a reason: this audience, this truth, this moment. That reason is what lets a creative director make a bold choice and a marketing director approve it. It also keeps the work honest to the brand; the strategist is the person in the room who remembers what the company actually is when the idea starts to drift toward whatever is fashionable this quarter.
Good strategy is also what makes work last. A campaign built on a real insight can run for years and spawn a dozen executions; one built on a trend dies with the trend.
In practice
How a strategist works in practice
- 01
Strategy begins with listening: stakeholder interviews, customer research, a read of the category, a long look at what the brand has already said and whether anyone believed it. From that the strategist writes the brief: a page, not a deck, with the problem, the audience, the insight, the single-minded proposition and what success looks like. They present it to the client and then to the creative team, and they stay in the room as the idea develops, checking it against the brief without strangling it.
- 02
On a film project the strategist's fingerprints are on the treatment and the script. On a brand project they are on the positioning, the architecture and the tone of voice. On a launch they are on the sequencing: what we say first, to whom and where. After the work ships, the strategist is usually the one reading the results and turning them into the next brief, which is how an agency learns rather than simply repeating itself.
At RIOT
Strategists at RIOT
Strategy here is not a separate department that hands a brief over the wall; it sits beside the creative director from the first conversation. The 2022 rebrand film and new identity trailer for the Washington Commanders had to tell a city what a new name meant before anyone had seen it play, which is a strategic problem before it is a film problem. "For the Pursuit", the brand spot for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, needed one idea large enough to stand for every business in the country. And our more than a decade with Coach has only lasted because the thinking behind each campaign and sizzle reel has stayed consistent while the executions change.
Watch out
What people get wrong about strategists
Mistaking a deck for a strategy. A hundred slides of research is an input; the strategy is the one sentence at the end that tells the creative team what to do. The second mistake is hiring a strategist and then skipping the research because the deadline is tight, which produces a confident brief built on nothing. The third is treating strategy and creative as a relay, where one finishes before the other starts. The best ideas come from the two working at the same table.
