Martin Weigel's new book on lessons from the front line

Welcome back to On Strategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O'Carol in Chicago. And I'm actually recording the intro to this episode Before I go to Ken and the episode's gonna drop the week after Ken. So hopefully I survived it and Hopefully a lot of great work got awarded and hopefully we actually got great turnout for our Fee roundtables Which I'm gonna be doing at Ken. This is my first visit to Ken by the way. So I'm kind of like unsure how it's all gonna work out. So hopefully it went well A couple of things I want to mention and number one in terms of upcoming episodes We've got our next on the spot episode. We just recorded it earlier this week Prior to Ken with that Chris gallery of mother in London and Nick Hurst of Adam and Eve London We yeah in that episode we talk about Hines and the New York Times on the spot for those of you who don't know is where planners talk about brands They've never worked on and so it's a fun more casual approach and Loved to the conversation with Chris and so that's coming up soon We're also doing our next episode in the planning for effectiveness outcomes as series effective outcomes series That we're partnering with the affis on this will be the next one will be episode number four And so that's gonna be upcoming We also had a great conversation recently with NPR's chief marketing officer and mischief's EVP of strategy ad gun About the new NPR campaign and I love that work and well worth the the listen to that episode We've also got an episode coming up on patty powers who for years have done brilliant work And I'm really excited to talk with the folks in Dublin about the patty powers works. That's gonna be upcoming also Um in terms of live shows we just got back from Carmichael Lynch in Minneapolis. We We are planning a it's gonna be in an invitation only roundtable though in Chicago at the BBDO In July that's coming that's coming up, but then the next live show with a broad audience Is going to be in September at GSD and M so we're gonna be in Austin At GSD and M September 10th. So if you are around there'll be more information coming up about that shortly Um since I know that Martin Vigal episodes on my show are always very popular I did want to mention something that I think will be of interest to um to strategists around the world Um, of course Martin's book is one of them, but the one that I wanted to mention today is the fact that we are planning to Undertake what we would say is the world's largest study of strategists in our industry Like many of you and I hear from a lot of people about this We're sort of burned out about hearing about commentary on how strategists feel From studies that maybe had a very very small sample and it's dangerous to take direction from those sorts of things So we're gonna try to create a robust global snapshot actually not gonna be a snapshot it's gonna be a deeper Um in inside look into what's happening in the minds of strategists around the world We want to make it an annual study and then we will share the results of that with everybody Once we get it gathered We're in the early stages of figuring into this out but this show is the voice of strategist worldwide And so I think we'll be one to do we've been trying to take the show in the live show Global and we've been doing making brilliant progress in that area But I also want to capture the voices of strategists the opinions of strategists And how we can help each other in meaningful ways Um as as a practice area in the in the industry and strategist in the broader term not just strategist and comms But strategists in the broader term so look for more information to come out about that soon We're trying to figure out exactly how we're gonna deploy it Um, it's gonna be hard work to get everybody to participate because you know sampling and finding people is always tough But we're gonna make it happen and we're gonna make it an annual event and we'll maybe maybe next year Can we'll roll out the results are at some heavy event we'll roll out the results and make it um And make it meaningful um speaking of the broader definition of strategy I'm really thrilled to have Martin Vigel with me today as my guest Martin has been on the show a number of times His episodes are always among the top episodes on the show If you don't know Martin He is um very well known as the chief strategy officer widening Kennedy Amsterdam he's been the chief strategy officer at amvbbdo He's worked at many major agencies. He's an extraordinary intellect and voice in this industry And the last couple of years you'll know him from His presentation of can with others like rob Campbell and paul of bloodworth uh for a couple of um i'm not sure if uh If Martin did a couple of those presentations, but he was there at the last one And um you know those things are like hotcakes man those those decks and those those Presentations Everybody wants to get their get their hands on them. So um he has written a book It is called strategy is a verb and if you're on youtube watching the show you can see i'm holding up the book here It's strategy is a verb notes from the front line And Martin vigal now vigal is spelled to w e i g e l w e i g e l pronounced vigal Um and you can get the book on amazon uh anywhere globally um also What's really interesting about this book Martin is typically a long form writer and if you've read his stuff you know that to be the case But this book is not long for me He has taken a different approach where most of these epists or most of these chapters are just three to four pages long So there is a and the book itself is roughly two two hundred pages Um, so it is a survey A different filter for the way that he thinks and it's really interesting Uh when you get into the book it's extraordinary so um if you do however want to read some of his long form work You can check out martinvigal.org And martinvigal with the w At dot org And when you get to his site does not only is there information about the book but also in the archive tab on the right hand side of that website You can you can click that that archive type at tab and see all of his Uh, well there's a lot of it. I don't know if it's everything he's written But there's an archive of his long form writing and i've read a ton of that stuff and i hope that you guys Will too So um, I think i've covered everything i needed to touch on martin um and now has his own consulting firm I hope i'm pronouncing this right and mdb It's spelled emdub emdub He um you can connect with martin on linkedin and uh i guess you there's probably a way to connect with them on the other the other side martin vigal.org. So this is a conversation we recorded last week. You may hear it sure uh birds chirping in the background because And martin was in this idyllic location Um, and i was in chicago so the birds the bird sounds were not coming from my microphone. They were coming from his And um it sort of has a little bit of context. I hope my editor doesn't actually take the bird sounds out which may have happened You never know But here's our good friend and an inspiration to us strategists This is my conversation with martin vigal Enjoy So martin vigal is here martin vigals episode and we've done a couple of different conversations martin over the last couple of years Uh your uh your episode where you and i were just Ranting and raving like we're gonna do today is the is the most popular episode on this show And we have done over 300 episodes you believe that shit? I just do that, huh? Yeah. Yeah. I checked that out this morning It is the most popular show So needless to say i'm excited to do this again Welcome back my friend good to see you. It's good to see you It's good to see you look better than me, but then again you've always looked better than me But you know you have that tan look so people people who are watching us on youtube can get a sense of what I All right, we are here to talk about your new book and um i'm excited about it I can imagine it was a torturous process but that's my lens on things because I struggle with I struggle with writing emails or memos Next But when you have to write a substantive book and reflect on it and have it be Something that you can be proud of like I can imagine It can be something that keeps you up night after night. I mean how how was it to write it? I think it took me To me about a year to get to a raw manuscript Unbelievable about so does 60,000 worse and and some of it is based on previous writings and quite a lot of it is entirely new New material give us give us um give us two minutes on What um what you want people to To note and know about this book and why it should be read the book is an argument For strategies a way of thinking strategy is a way of orientating your self in the world and it's about understanding that you have agency In the world should you choose to exercise it and as strategist we should all be in the Business of exercise in agency. I think it's a call to arms. I know that sounds grandiose and like I'm delivering some sermon on the mouse which I'm not. I think the strategy has got small, not just in Adland or marketing. It seems to be in thin supply in all walks of life. It's got small. This is about making I want people to understand the strategies by its nature and ambitious undertaking. By its nature strategy is ambitious because it's about a better tomorrow. It's a hopeful discipline because it says we can make tomorrow better, more desirable, more valuable, more sustainable. We just have to want to do the work and think and think like strategists, not administrators or bureaucrats or fluffers. We're people of action. We're men and women of action. Be ambitious. Build the better tomorrow. Do the fucking hard, hard work and claim your agency and maybe just book the PowerPoint away. Who said a little less talk and a bit more action? The thing that strikes me and about the book is the further you get into it, the deeper you get involved in it. That's a compliment. I think that, as I read through it, I was reminded about the debate that so many of us have in planning, which is the right way to do things. There's one argument that says that there is no right way to do things. Number two, there's a sort of a call within this book, I think, or implication, that there's a better way to do it than how it's being done today. If we're not careful, the work, and these are my words, if we're not careful, the work and the quality of the work will continue to decline because I think it has been in decline for many years. There's a lot of empirical data that supports that. Is this partly you sort of raising a concern about how we're doing things now? In that process, there's a professional and personal soul searching that made its way onto the pages. Part of that to begin to answer your question was a dissatisfaction with the conversation around strategies. Speaking candidly, I think clients have been underserved by strategists, and thus consumers are eventually being underserved. Given everybody as a broadcaster, the quality of advice around the practice of strategy is largely visible. We've forgotten what strategy is. I think that it's become such an overly-used term, just like others will talk about that, such as insight. It's lost its meaning. In conversations that I have, brands with clients, with people who are strategists, the toughest question to ask a strategist is, what was your strategy? It becomes a conversation rather than anything succinct, which is dangerous because I think strategy is, strategy does have a definition. It's not complicated, but it has lost its power. I think that's because it's losing its value in many ways. I think you make good points. Articulating what your strategy was shouldn't require five minutes of rambling. It's a sentence. It is that you can provide color and texture and rational and elaborate on the process that got you there. But the strategy itself, I'd argue, if you can't articulate that in a sentence, one you don't have a strategy, and two you probably don't know your job is, because it's alarming how at least in advertising agencies, so few strategists are even capable of articulating what a strategist is. I wanted to start off on, and we'll just pop around. I want to start off with chapter 56, which is struggle. This one struck me because there's a couple of different dimensions to it. You mentioned in this chapter, the circumstances in which you wrote the book. In doing that, it's reflected on this idea of fast versus slow way of working, not in a Daniel canemons way. But more in the fact that maybe within the culture of planning today, everything is expected to be faster. Everything is expected to be delivered. God knows how we got into that, but we're in it. But that is not the place where great strategy emerges, versus for long-term, durable strategy. Tell us what you mean in this chapter when we talk about without struggle, our work is predictable. The struggle is necessary because you, I think it's only by having gone through the bad versions or the suboptimal versions of a sentence or a chapter or a thesis. Only by going through the suboptimal versions, can you really understand why the right better version is right and better? You need to go through that grind. It's not just enough to get to the right one because the rightness of it is only illuminated when you've consciously gone through all the other ways you could have done it and understood then being clear why you had rejected them. So, wrongness for me illustrates and illuminates the rightness. And I don't think that's an indulgence. It's necessary because at some point, inevitably your strategy will be queried, critiqued, challenged, and all of that is right and good. But if you haven't gone through the hard yards of the struggle, you're going to be much less well-equipped to represent that strategy, be an advocate of the strategy, articulate clearly why that version of the strategy is more fit for purpose than the period of other versions and alternate routes you could have. If there's an expectation that I have to deliver a strategy in 24 hours or 48 hours versus if I have two weeks, I can't think of an example of where in the early stages of strategy development, there's this tendency to have this outpouring of potential directions that you could go with. And they all seem extraordinarily exciting at the time and you capture them on paper or however you capture them with a group of people. I can't remember time in my career where then having time to continue the process of interrogating assumptions and exploring audiences, etc. I can't think of a time when I ever went back to that day one and said, "Oh, that day one was the right one." So the danger is that we are having the clock stop at 48 hours and they were going to market with that as a strategy and not realizing that if we did invest our time doing other things or having more time to do that thing, that we ultimately would look back on those early ideas and go, they were never the right one to begin with. So we've made a mistake by going to market too fast with it. It's not to say that there isn't great strategies that are born in 24 hours that aren't great. There are outliers. Absolutely. But there's no doubt that time to reflect, time to shape, time to debate, time to explore, makes for better strategy. When did nothing, there's nothing worse when you're representing a strategy than somebody asking, "Have you thought about doing it slightly differently or have you thought about and having to answer no?" You know, it's the first idea we came up with and we were against the clock. So here it is. It doesn't make for a great, great conversation. If you're able to say, "We did," and here's why it's flawed or not fit for purpose or doesn't map well to the needs of the audience or the org. Yeah, we did. But this one, and here's why there's some optimal. And this is what this one does to the other's and don't it? It's a much more persuasive conversation to find yourself in. You have the struggle as I write. The struggle is the craft. And I'm not asking for the strategic process. We treated like an indulgence and not be cognizant of commercial pressures and timelines and all the rest. But if you're, I begin to wonder whether if you're banging out scratches and find them easy, I wonder how good they are. I mean, there are outliers. And I've been privileged to be in a couple of occasions where we knocked out a strategy in the day and won the pitch in a week. But they're outliers. They're ready to, they're ready to. I suppose it's important to delineate between the various types of strategy. I mean, if we're talking at a level of trying to build a platform for a brand, that is not something that is typically pushed out in 24 hours or 4 hours. But sometimes it is from a new business perspective. But that's, and that's the level we're talking about executing off of an existing strategy we can do fast, right? We should be able to do that question. Should they have to do it fast? Should be able to do it quick. But it's, but it's getting to that higher level and then feeling that we're under pressure to deliver against that. It's just recognizing that why are we, in my mind at least, why are we constantly going faster? Why are we feeling that pressure to deliver so quick? And a lot of people come on this show and answer by saying that's a client side issue. Or it's the speed of culture. Why are we trying to keep up with culture? I don't know why we're fucking trying to keep up with the speed of culture. We're supposed to be defining ourselves on our place in it, not keeping up with it and changing constantly. So I don't buy that. I think that we, as an industry, as a client side too, we've gotten so used to fast that we're accepting that's the norm. But I don't agree with that. I wonder whether now having escaped the cloisters of Adland, whether that's a particularly Adland client relationship affliction. There's another chapter I want to touch on is chapter 11, which is imagine. You talk about it in terms of the ability to see things that do not yet exist, that could exist and work out how they might exist is central to strategy. It's imagining that. And it's the idea of working backwards from an imagined future. Working forwards from what you have, what you know, what you know to be feasible or what you least what you believe to be feasible. I'd argue, dooms you to incrementalism and solving small problems. And I'm not there are times when small problems are important problems. But that's not strategy. Strategy is we want tomorrow to look different from today. If A is the present and B is the future, I don't think you start with A. That's the argument that Roger Martin makes. Because if you start with where you are, there are going to be a whole host of reasons why you can't get to B. We don't have that skills. We don't have the right investment. We don't have the right people. Our brand has the wrong reputation. Nobody knows. There are so many reasons why you can't get to B. But if you start with B, go, do you want to live in the B world? Yeah. Fuck yeah, it sounds exciting. It's sustainable. It creates value for businesses and human beings. Is it differentiating, exciting, necessary? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. So what, as Roger Martin argues, what would have to be true today to make that happen? Well, we don't need to open a new factory in China. And the list goes, and if you start with A, you'll be constrained by what you don't know, don't have, haven't explored. Do you? And that's the imagination, right? It's understanding where that imagined, where that end game is. And that is a journey we have to go on. Yes. So that's why I would argue that strategy is, it is time travel. You travel to the more desirable future and work out how to bring that back into the press. I tell the story in the book of the Apollo program, R&JFK, and now it's the we'll put a man on the moon. The technology to accomplish that did not exist. Didn't exist. They didn't know how to do it. They didn't know how to get a human being safely to the moon, land on the moon, have a bit of a wander on the moon, come back to the moon and communicate with Earth. All of that have meals, be able to breathe and not die. None of that existed. That's why it took 40,000 engineers and scientists to work out, oh, shit, okay, well, what will we need? What will need a completely different navigation system and way of communicating with command and blah, blah, blah, the list goes on. And they had to invent those technologies. If they worked, if they started with where they were, they wouldn't have landed on the moon because we're going where we don't have to say no to. And the problem that I had, the other challenge that I have with it, I'm interested in your thoughts on this too, is as an industry, we tend to be sitting around on the where we are and just trying to reframe where we are because we're thinking about it solely between in the context of comms. And this is where people like you and people like Tom Morton and Johnny Bauer and others in the industry are trying to encourage us to get to, which is to get beyond comms, get beyond just thinking about how we're representing what we are and sort of thinking about what we want to be in, in, in, in, in, in, how are we going to connect these dots? How are we going to imagine that future? How are we going to get organizational volume because the strategic implications are not just in the area of comms, their organizational strategy, their personal strategy, their product strategy, distribution strategy, there's physical infrastructure, et cetera. That's the super exciting space that everybody, even in our industry of comms, wants to be a part of, but we, it seems out of reach. You say much of our strategic craft has become a zero consumer exposure undertaken, undertaking. I was reflecting before we started talking, focused why it, why it matters, making, actually making contact with customers, or let's call them people, actual contacts. I'm not reading them about, not reading them about, about them in research reports, not simply, you know, applying, say, synthetic research to your, your strategy because you go, there were all these new tools that make the research process more efficient, and what's going to say better, but this is going to make it more, more efficient. Why does it matter so much to have that contact? Because it's a shag, right, back to your time conversation, early, why is that matter? Because we've got reams of research and real time data that gives us a granularity of understanding, or these knowledge about people's habits, preferences. Actually, why the fuck do we need to go and meet them? Yeah. It's really, really hard to feel that you have a responsibility towards consumers. If you have met them, these people deserve great products. These people deserve to be able to find our products easily and try experiencing that they deserve, if we're going to insist on interrupting their time to be served with stuff that is intelligent and/or entertaining or both. And I say responsibility because that's the purpose of marketing is to serve the customer. All else flows from that revenue profit stock price, but none of that happened. The point of marketing is to serve the needs, wants, aspirations of people. And I think that's really hard to do if you aren't driven by a sense of responsibility towards the sky. If they're just the data point, I think it was Bob Hoffman, and say something on the lines of you, extrapolating from your own experience is fucking narcissism. I'm really interested in getting your point of view on how we use AI, should use AI, can use AI. Because this is one of the positive sides of AI. And I'm hearing this increasingly recently from folks who are now beginning to have a sense of how, of what form AI is going to come in that we might, that we might, in actuality, have to use it versus what we thought of might have been. I think the industry, many in the industry are starting to realize that AI can free them up to do the things they really want to be doing or really should be doing. So it's not replacing you. It's actually becoming a liberating force in many ways. I mean, that reflects my own personal experience. Right, too. I can stay away from the drudgery now, and focus on the higher level of work. I now have a lot, I have built myself for planning departments. And you're just so in case people aren't picking up on this, you're talking about you've you built yourself as sort of an agentic planning department using a large [BLANK_AUDIO] language model? Yeah, now I've I spent the last couple of months just building a whole end-to-end workflow around my strategic practice just to accelerate the craft. There's an army of one I can I can deliver what a team of planners can do but I can probably do it faster than they ever faster than they ever did it. Leaving me to do at least for now the bits I enjoy the bits I'm good at the bits that benefit from human from human from human from human judgment. Yeah. You know there's a great there's a great test and a great line that Les Bonnead had a couple of weeks ago he was on a webinar that I was watching and I've rolled this line out at a number of our live shows around the country and given Les credit as I'm doing right here but he said he said during this conversation that AI helps you lift the floor. It doesn't raise the ceiling. Now this is interesting where I'm putting it. Yeah isn't it? It's a great way of thinking about it. I'd probably push Les's thought further it can make good strategists even better. Yes. But he won't make shit strategist good so it might make shit creative and shit strategists deliver shit faster but it won't turn them into the line on messes of strategy and creativity. I want to come back to one of our favorite topics to discuss because we both feel pretty passionate about this. Now you're a mild mannered gentleman but I also know that you're a fiery son of a bitch when it comes to me. So this is one of those things and you talk about it in chapter 14 which is titled Understand. It's your disdain for the and mine for the term insight. I don't think either one of us is saying that insight is not a possibility. There are brilliant campaigns that are developed off of genuine insight but they're rare and we've kind of set a bar where that's our deliverable as a practice area within strategy and I think we're handicapping ourselves significantly. What is the point that you want to make about your disdain for the term insight in this chapter? I think it might have been that chapter where my editor wrote back and said do you need to say fuck quite that much? There was a time where marketers didn't use the word insight. Yeah. At all and you know what some of those juggernaut households brands that in people's everyday lives, you know like Coca Cola, McDonald's, FedEx, were built on decades without ever using that word. I went back on 30 years and I never said I don't know if I know it. I don't think I had an insight that's satisfied to standards and demands of the insight. So the head of a life definition of what it means. Yeah. Which is amazing for somebody of your caliber to say it's bizarre and I find that very common for people to come on this show. The best people that come on this show rarely use the term insight and when they're expressing the essence of their work, it's reflected off of what appears to be a genuine understanding of their audience. On the found they tell stories. It's not about and our insight was. When I've in the first agency I've worked in back in the 1800s, the brief said, "Who's our audience and what do we know about them?" The problem with the problem that drives me wild is the insight has become in many quarters and end in itself. That's not an insight. This is an insight. When the real question is, is it useful? You just need something useful. I think you've spoken to my former colleagues at Whidenon or Oldspice. What was the insight was a shocker data that the primary purchaser was a woman. Oh, you know, in the dough insight police, where's the tension, where's the intellectual edifice that you brought around that? No, but that was really useful. It was directly informing of the work. So crates go, "Oh, so we're not talking to men then. We're talking to the people who do the buying. Why we're influenced to do the buying completely changes. It's really, really useful. Thank you very, very much. I don't think there was any penetrating insight into the state of the state of contemporary masculinity." Yeah, and the other thing for me is, I think that the danger is that if we make that the deliverable of the strategist, the strategist, who may come up with some wonderful observations such as that data point, will assume in their own mind that that's not good enough for them to share, that they need to go further. And in trying to find an insight, they end up being off strategy because they move the goalposts in order for it to fit the insight. And we've talked about this before. That to me is not only dangerous. It's irresponsible. And if we're there to do effective work, it's highly irresponsible to do that just because you think you're deliverable as a so-called insight. Positioning the insight as the planner's primary output is very convenient for those who want to domesticate and declaw the strategist and keep him or her at arm's length from creative execution shows the insight and fuck off. Not have a point of view on how this branch shows up or its promise is, blah, blah, blah, blah, just come with an insight and leave us alone. And I think that insight as the strategist, called deliverable is toxic. And the other thing that I think we can both agree on is, I try to think of it, I mean many people have referred to this term, but it's better to be interesting than right. Version of that, which is so true. And I think I fell, during my career, I fell, I sort of fell into this trap. Is I wanted to create a strategy that was impeneturably right. I wanted it to be fully supportive. And many times, and I had convinced myself, it was absolute. Yeah. Yeah. And I would share it and socialize internally at the agency and it just fell fucking flat. And my idealistic Irishman, fire and blood came out, right? And I'm like, what the fuck? This is absolutely right. It's absolutely at the problem was it just wasn't interesting. It wouldn't be concretely compelling. And therefore it would not, it would lead to very practical communication. Therefore, I wasn't fully getting the fact that it needed to be more than just right. I think it was Stephen Bungay, author of Art of Action. I think I've cited it in the book, talked about it's not enough to get people to understand your strategy. I think he said, understanding, understanding gets compliance, but only belief gets commitment or words. Yeah. To that, to that because the enactment of the strategy by the total business will only happen if people can believe in it. It is Martin Vigel. And Vigel is spelt because when you want to need a proper spelling when you got a Amazon to buy the book, it's W E I G E L Martin Vigel. His book is strategy is a verb notes from the front line. And you've been on the front line, man. You've been at the best agencies in the world working on many of the best brands in the world. Where can people buy the book? And here it is, if all of them are. They're creating your book shops. Amazon, Kindle and Trends, Waterstones, Foyles, I think Barnes and Noble comes on stream soon. So we get our Amazon here in the US now. Yes, exactly. No, it's Amazon globally. Pretty much. Brilliant. Now so there are no excuses. Brilliant to see you Martin. Thank you. Lovely to see my friends. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. And we will see everyone on the next episode.