A sales colleague and I were chatting about a client RFP he was working on and got hung up on the objectives and strategies outlined in the document and how they seemed to be confused and mixed up. See, we work on the sell-side of digital media meaning our clients are agencies who act on behalf of their clients, the brands. Brands communicate business goals to the agency and then the agency is in charge of developing a marketing and media mix to meet those goals. The unfortunate thing about our industry is, at the lower positions and experience levels, there is a general lack of eduction, on both the buy and sell side, about business processes and topics. This become very troublesome when you have a junior planner on the buy-side, who controls 80%+ of the vendor decision making process, setting objectives that aren’t really objectives and developing strategy statements that aren’t strategies. I’ve seen this first hand from my own buy-side experiences. I’ve seen strategy statements like, “Our strategy is to increase conversions,” and objectives like, “We’re going to align with women’s content to reach household decision makers.”

So, you’re probably wondering by now, how should we look at and define objectives, strategies, and tactics (O.S.T.). This is the story and scenario I use to explain O.S.T. to my staff.

Say you’re standing on the shore of a lake and your friend is on the other side and you’d like to meet up with your friend. What is your strategy? First, lets define the objective. In this case it is simple, the objective is to get to the other side of the lake. Great. Now how are we going to do that? This is where strategy comes into play. There are several strategies we can employ to get to the other side of the lake - you can swim across, you can make a boat to get across, or walk along the bank to get to the other side. Those are your strategic options. Each one will get you from Point A, your side of the lake, to Point B, the other. Each one has its own unique advantages and drawbacks, but in the end each will satisfy your objective. Which strategy you choose has a lot to do with your unique capabilities and situational understanding, but again the key to a strategy is that is will satisfy your objective. Taking it one step further, once you settle on a strategy, say building a boat in this case, you’re still left with how to implement this strategy. This is where tactics come into play. Tactics are what make strategies come to life – they are the physical implementations of your strategy. In our case above, if you’re strategy is to build a boat, the tactical implementation could be to build a sail boat. There are many different types of boats you can construct, but each type of boat would satisfy the strategy of building a boat to meet the objective of getting to your friend on the other side of the lake. Simple enough.

In more business-centric terms. An objective is a business goal that the company would like to meet in the future – essentially, an objective is a future Point B. A strategy is a top-level way approach of getting where you are today (Point A) to your end goal (Point B). Tactics are just physical implementations and iterations of your strategy – what are you actually going to do, build, develop, or change to get from where you are today (Point A) to your end goal (Point B).