Taking Responsibility for Our Value

The recent hullabaloo caused by the “no agency would have done this ad,” tweet from Coinbase CEO and the Martin Agency’s CEO has put the value of communications work front and center.  

Here’s the jist: the CEO of Coinbase stated an outside agency had pitched him “a bunch of standard super bowl ad ideas,” and didn't like any of them. Then he took to twitter to say as much. The Martin Agency CEO responded, again on Twitter, with presentation dates and times in 2021 when that idea had been presented to the company, calling for transparency and credit.

As a strategy practice, a discipline that is similarly never mentioned or heralded when advertising works, this got us thinking. What is the value of strategic work, and how do we change the way we and our partners think about engaging in it?

We don’t have the answer, but it is a question that is fueling our own discovery phase. As four ex-agency women, who have worked across account, new business, creative, strategy, and project management — the frame in which our value resided was the creative output. It was what we made, and the making always included doing work and presenting ideas for free, based on a problem we were given. 

But the reality is, our outputs are equally important to our inputs. Good brand strategy must reach back to connect to your business strategy and be the engine that drives it forward. It must also reach forward to connect to your communications plan and drive internal and external engagement. The problems that lie hidden within this part of the process, the ones unrelated to a deliverable, are what hinder strategic success. As a strategy practice that is hyper-focused on usability, exploration and discovery are major contributors to the value equation we provide in our specific disciplines. They also directly impact the quality and effectiveness of our work.

And yet, Brand and Comms Strategists are rarely, if ever, included in the initial discovery phase of the project or process, and even more rarely paid for it. At Hush, we would argue this directly contributes to the high failure rate of strategic implementation, as problem-identification is a key to any strategic initiative. 

While the concept of paid discovery has been around for a long time, for some reason, many agencies have rejected the idea. Staying in their lanes and answering more directly to requests - which have gotten more complex and less clear. Paying for problem identification and a path forward, prior to doing the work itself, is much more common in the consulting space where experience and expertise are the product. Strategy work lives somewhere in the middle, as we are charting new territory and building different ways of working with our partners. 

Many of the conversations we are having right now make it clear that the integration of brand and communications is top of mind for many marketers. And they include questions around everything from resourcing and team structure to leadership buy-in and onboarding. We are identifying and shifting priorities and reallocating budgets. We are working on internal roll-out plans, right-sizing campaign efforts, and updating brand guides to be actionable at scale. These are big challenges leaders are up against, and they require new approaches to solve for new needs. We know there is no universal blueprint for how to do this. But we also know that bringing us in and paying us to facilitate project discovery at the brand and comms level will always provide better results.

Kristen Cavallo wrote that perhaps this moment is an opportunity to create positive change for the industry. And we agree. She said, “respecting the discipline requires clients who value our work as an economic multiplier, and it requires an industry that knows it’s worth.” It is time for us all to take responsibility for our value, standing up for our worth as strategy, creative, and communication experts.