The document discusses strategies for creative agencies to pursue long-term growth. It suggests agencies integrate three core lines of business: services, product/service innovation, and digital infrastructure development. Agencies are currently responding to challenges by adding new services and expanding existing offerings, but are slower to tackle future-facing growth. The role of strategy is to spur growth by focusing on innovation, connection, industry leadership, and inspiring creativity. Specifically, strategy can innovate new experiences/models, connect brands/ideas, lead industry conversations, and use design thinking to enrich creative work.

1. STRATEGY PLAYBOOK
Designing Responsive Strategy for Creative Agencies
1

2. THE CHALLENGE.
Create a systemic, proactive and continuous growth that builds on
the agency’s existing strengths without diluting its unique culture.
2

3. AGENCIES RESPOND TO THIS CHALLENGE BY:
New
Offerings
Adding new services
(Labs, Studios, Interactive Production,
Digital product development, Social Media, ?
Digital strategy, Digital media planning))
Existing
Offerings
Making legacy business Expanding into new
more valuable categories and industry
(Integrated campaigns, Digital products,
Digital systems) verticals
Existing Clients New Clients
3

4. THEY ARE SLOWER TO TACKLE A LONG-TERM, FUTURE-
FACING GROWTH OPPORTUNITY:
New
Offerings
Adding new services Can agencies become
(Labs, Studios, Interactive Production, value brokers in the
Digital product development, Social Media,
Digital strategy, Digital media planning)) digital world?
Existing
Offerings
Making legacy business Expanding into new
more valuable categories and industry
(Integrated campaigns, Digital products,
Digital systems) verticals
Existing Clients New Clients
4

5. THE ROLE OF STRATEGY IN THE LONG-TERM,
FUTURE-FACING GROWTH
5

6. BY ITS VERY NATURE, STRATEGY IS WELL POSITIONED TO HELP
CONSUMER
• It clarifies the problem
• Formulates the hypothesis about the
solution and selects a method to test it
• Sets clear and constant objectives
• Defines resources needed to meet them
BUSINESS MARKET • Combines convergent and divergent
thinking, direction and inspiration
• Human-centered, sustainable, holistic
• Designs the plan for execution
BRAND • Requires internal and external collaboration
• Defines how success will be measured
6

7. BUT THE WAY AGENCIES ARE CURRENTLY USING
STRATEGY IS LIMITED:
• Surveys, focus groups and secondary-research audience insights
• Brand Models
• Trend mapping
• Competitive overviews
• Summary of best practices
• Comms planning and Engagement Planning
• Data and Analytics
• As a set-up for creative concepts
7

8. THIS IS HOW THEY CAN BE USING IT:
• Create a hub for primary, design thinking-driven consumer insights, brand
audits, and business analysis. Develop problem-solving briefs and
establish a digital-first strategic process. Don’t just set the stage for the
creative, but inspire it to become even better.
8

9. THIS IS HOW THEY CAN BE USING IT:
• Create a hub for primary, design thinking-driven consumer insights, brand
audits, and business analysis. Develop problem-solving briefs and
establish a digital-first strategic process. Don’t just set the stage for the
creative, but inspire it to become even better.
• Explore new revenue models and come up with new commerce
opportunities for brands. Detect digital growth opportunities on an agency
level.
9

10. THIS IS HOW THEY CAN BE USING IT:
• Create a hub for primary, design thinking-driven consumer insights, brand
audits, and business analysis. Develop problem-solving briefs and
establish a digital-first strategic process. Don’t just set the stage for the
creative, but inspire it to become even better.
• Explore new revenue models and come up with new commerce
opportunities for brands. Detect digital growth opportunities on an agency
level.
• Nurture relationship with innovators who are disrupting business. Connect
the agency with the wider digital ecosystem.
10

11. THIS IS HOW THEY CAN BE USING IT:
• Create a hub for primary, design thinking-driven consumer insights, brand
audits, and business analysis. Develop problem-solving briefs and
establish a digital-first strategic process. Don’t just set the stage for the
creative, but inspire it to become even better.
• Explore new revenue models and come up with new commerce
opportunities for brands. Detect digital growth opportunities on an agency
level.
• Nurture relationship with innovators who are disrupting business. Connect
the agency with the wider digital ecosystem.
• Create thought leadership content (articles, POVs, reports, presentations)
to be used in agency marketing and sold to clients.
11

12. THIS IS HOW THEY CAN BE USING IT:
• Create a hub for primary, design thinking-driven consumer insights, brand
audits, and business analysis. Develop problem-solving briefs and
establish a digital-first strategic process. Don’t just set the stage for the
creative, but inspire it to become even better.
• Explore new revenue models and come up with new commerce
opportunities for brands. Detect digital growth opportunities on an agency
level.
• Nurture relationship with innovators who are disrupting business. Connect
the agency with the wider digital ecosystem.
• Create thought leadership content (articles, POVs, reports, presentations)
to be used in agency marketing and sold to clients.
• Become a new revenue stream for the agency as a stand-alone service
that is pitched to clients separately from creative development. Expand
agency offerings to include brand books, social media playbooks, brand
strategy, strategic platform development, and content strategy.
12

13. MORE SPECIFICALLY, STRATEGY CAN SPUR GROWTH BY
FOCUSING ON THE FOLLOWING TASKS:
INNOVATE CONNECT LEAD INSPIRE
13

14. Innovation of consumer experience and commerce business models
14

15. Innovate
Design and
develop
innovative Scout digital markets
experiences to come up with new
and commerce business & revenue
business ideas.
models.
At best, you’d create
money that didn’t exist
before you came up
with the idea (AirBnB
and Uber have also
done it.)
15

16. First step is to ask what business you
are in.
Stop defining yourself as an agency. You are
not only about creative ideas, campaigns,
media plans, design or production.
You are about business solutions, great
experiences, sustainable systems, content and
distribution. You are an advisor, broker and
curator.
When you redefine yourself like this, the range
of solutions you can come up with expands.
The range of problems you can solve and
clients you can serve expands, too.
16

17. Find new ways to solve problems:
• How might we create positive acquisition
utility by innovating with a flexible check-in
process?
• How might we make the existing brand
offerings more valuable through creating
context for their consumption, coming up
with meaningful extensions or adding utility?
• How might we turn utility into ads? How might
we introduce fun, small solutions into our
media plans?
• How might we utilize sharing economy to
deliver value to our brands?
• How might we translate our brands’ value
chain into customer experience flow?
17

18. DIGITAL COMMERCE MARKETS
Retail is the biggest digital commerce market, but it’s not the only one.
There is a number of possible digital revenue streams.
18

19. Connect: Create a marketplace for ideas, capital and collaboration
19

20. Connect
Connect
different dots
to create Use digital
something infrastructure to bundle
new. your clients’ offerings
with innovative,
disruptive solutions.
By doing so, create a
new revenue source
for brands.
20

21. Connect
Create
meaningful
collaborations Know what behavior
between you need to affect to
brands. achieve desired
business results for
your clients. This will
lead you to the right
complimentary
partners.
21

22. Connect
Help those
who disrupt
business. Connect brands with
innovators:
Mix community and
commerce to increase
products’ reach.
Use collaborative
consumption to
increase brand affinity.
Employ redistribution
markets to extend the
product lifecycle.
22

23. Connect
Turn into a
value broker.
There is currently a big
demand for platforms
that allow consumers
to invest in the
products, people and
companies they know
and love.
These platforms are
multi-sided: they serve
entrepreneurs,
advisors and investors.
The main benefit in this
ecosystem is that
whoever builds a
platform, owns it.
23

24. Connect
Mix marketing
and utility.
Ads don’t have to
come in the form of
banners. They can
also be digital
products.
Integrate your love for
digital products with
your extensive
distribution and
marketing
infrastructure.
24

25. Lead the industry conversation through insights, tools and direction
25

26. Lead
Expose the
freshest
people, Strategy’s leadership
solutions and task is to influence,
ideas of our shape and direct
time. industry conversations.
In order to become a
think-thank, strategy
needs to keep close to
those who are
disrupting business.
It also needs to be able
to communicate its
insights in simple and
clear way, to multiple
audiences.
26

27. CRAFT THINK FIND
Use insights into the Curate articles,
Put selected thinkers,
latest trends in interviews, expert
doers and writers on
technology & behavior opinions and data that
the map and explore
to build products and talk about new
their ideas on the future
tools that respond to mechanisms of
of commerce, brands,
clients’ and creating value. Become
technology and
customers’ a go-to resource for
business.
challenges. digital markets.
27

28. Use inspiration tools to make the creative better
28

29. Inspire
Use the
principles of
design thinking The aim of great
to enrich the strategy is to liberate
creative great creativity (and not
process. to make planners
famous).
The fastest route to
inspiration is a human-
centric, problem-
solving approach that
adds value to people’s
lives.
It combines six
techniques:
- Customer Insights
- Ideation
- Prototyping
- Storytelling
- Scenarios
29

30. 30

31. Consumer Insights
Why.
Start strategy with humans. It increases the
likelihood of developing a breakthrough idea and
finding a receptive market by connecting this ideas
to existing behaviors.
What.
Make sure that our value proposition solves real
customer problems. Make sure that customers are
willing to pay for it. Know how they’d like to be
reached.
How.
The empathy map, Digital ethnography,
ethnography, language-based insights, expert
Interviews, Online user testing, Online surveys,
Segmentation handbooks, Insight out, Individual
interviews, Group interviews, In-context immersion,
Observation..
31

32. Ideation
Why.
Come up with a large number of ideas, hypotheses
or possible solutions. It gets creative minds thinking
and increases likelihood of them coming up with a
breakthrough idea.
What.
Ideation process has two parts: generation where
volume matters and synthesis where ideas are
narrowed down to a small number of viable options.
How.
Come up with hypotheses, Define opportunities,
Create solutions, Make sense of consumer insights
32

33. Prototyping & Storytelling
Why.
Create low-investment, low-cost ways of trying out
team’s ideas in a real world context and serving as
a springboards for the next round of ideas.
What.
Tell a story about which challenges a customer is
facing and which job they want to get done.
Illustrate how team’s ideas create value for
customers and create value for them. This is a
clear way to introduce a solution and describing
how it fits into customers’ life.
How.
Storyboards, Visual storytelling.
33

34. Scenarios
Why.
Make customer insights tangible and inform the
design development process through specific
and detailed design context.
What.
Capture how people travel through a product,
service or brand experience in time and what
the most meaningful points are. Clarify where
the customer and the service or brand interact
and what are the points of opportunity to deliver
value.
How.
How.
Experience journey maps, Experience blueprint,
Customer journeys, Future scenarios
34

35. SUMMARY: THE ROLE OF STRATEGY IN THE LONG-
TERM, FUTURE-FACING AGENCY GROWTH
Systemic integration of three core lines of business:
service, product innovation and infrastructure.
1/3 1/3 1/3
Service Product & service Infrastructure
innovation
Influence scale and Lead digital market
Help emerging
scope of an agency’s innovation and
digital markets
offerings & recognize influence industry
grow and scale.
growth opportunities. conversations.
35

36. andjelicaaa@gmail.com
@andjelicaaa
www.slideshare.net/andjelicaaa
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-
network-blog/2013/feb/11/ten-digital-strategists-
watch-2013
anaandjelic.typepad.com
http://adage.com/author/ana-andjelic/3343
http://www.fastcocreate.com/1681792/what-
marketers-are-getting-wrong-about-loyalty
http://vimeo.com/19634070
36