21 - The Four Point Framework - How to Sell Microsoft Teams More Aggressively Against Zoom and Slack (Kelsey Whittemore). 33 - 8 signs your strategy presentation lacks strategy 35 - Weakest vs strongest way to end a presentation 09 - How to write a strategy: single-minded propositions.
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Insights
Look for words and research that take you out of your head – it's deep empathy.
Branding
A strong brand is a brand that is more on people's minds than its market share. A strong brand is not afraid of emotion, especially humor, but it is afraid of being boring and literal.
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In advertising, insights will often explain the world to people in a way that also benefits the brand.
Introduction
Some people will argue that you don't need a mirror to make effective advertising, but most things that get our attention contain some kind of break with reality (absurdism) or make us think about our reality just a little.
Yeah, but How Serious?
To understand the mechanics of an insight is to understand the mechanics of an idea. And since creativity is the act of having an idea, insights are also creative acts. And the combination elicits the reaction in people, "That's so true, and I've never heard it like that before." This edges it towards the status of an insight.
The difference between an idea and an insight is that an insight will cause us to reorganize our lives.
The Difficulty with Insights
Can we agree on how to see them?” It may even be helpful to use the word “insight” as little as possible. Data is the building blocks and we thank them for their service, but they are not the Taj Mahal. I have labeled all of these slides before you – all two hundred of them – with the word “insight.” I have found so many insights.
And here's the ninth problem: the strategy community that cares about caring for insights—that vacillates between caring for insights and feeling guilty about caring for them—makes insights difficult.
How Insights Work
This is why Strategist Two encourages the appearance of the cages in certain media outlets. So they will say, “Show strong men opening cages (without making us look weak).” This means that opening the cages will have to be a great show of force, a theatrical epic of super-powered empathy with fireworks, costumes and F-15 jets patriotically screaming through the sky, beyond anything Strategist One could have imagined. Let's be friends." Insights ask people to see themselves in a brand, even if what they see isn't how someone else would see them.
Then they wait and maybe pee a little on their dress while they wait.
How Insights Happen
Our insight into donations can even lead to a more powerful reframing of the problem we need to solve: "Our donors don't argue enough about how much to donate." And then we would look for another insight that opens up this new problem statement. Even with the stricter definitions of the word "insight," writing insights is not the easiest job. They are social objects, which means they exist within a group of people, and the first group of people they have to survive is the group of people working on the project.
For example, "Can you prescribe Viagra for me?" The person feels they have played along with etiquette - sat in the chair and discussed medical issues, building trust and empathy.
Questions That Fetch Insights
This is because you are an adult, you have a brain and you want to take responsibility for your life. This is to suggest that insights that are Lurkers are surprises that lurk, and insights that are Surprisers are surprises out of nowhere. This is the opposite of a three-legged race, where two people tie one of their legs to the other person's leg and run.
A three-legged race is the opposite of how an insight works, because a three-legged race combines two objects that are normally separated in a way that makes them worse.
How to Write an Insight
How to Help a Workshop Write an Insight
Sometimes a group will start with comic gibberish like, "I was walking down the street the other day and I saw this monkey and the monkey was looking at me and then I realized I was standing next to a bald guy, and he wasn't the first bald guy I'd ever seen, but he was the first bald guy I'd seen that day …” Most stand-up comedy includes tight lines, even if they sound loose in their delivery. Ask them to read a page of this scripture and read it aloud to themselves, then ask them to write a paragraph of it on paper with their own pens and write an insight for your project with similar flair.
Ask them to write and rewrite different insights and see if this helps them get where you need to get them.
Insights Help Us Escape Problems
You're thinking, “If the startup world talks so much about failure on the road to success, why don't their employees think about hair loss in a similar way. Is it because hair loss is a series of failures, but once it's over, it's just one big failure—like bankruptcy?” Remember how many men in the start-up world who are losing hair have admitted that every day thinking about hair loss -.
Yes, it's a convenient escape route for this exercise, but it comes to light one word at a time.
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The Current Debate About Insights
Simple Summary Of Academic Research
Remember that insights don't have to be about the meaning of life - they can be about how people eat, or put down the toilet seat, or how they blow their noses. And the more you play with insights, the more you'll push yourself into the less obvious.
Conclusion
How to do
Strategy
A Simple Approach
You can learn all about it from my book Strategy is Your Words and my online course on Strategy Basics. I've taught thousands of strategists and been inside dozens and dozens of companies with my training. If people could focus on the basics for a year – no distractions, no politics, no nonsense – we'd see a lot more flourishing careers and better advertising.
We focus on the Four Points framework, creative briefs and strategy stories to bring your skills to life and fuel your career.
Strategy Is Simple
If you've ever wondered how to make money, here's the trick: take something that seems magical, make it complex, and sell yourself as the way to solve the complexity and get to the magic. So if you design a strategy with deliberate complexity to make money and take money from dumb money, then you are part of the problem. But if you're new to strategy and confused by all the techniques and concepts, and you're doing your best to represent strategy in your agency (which is no easy feat), it will seem complex in the way that the first day you walk into a job or martial arts school seems complex.
But I'll give you a trick - you can define the word however you want.
Strategy - A Simple
Approach
If you're lucky, they'll have worked out their key business challenges and know what success looks like. If you are building a brand around one of these, you can use the term "perceptual goal". A midlife crisis is death asking if you're ready A midlife crisis is life telling you to pay attention.
If you're putting common language like "convenience," "quality," and "easy" here, then I don't think you need it.
Making a Career of
You will have a life after this career, but it is even better to have a life while you have this career. If you are a strategist, you can remember the time in your life when you didn't know that being a strategist was a thing. They all benchmark themselves against other people: “What is normal to have achieved at my age?”, “Am I too old or too young to be a strategist?”, “Should I do a master's degree to get into strategy? ”.
And here's the deal: As you'll see in this mini-mind dive, there are no answers.
How people get into strategy
But if you can get into a company with a boss who knows how to develop you, a range of clients who want your work, creative teams who compliment your work when you're not there, and you're given responsibility up front for your time (not in a reckless way), my feeling is that you will develop faster at the strategy job than someone who sits on one account for years and turns into a bureaucrat. It's no coincidence that many of the most award-winning strategists work with strong creative teams. It's even harder to sell to someone who thinks they've already done what you're selling.
If you're good enough, you're old enough* (also, if you're good enough, you're young enough).
Don’t
Understand what accountability looks like: It's different at every agency, especially those who play the blame game. Learn the rules of the system (career path and promotions) so you don't fall victim to it: button mashing can only get you so far before he has to figure out what it takes to get to the next level. Instead, figure out how to create new value that didn't exist before (ideally within the 9:00 PM to 5:00 PM time frame).
Coffee chats and meet and greets only last so long before you need to roll up your sleeves.
Want more?
When you take someone who knows what they're doing through this kind of portfolio, you'll hear "Uh-huh Uh-huh Uh-huh" but the person will say "Next, next, next. You'll waste time and energy and distract yourself from your goal: to land at least one unexpected and defensible idea per case study.And don't forget the other part of the challenge: getting and keeping the attention and memory of the people who read your portfolio when you're not with your portfolio.
You're trying to poke the person in the brain and make them think, "Whoa, I didn't see that coming."
Does your career need a strategy?
We launched in 2018 as a podcast to help strategists and account planners learn from each other. Then we launched a Facebook group, which now hosts 19,000 people, an online learning membership and a conference. One of the most common pieces of feedback our training programs have received is the following: “You opened my mind to new ways of doing things.
Whether it's someone brand new to advertising and marketing, someone looking to transition into a new role, or someone looking to take their strategy to the next level, we're here to help.
