Martin Weigel's new book on lessons from the front line

0:00Martin Weigel: Welcome back to One Strategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O 'Carroll in Chicago, and I'm actually recording the intro to this episode before I go to Cannes, and the episode's going to drop the week after Cannes, so hopefully I survived it, and hopefully a lot of great work got awarded, and hopefully we actually got great turnout for our FE roundtables, which I'm going to be doing at Cannes. This is my first visit to Cannes, by the way, so I'm kind of like unsure how it's all going to work out. So hopefully it went well. A couple of things I want to mention. Number one, in terms of upcoming episodes, we've got our next On the Spot episode.

0:37Martin Weigel: We just recorded it earlier this week prior to Cannes with Chris Gallery of Mother in London and Nick Hurst of Adam and Eve London. In that episode, we talk about Heinz and the New York Times. On the spot, for those of you who don't know, is where planners talk about brands they've never worked on. And so it's a fun, more casual approach. And I loved the conversation with Chris. And so that's coming up soon. We're also doing our next episode in the Planning for Effectiveness Outcomes series, Effective Outcomes series, that we're partnering with the AFIs on. This will be, the next one will be episode number four.

1:13Martin Weigel: And so that's going to be upcoming. We also had a great conversation recently with NPR's Chief Marketing Officer and Mischief's EVP of Strategy, Ed Gunn, about the new NPR campaign. And I love that work and well worth the listen to that episode. We've also got an episode coming up on Patty Powers, who for years have done brilliant work. And I'm really excited to talk with the folks in Dublin about the Patty Powers work. So that's going to be upcoming also. So in terms of live shows, we just got back from Carmichael Lynch in Minneapolis. We are planning a, it's going to be in an invitation only round table though in Chicago at BBDO in July.

1:59Martin Weigel: That's coming up. But then the next live show with a broad audience is going to be in September at GSD &M. So we're going to be in Austin at GSD &M September 10th. So if you are around, there'll be more information coming up about that shortly. Since I know that Martin Weigel episodes on my show are always very popular, I did want to mention something that I think will be of interest to strategists around the world. Of course, Martin's book is one of them, but the one that I wanted to mention today is the fact that we are planning to undertake what we would say is the world's largest study of strategists in our industry.

2:44Martin Weigel: Like many of you, and I hear from a lot of people about this, we're sort of burned out about hearing about commentary on how strategists feel from studies that maybe had a very, very small sample. And it's dangerous to take direction from those sorts of things. So we're going to try to create a robust global snapshot. Actually, it's not going to be a snapshot. It's going to be a deeper inside look into what's happening in the minds of strategists around the world. We want to make it an annual study. And then we will share the results of that with everybody once we get it gathered. We're in the early stages of figuring this out.

3:25Martin Weigel: But this show is the voice of strategists worldwide. And so I think what we want to do, we've been trying to take the show and the live show global, and we've been making brilliant progress in that area. But I also want to capture the voices of strategists, the opinions of strategists, and how we can help each other in meaningful ways as a practice area in the industry. And strategists in the broader term, not just strategists in comms, but strategists in the broader term. So look for more information to come out about that soon. We're trying to figure out exactly how we're going to deploy it.

4:01Martin Weigel: It's going to be hard work to get everybody to participate because sampling and finding people, it's always tough. But we're going to make it happen. And we're going to make it an annual event. And maybe next year, Ken, we'll roll out the results or at some FE event, we'll roll out the results and make it meaningful. Speaking of the broader definition of strategy, I'm really thrilled to have Martin Weigel with me today as my guest. Martin has been on the show a number of times. His episodes are always among the top episodes on the show. If you don't know Martin, he is very well known as the Chief Strategy Officer at Widening Kennedy, Amsterdam.

4:42Martin Weigel: He's been the Chief Strategy Officer at AMV BBDO. He's worked at many major agencies. He's an extraordinary intellect and voice in this industry. In the last couple of years, you'll know him from his presentation at Cannes with others like Rob Campbell and Paula Bloodworth for a couple of, I'm not sure if Martin did a couple of those presentations, but he was there at the last one. And, you know, those things are like hotcakes, man. Those decks and those presentations, everybody wants to get their hands on them. So he has written a book. It is called Strategy is a Verb. And if you're on YouTube watching the show, you can see I'm holding up the book here.

5:26Martin Weigel: It's Strategy is a Verb, Notes from the Front Line. Martin Weigel. Now, Weigel is spelled W-E-I-G-E-L. W-E-I-G-E-L, pronounced Weigel. And you can get the book on Amazon anywhere globally. Also, what's really interesting about this book, Martin is typically a long-form writer. And if you've read his stuff, you know that to be the case. But this book is not long-form. He has taken a different approach where most of these chapters are just three to four pages long. And the book itself is roughly 200 pages. So it is a sort of a different filter for the way that he thinks. And it's really interesting when you get into the book.

6:18Martin Weigel: It's extraordinary. So if you do, however, want to read some of his long-form work, you can check out martinvigel.org. martinvigel.org. And when you get to his site, not only is there information about the book, but also in the archive tab on the right-hand side of that website, you can click that archive tab and see all of his, well, there's a lot of his. I don't know if it's everything he's written, but there's an archive of his long-form writing. And I've read a ton of that stuff, and I hope that you guys will too. So I think I've covered everything I needed to touch on. Martin now has his own consulting firm.

7:01Martin Weigel: I hope I'm pronouncing this right, M-Dub. It's spelled E-M-D-U-B E-M-D-U-B You can connect with Martin on LinkedIn And I guess there's probably a way to connect with him on the other site martinveigl.org So this is a conversation we recorded last week You may hear birds chirping in the background Because Martin was in this idyllic location And I was in Chicago So the bird sounds were not coming from my microphone. They were coming from his. And it sort of adds a little bit of context. I hope my editor doesn't actually take the bird sounds out, which may have happened. You never know. But here's our good friend and inspiration to us strategists.

7:47Martin Weigel: This is my conversation with Martin Weigel. Enjoy. So Martin Weigel is here. Martin Weigel's episode, and we've done a couple of different conversations, Martin, over the last couple of years. your episode where you and I were just ranting and raving like we're going to do today is the most popular episode on this show and we have done over 300 episodes you believe that shit? I didn't know that yeah, I checked it out this morning it is the most popular show so needless to say I'm excited that we're doing this again welcome back my friend good to see you it's good to see you you look better than me but then again, you've always looked better than me.

8:29Martin Weigel: But, you know, you have that tan look. So people who are watching this on YouTube can get a sense of what I mean. All right, we are here to talk about your new book, and I'm excited about it. I can imagine it was a torturous process. That's my lens on things, because I struggle with writing emails or memos or decks. But when you have to write a substantive book and reflect on it and have it be something that you can be proud of, I can imagine it can be something that keeps you up night after night. I mean, how was it to write it? I think it took me about a year to get to a raw manuscript. Unbelievable.

9:13About 60 ,000 words. And some of it is based on previous writings, and quite a lot of it is entirely new. new material.

9:25Martin Weigel: Give us two minutes on what you want people to note and know about this book and why it should be read. The book is an argument for strategy as a way of thinking. Strategy is a way of orientating yourself in the world, and it's about understanding that you have agency in the world should you choose to exercise it and the strategists we should all be in the business of exercising agency i think it's a call to arms i know that sounds grandiose and like i'm delivering some sermon on the mount which i'm not i think the strategy has got small, not just in ad land or marketing. It seems to be in thin supply in all walks of life.

10:24It's got small. This is about making, I want people to understand that strategy is by its nature an ambitious undertaking. By its nature, strategy is ambitious because it's about a better tomorrow. It's a hopeful discipline because it says we can make tomorrow better, more desirable. more valuable, more sustainable. We just have to want to do the work. And think like strategists, not administrators or bureaucrats or fluffers. We're people of action, we're men and women of action. Be ambitious, build a better tomorrow, do the fucking hard work and claim your agency and maybe just book the PowerPoint.

11:13away, you know, who's a little less talk and a bit more action.

11:19Martin Weigel: The thing that strikes me about the book is the further you get into it, the deeper you get involved in it. And that's a compliment. I think that, and as I read through it, I was kind of reminded about the debate that so many of us have in planning, which is the right way to do things. There's one argument that says that there is no right way to do things. Number two, there's a sort of a call within this book, I think, or implication that there's at least a better way to do it than how it's being done today. in that if we're not careful, the work, and these are my words, if we're not careful, the work and the quality of the work will continue to decline, because I think it has been in decline for many years, and I think there's a lot of empirical data that supports that.

12:15Martin Weigel: But is this partly you sort of raising a concern about how we're doing things now? In that process of professional and personal soul-searching that made its way onto the pages, part of that, to begin to answer your question, was a dissatisfaction with the conversation around strategy. Speaking candidly, I think clients are being underserved by strategists, and thus consumers are eventually being underserved. given everybody is a broadcaster the quality of advice around the practice of strategy is largely risible we've forgotten what strategy is i think that it's become such an overly used term just like others will talk about today such as insight it's it's lost its meaning i mean in conversations that i have brands with clients with people who are strategists um the toughest The toughest question to ask a strategist is, what was your strategy?

13:20Martin Weigel: It becomes a conversation rather than anything succinct, which is dangerous because I think strategy does have a definition. It's not complicated, but it has sort of lost its power. And I think that's because it really, it's sort of losing its value in many ways. Yeah, I mean, I think you make a good point. And articulating what your strategy was shouldn't require five minutes of rambling. It's a sentence. You can provide color and texture and rationale and elaborate on the process that got you there. But the strategy itself, I'd argue, if you can't articulate that in a sentence, one, you don't have a strategy.

14:13Two, you probably don't know what your job is. You know, because it's alarming how, at least in advertising agencies, so few strategists are even capable of articulating what a strategist is.

14:27Martin Weigel: But I wanted to start off on, and we'll just bop around. So I want to start off with chapter 56, which is struggle. Oh, interesting. Because this one struck me because there's a couple of different dimensions to it. You mentioned in this chapter the circumstances in which you wrote the book. And I think in doing that, it sort of reflected on this idea of fast versus slow way of working. Not in a Daniel Kahneman sort of way. But more in the fact that maybe within the culture of planning today, everything is expected to be faster. Everything is expected to be delivered. and god knows how we got into that but we're in it but that is not the place where great strategy emerges versus for long-term durable strategy tell us what you mean in this chapter when we talk about without struggle our work is predictable the struggle is is necessary because you i think it's only by having gone through the bad versions or the suboptimal versions of a sentence or a chapter or a thesis, only by going through the suboptimal versions can you really understand why the right or better version is right and better.

15:55You need to go through that grind. It's not just enough to get to the right one, because the rightness of it is only illuminated when you've consciously gone through all the other ways you could have done it and understood and been clear why you had rejected them. So wrongness for me illustrates and illuminates the rightness. And I don't think that's an indulgence. It's necessary because at some point, inevitably, your strategy will be queried, critiqued, challenged, and all of that is right and good. But if you haven't gone through the hard yards of the struggle, you're going to be much less well-equipped to represent that strategy, be an advocate of the strategy, articulate clearly why that version of the strategy is more fit for purpose than the myriad of other versions and alternate routes you could have.

17:07Martin Weigel: If there's an expectation that I have to deliver a strategy in 24 hours or 48 hours versus if I have two weeks, I can't think of an example of where in the early stages of strategy development, there's this tendency to have this outpouring of potential directions that you could go with. And they all seem extraordinarily exciting at the time. And you capture them on paper or however you capture them with a group of people. I can't remember a time in my career where then having time to continue the process of interrogating assumptions and exploring audiences, etc. I can't think of a time when I ever went back to that day one and said, oh, that day one was the right one so the danger is that we are we are um having the clock stop at 48 hours and there we're going to market with that as a strategy and not realizing that if we did invest our time doing other things or having more time to do that thing that we ultimately would look back on those early ideas and go they were never the right one to begin with so we've made a mistake by going to market too fast with it.

18:19Martin Weigel: It's not to say that there isn't great strategies that are born in 24 hours that aren't great. There are outliers. But there's no doubt that time to reflect, time to shape, time to debate, time to explore makes for a better strategy. Well, there's nothing worse when you're representing a strategy than somebody asking, have you thought about doing it slightly differently? Or have you thought about having to answer no?

19:03It's the first idea we came up with and we're against the clock. So here it is. It doesn't make for a great conversation. If you're able to say, we did, and here's why it's flawed or not fit for purpose or doesn't map well to the needs of the audience or the org, yeah, we did. But this one, and here's why they're suboptimal, and this is what this one does that the others don't. It's a much more persuasive conversation to find yourself. The struggle, as I wrote, the struggle is the craft. And as I said, I'm not asking for the strategic process to be treated like an indulgence and not be cognizant of commercial pressures and timelines and all the rest of it.

20:00But I begin to wonder whether if you're banging out strategies and find them easy, I wonder how good they are. I mean, there are outliers, and I've been privileged to be in a couple of occasions where we knocked out a strategy in a day and won the pitch in a week, but they're outliers. They're edge-casing.

20:21Martin Weigel: I suppose it's important to delineate between the various types of strategy. I mean, if we're talking at a level of trying to build a platform for a brand, that is not something that is typically pushed out in 24 hours or 48 hours. But sometimes it is from a new business perspective. But that's the level we're talking about. Executing off of an existing strategy we can do fast, right? We should be able to do that quick. Should be able to do it fast. Should be able to do it quick. But it's getting to that higher level and then feeling that we're under pressure to deliver against that. It's just recognizing that why are we, in my mind at least, why are we constantly going faster?

21:01Martin Weigel: Why are we feeling that pressure to deliver so quick? And a lot of people who come on this show will answer by saying that's a client-side issue or it's the speed of culture. Why are we trying to keep up with culture? I don't know why we're fucking trying to keep up with the speed of culture. we're supposed to be defining ourselves and our place in it not keeping up with it and changing constantly so i don't i don't buy that i think that we as an industry as a client side too we've gotten so um we've gotten so used to fast that we're accepting that's the norm but i don't agree with that i don't wonder whether now having escaped the cloisters of adland whether that's a particularly ad land client relationship affliction.

21:50Martin Weigel: Another chapter I wanted to touch on is chapter 11, which is Imagine. You talk about it in terms of the ability to see things that do not yet exist, that could exist, and work out how they might exist is central to strategy. It's imagining that, and it's the idea of working backwards from an imagined future. Working forward from what you have, what you know, what you know to be feasible, or at least what you believe to be feasible, I'd argue dooms you to incrementalism and solving small problems. There are times when small problems are important problems, but that's not strategy. Strategy is, we want tomorrow to look different from today.

22:42If A is the present and B is the future, I don't think you start with A. That's the argument that Roger Martin makes. Because if you start with where you are, there are going to be a whole host of reasons why you can't get to B. We don't have that skills, we don't have the right investment, we don't have the right people, our brand has the wrong reputation, nobody knows us. There are so many reasons why you can't get to B. But if you start with B, go, do you want to live in the B world?

23:14Martin Weigel: Yeah. Fuck yeah, it sounds exciting, it's sustainable, it creates value for businesses and human beings. Is it differentiating, exciting, necessary? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. So what, as Roger Martin argues, what would have to be true today to make that happen? Well, we need to open a new factory in China. And the list goes. And if you start with A, you'll be constrained by what you don't know, don't have, haven't explored. And that's the imagination, right? It's understanding where that end game is, and that is a journey we have to go on. Yes. So that's why I would argue that strategy is time travel.

24:01You travel to a more desirable future and work out how to bring that back into the press. I tell the story in the book of the Apollo program when JFK announced that we will put a man on the moon. The technology to accomplish that did not exist. It didn't exist. They didn't know how to do it. They didn't know how to get a human being safely to the moon, land on the moon, have a bit of a wander on the moon, come back to the moon, and communicate with Earth. All of that, have meals, be able to breathe and not die. None of that existed. That's why it took 40 ,000 engineers and scientists to work out, oh shit, okay, well, what will we need?

24:50We'll need a completely different navigation system, a way of communicating with command, and blah, blah, blah, the list goes on. And they had to invent those technologies. If they'd worked, if they started with where they were, they wouldn't have landed a man on him, because we'd go, well, we don't have the same analogy.

25:10Martin Weigel: And the problem that I, the other challenge that I have with it, I'm interested in your thoughts on this too, is as an industry, we tend to be sitting around on the where we are and just trying to reframe where we are because we're thinking about it solely in the context of comms. And this is where people like you and people like Tom Morton and Johnny Bauer and others in the industry are trying to encourage us to get to, which is to get beyond comms, get beyond just thinking about how we're representing what we are and start thinking about what we want to be in and be how are we going to connect these dots how are we going to imagine that future how are we going to get organizational buy-in because the strategic implications are not just in the area of comms their organizational strategy their people strategy their product strategy distribution strategy there's physical uh infrastructure etc that's the super exciting space that everybody even in our industry of comms wants to be a part of but we it seems out of reach you say much of our strategic craft has become a zero consumer exposure undertaken yeah undertaking i was reflecting before we started talking focus why why it matters making actually making contact with customers, or let's call them people.

26:38Actual contacts, so not reading about them in research reports, not simply applying, say, synthetic research to your strategy. Because you go, there are all these new tools that make the research process more efficient. I'm not going to say better, but this is going to make it more efficient. Why does it matter so much to have that contact? Because it's a shag, right? Back to our time conversation earlier. Why does that matter? We've got reams of research and real-time data that gives us a granularity of understanding all these knowledge about people's habits, preferences, actually, why the fuck do we need to go and meet them?

27:38I think it's really, really hard to feel that you have a responsibility towards consumers if you haven't met them. These people deserve great products. These people deserve to be able to find our products easily, enjoy experiencing that they deserve, if we're going to insist on interrupting their time, to be served with stuff that is intelligent and or entertaining or both. And I say responsibility because the purpose of marketing is to serve the customer. All else flows from that. Revenue, profit, stock price. But none of that happens. the point of marketing is to serve the needs, wants, and aspirations of people.

28:33And I think that's really hard to do if you aren't driven by a sense of responsibility towards the company. If they're just a data point, I think it was Bob Hoffman who said something on the lines of, you know, extrapolating from your own experience is fucking narcissism.

28:52Martin Weigel: I'm really interested in getting your point of view on how we use AI, should use AI, can use AI. Because this is one of the positive sides of AI. And I'm hearing this increasingly recently from folks who are now beginning to have a sense of how, of what form AI is going to come in that we might, in the way that we might in actuality have to use it versus what we thought it might have been. I think the industry, many in the industry, are starting to realize that AI can free them up to do the things they really want to be doing or really should be doing. So it's not replacing you. It's actually becoming a liberating force in many ways.

29:35I mean, that reflects my own personal experience. Mine too.

29:41Martin Weigel: I can stay away from the drudgery now and focus on the higher level work. I now have a lot. I have built myself a planning department. And you're, just so, in case people aren't picking up on this, you're talking about you've built yourself a sort of an agentic planning department using a large language model? Yeah, now I've, I spent the last couple of months just building a whole end-to-end workflow around my strategic practice just to accelerate the graft. There's an army of one I can deliver what a team of planners can do, but I can probably do it faster than they ever did it. Leaving me to do, at least for now, the bits I enjoy, the bits I'm good at, the bits that benefit from human judgment.

30:40Martin Weigel: Yeah. You know, there's a great test and a great line that Les Bonad had a couple of weeks ago. He was on a webinar that I was watching. And I've rolled this line out at a number of our live shows around the country. And given Les credit, as I'm doing right here. But he said during this conversation that AI helps you lift the floor. It doesn't raise the ceiling. Oh, that's an interesting way of putting it. Yeah, isn't it? is a great way of thinking about it. I'd probably push Les's thought further. It can make good strategists even better. Yes. But it won't make shit strategists good. So it might make shit creatives and shit strategists deliver shit faster, but it won't turn them into sort of a line or messes of strategy and creativity.

31:38Martin Weigel: I want to come back to one of our favorite topics to discuss because we both feel pretty passionate about this. Now, you're a mild-mannered gentleman, but I also know that you're a fiery son of a bitch when it comes to things. So this is one of those things. And you talk about it in Chapter 14, which is titled Understand. It's your disdain for the, and mine, for the term insight. I don't think either one of us are saying that insight is not a possibility there are brilliant campaigns that are developed off of genuine insight but they're rare and we've kind of set a bar where that's our deliverable as a practice area within strategy and I think we're handicapping ourselves significantly what is the point that you want to make about sort of your disdain for the term insight in this chapter disdain I think it might have been that chapter where my editor wrote back and said, do you need to say fuck quite that much?

32:42I hear you. There was a time when marketers didn't use the word insight. Yeah. At all. And you know what? Some of those juggernaut household brands that are in people's everyday lives, you know like coca-cola mcdonald's fedex were built on decades without ever using that word i look back on 30 years and i was like i don't know if i know i don't think i had an insight that satisfied the standards and demands of the insight so the head of ever like that definition of what a new site is yeah which is amazing for somebody

33:24Martin Weigel: of your caliber to say it's it's it's bizarre and i find that very common for people who come on this show the best people that come on this show rarely uses the term insight and and when they're expressing the the essence of their work it's reflected off of what appears to be a genuine understanding of their audience how they tell stories it's not about and our insight was When I've been the first agency I ever worked in back in the 1800s, the brief said, who's our audience and what do we know about them? The problem that drives me wild is the insight has become in many causes an end in itself.

34:15You know, that's not an insight, this is an insight, you know, when the real question is, is it useful? You just need something useful. You know, I think you've spoken to my former colleagues at Wyden on Old Spice. Yes. What was the insight? It was shopper data that the primary purchaser was a woman. Oh, you know, throw insight, please. Where's the tension? Where's the intellectual edifice that you build around that? No, but that was really useful. It was directly informing of the work.

34:53Martin Weigel: Yeah. So, creators go, oh, so we're not talking to men then, we're talking to the people who do the buying, what are we influenced to do? The buying completely changes everything. Really, really useful. Thank you very, very much. I don't think there was any penetrating insight into the state of contemporary masculinity, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, and the other thing for me is I think that the danger is that if we make that the deliverable of the strategist, The strategist, who may come up with some wonderful observations, such as that data point, will assume in their own mind that that's not good enough for them to share, that they need to go further.

35:47Martin Weigel: And in trying to find an insight, they end up being off strategy because they move the goalposts in order for it to fit the insight. and we've talked about this before, that to me is not only dangerous, it's irresponsible. And if we're there to do effective work, it's highly irresponsible to do that just because you think you're deliverable as a so-called insight. Positioning the insight as the planner's primary output is very convenient for those who want to domesticate and declaw the strategist and keep him or her at arm's length from creative execution. Show us the insight and fuck off, not have a point of view on how this brand shows up, what its promise is, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

36:37Just come with an insight and leave us alone um and i think that insight as the strategist core deliverable is is is toxic

36:54Martin Weigel: and the other thing that's that i think we can we can both agree on is um i try to think what i mean many people have referred to this this term but um it's better to be interesting than right version of that, which is so true. And I think I fell, during my career, I fell, I sort of fell into this trap, is I wanted to create a strategy that was impenetrably right. I wanted it to be fully supportive. And many times, and I had convinced myself it was absolutely right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I would share it and socialize it internally at the agency, and it just fell fucking flat. and then my ideal idealistic irishman fire and blood came out right i'm like what the fuck this is absolutely right it's absolutely yet but the problem was it just wasn't interesting it wouldn't wouldn't be creatively compelling and therefore would not it would lead to very practical communication therefore i i wasn't fully getting the fact that it needed to be more than just right?

38:06I think it was Stephen Bungay, the author of Art of Action, I think I've cited it in the book, talked about it's not enough to get people to understand your strategy. I think he said, understanding gets compliance, but only belief gets commitment or words. to that effect, because the enactment of the strategy by the total business will only happen if people can believe in it.

38:45Martin Weigel: It is Martin Weigel, and Weigel is spelt, because you're going to need the proper spelling when you go to Amazon to buy the book. It's W-E-I-G-E-L, Martin Weigel. his book is strategy is a verb notes from the front line and you've been on the front line man you've been at the best agencies in the world working on many of the best brands in the world where can people buy the book and here it is if uh but all of them increasingly all good book shops um amazon kindle and prints um waterstones foils i think barnes and noble comes on stream soon. So we can get it on Amazon here in the US now. Yes, exactly.

39:33No, it's Amazon globally, pretty much. Good.

39:35Martin Weigel: Brilliant. So there are no excuses. Brilliant to see you, Martin. Thank you for spending this time together. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. And we will see everyone on the next episode.