JWT Director of Strategy Agustin Soriano on the need to mix and match fundamentals of branding with a fresh pair of eyes.
Q: How did you get started in the creative industry and in specific strategy?
Agustin Soriano: I studied advertising. So yes, I’m one of these professionals with a classic start. But to be honest, with the perspective of the years I think it would be easier to have studied some other degree related to communication or humanities. A different background gives you the ability to think outside the box.
For example, people who studied audiovisual communications taught me how to think of campaigns as if they were movies or even melodies. By doing so, you immediately find the weak spots in your story, so you can build better, fluid and consistent strategies.
History or Art degrees, can give you the advantage of a fresh perspective about communication or human behavior, not to mention other degrees like Anthropology and/or Psychology.
After finishing my studies, I was lucky enough to get the first prize in the final project of the degree and start working in McCann Erickson Madrid. This experience and the driving force of the curiosity encouraged me to find new challenges. As a result, I moved to Chicago just a year after, in 2004. There was where I started to be interested in strategy.
In Chicago I found it interesting how agencies, wanting to reach Hispanics, were deeply examining cultural differences amongst Hispanics, because it was not enough to just translate campaigns into Spanish.
You had to almost find a completely new ways to transmit the message so that brands:
- Would resonate with buyers;
- Ensured that they understand the current life situation in the country;
- While still respecting the overall brand idea.
Every planner who has worked in the Hispanic market in the US will confirm this and I found it the most exciting part of the advertising process.
Then I came back to Spain and worked for different agencies. After that I started my own company (Rosebud) where I enjoyed and worked for almost 6 marvelous years.
This was 2008 and the crisis was starting in Spain. It was a great decision, although not only because it gave me the freedom of doing things on my way, but because it gave me the opportunity to dream, to be passionate, to fail a lot and learn faster from it.
They say that “a calm sea never made a skillful sailor”. And there is no better sea than running a business.
Despite of the fact that Rosebud is still running successfully (Kudos to my partners Majo and Santi, you guys rock!), I decided to move abroad to find, again, new challenges. And here I am, in JWT Amsterdam, fighting for making better work everyday and with my eager mode still intact.
Q: What are some of the risks and opportunities facing the creative industry?
Agustin Soriano: Let me start with the opportunities we have.
Technology allows us to discover, create and offer new and more interesting stories to people, even in real time.
It only takes a little while to realize what possibilities we have with apps like Periscope or Merkaat. It lets everyone be their own live broadcasting TV station, from wherever on the planet they are. Technology allows the creative industry to live outside the boundaries of media.
Want to have your own branded satellite orbiting the earth? Now you can. Use pizza emojis to order your pizza from your mobile phone? Why not? Create an android to make a PR campaign for a celebrity? Hell yeah!
That’s why we live in the most exciting moment to work in the business of ideas. Advertising is more alive than ever because now we have so many different ways to connect with consumers, create new stories and have them shared.
But (and here is where the risks start) brands and agencies, often confuse the technology with the idea itself. We’re sometimes so distracted by the possibilities, that we don’t pay attention to what the brand needs or what we are communicating.
That’s the big risk for me. Social Media, Mobile Apps, Big Data, Internet of things. All great tools, but they must not replace the idea or the strategy. These are the two main fundamentals we need to take care of.
Strategy is now needed more than ever to surf this wave of change. Because the more complex the environment becomes, the more human and simple a brand has to behave. To quote Agathe Guerrier from BBH:
“Strategy is clarity of brand purpose, the tool that gives brands the ability to accommodate change.”
As an industry, we’re doing the opposite. We’re constantly inventing new jargon, because we need to be associated with the latest. We need to show that we’re doing something more complex and important than selling.
Who the hell needs to “have a word” with their connected toothbrush? That’s my point.
Q: New technology has amplified old and created new forms of behaviour. How do you decide what to invest time and money in to build skillsets around?
Agustin Soriano:
As a strategist you have to know the new ways people use technology. If you always place the user in the center of your decisions, you need to know what they like and where they are.
This is the recipe to be relevant.
The objective is to talk more about what is important for people and less about what matters for brands.
For example, people love to spend time with Social Media. If you want to discover insights related to your brand, you might want to replace focus groups with tools that follow the social media rules so people can talk in a more familiar and friendly environment.
And this is precisely one of the projects I’m leading in the agency at this moment.
I mentioned Periscope before. This is what people use, so participate and figure out how they behave, why they like it and how they use it. It will give you good clues about their behaviour and how to use it for your brand.
We waste a lot of time on deciding what we want to say instead of thinking about what people want to do, hear and watch. This is the mindset we must have if we want to stay relevant.
Q: Should everybody working in the creative industry know how to code?
Agustin Soriano: Absolutely not. But let me reframe the question: should everybody working in the creative industry know what the possibilities behind coding are? Absolutely yes.
Understand and know what coding can do is key. But this question can actually be applied to everything in our industry. For example, should everybody know how to develop a brand strategy? Nope.
But everybody should understand strategy to be able to see the big picture. If you are a professional who work in the creative industry you should be interested in everything and learn as much as you can.
Q: What qualities do you look for in a successful Strategist?
Agustin Soriano: First of all, I think planners should be hired for their attitude, hunger and curiosity. This quality is the driving force for everything else because by definition, a strategist is a generalist, like an immense sea of knowledge with only 5 centimeters of depth.
Therefore, a strategist should know about almost everything related with pop culture: movies, books, comics, music, politics… and also be an expert in brand management, marketing, human communication, technology and Internet.
You need to be constantly eager to know new stuff to deal with this demanding profession.
There is an interesting article by Undercurent about the matrix of skills a strategist needs to develop. Reading this, you realize that it’s almost impossible to reach an expert level on every one of these skills.
But if you are an enthusiast, if you have the inner force, you will keep on searching and learning.
Secondly, I look for creative people. If we have to inspire creatives, everything starts with us.
We have to be creative in the interpretation of the data, we have to be creative in the conceptualization (the sentence that summarizes everything and ignites the heart of creatives), we have to be creative in the way we brief, in the way we design our presentations and defend our position.
I don’t mind if a strategist has 3 degrees and 2 masters, a strategist needs to be creative. No excuses here. Creativity is the most underestimated skill by both agencies and strategists themselves.
And last but not least, I look for honest, modest and nice people to work with. You can be the best strategist in the world, but if you are an asshole, everything else only acts as a supporting role to your magnificent absurdity.
Q: Are strategists made or born?
Agustin Soriano: made, of course. Like almost everything. But the only way to get all the knowledge a strategist needs is with consistency and patience. Read and study everyday to become a little bit better every day. This is the hunger mode I talked about before.
The difficult part about being a strategist is that what you need to know is not taught in schools or universities. So the major part of the knowledge you need will come from self-learning.
That’s why the work being done by professional schools like Hoala -sharing the knowledge and experience from the best strategists to professionals that want to boost their careers in strategy- is so important.
Q: If you were to test a candidate’s skills by giving them a small project, what would you ask them to do ?
Agustin Soriano: Well, depends on the level that I would need in that particular case.
But I always ask for something related to popular culture, like “what is the last time you went to the cinema or the last series you watched?”, “what is the last book you read about something not related with communication? or “what is the number one song in iTunes this month?”.
I always like to complement this question by asking for something that mixes branding and culture like:
“Identify and describe the communication problem of Abercrombie & Fitch and propose a brand strategy to solve it”.
As you can see I love to ask impossible questions and analyze the crazy answers.
Q: What should students and graduates, looking to up their chances of breaking into the industry, focus on, in terms of skills and knowledge topics?
Agustin Soriano: When you are a student, you have to get experience. This is the most important knowledge you can get and you will be hired in the future by that experience.
Also, try as many things as you can to be able to know where in advertising/communication you can perform better and happier. People finish their studies really scattered, without knowing what they want to do next. But you can’t know it if you don’t try first and explore the possibilities you have at your reach.
International experience also helps a lot. And don’t be selective at that stage, the most important thing is the experience you get, not where.
For example, starting in small agencies can be great, because you can have more responsibilities from the very beginning.
And the last piece of advice is related to personal projects. Don’t stop making things and projects, even if they are not related strictly to the world of advertising (in fact, it’s even better if they are not related to advertising).
Q: In his essay on how to build brands in the digital age, Martin Weigel writes: “There is as much to unlearn as there is to relearn”. What are you unlearning and relearning? Why?
Agustin Soriano: My words above were not a coincidence when I was referring to the risks in our industry. We follow shiny objects like a cat follows a laser red dot.
Fundamentals become more and more important in a world where everything else changes. But this thinking doesn’t feel innovative so it doesn’t sell books or conferences. This is what I think we have to unlearn and relearn.
It was also on purpose when I talked about how the university teaches advertising. Every university follows the doctrine of positioning by Ries and Trout, the books of Kotler or even sci-fi concepts like “Lovebrands”.
All of these things should be unlearned, because they are not valid anymore (if they were at some point) and relearned again.
I really think every strategist must make the effort of studying (unlearning) the reasons behind, for example:
- A positioning map not being the best tool for thinking about the new position of a brand in the market,
- A loyalty program being a waste of money;
- The brand tracking not being the best way to measure your brand;
- What is the relation between share of voice and share of market and its implications for your brand.
Strategy is a constant process of unlearning and relearning. Luckily, there are some texts and books out there from people like Martin, that don’t take for granted what we’ve been taught and help show the actual reality with facts and numbers.
Q: With the way that tech, design, comms and product development are merging, what would you advise your 20 year old self, if he asked you where to work?
Agustin Soriano: My 20 year old self would not listen to me. For sure. At that time I was playing basketball all the time.
I only had eyes and ears for the ball and the court. But then I listened to myself when I was 22 and everything changed.
So I would advise to my 22 year old self to follow his guts and passions, travel even more and do what makes him happy.
And then I would show him the R/GA conference at Cannes this year. He would know what to do.
Thank you Agustin
