Reworking strategy's value proposition

0:09Baiba Matisone: Welcome to the WALK podcast. I'm Catherine Driscoll, Commissioning Editor for EMEA at WALK. In this episode, we continue our series around the new future of strategy report. Strategy best practice is very dear to our hearts at WALK. And since 2017, we've interviewed strategists from around the world to understand challenges and how strategy is evolving. A clear theme that emerged this year was that strategists are actively embracing a new value proposition. In the survey, 80 % of strategists said they must prove better business impact by developing stronger arguments and providing solid evidence.

0:44Baiba Matisone: I'm delighted to be joined today by two strategists who are making that link from strategy to business outcomes in their work, and also who both contributed to the future of strategy report. I'd like to welcome Martin Beverley, co-founder of the groundbreaking agency Ace of Hearts, and Biber Matasone, a Brandon strategy consultant who trained strategists and founded the community Strategy Pints in Berlin. But before we hear from our guests, here's a quick word from our sponsors.

1:13Baiba Matisone: If you're listening to this podcast, you'll know that WALK is the home of leading effectiveness thinking. And now we're teaching you everything you need to know about the fundamentals of strategy. WALK Strategy Fundamentals is WALK's new digital course for junior or entry-level strategists. You'll learn from award-winning case studies and hear directly from top strategists and WALK's own experts, giving you the latest industry insights alongside proven practical frameworks. Sharpen up your skills to excel in 2026 with WALK Strategy Fundamentals. Available now at walk.com slash learning.

1:54Baiba Matisone: welcome to you both hello so i'll get stuck in with you martin so time-based fees and rate cards remain the most common way agencies charge for their work in the survey but only 14 percent of strategists thought that this is the ideal model you have a very practical response to this question of the value of strategy at ace of hearts and i've argued that time is a terrible proxy for value So you wrote about this in your article, but could you share why time-based fees are so flawed?

2:22Martin Beverley: Yeah, I can try. Well, I just, I think there's a weird thing in our industry in general, which is we spend a lot of time sort of pondering how to help our clients grow their business. But we don't necessarily spend that much time thinking about our own businesses. And I think if you just even spend a little bit of time thinking about timesheets, it's just kind of terrible for a number of reasons. I think the first is that any kind of creative discipline, it's really difficult to put it into a spreadsheet in terms of time. I think anyone that's in a more creative discipline may know that sometimes it's instant, sometimes it's gradual, it can take weeks or it can take a few seconds.

3:00Martin Beverley: And great creative companies, they just have this potential to make disproportionate gains and leaps. And that's really difficult to put time against. So I think just in general, as a premise, creative thinking is hard to put time against. But then I also worry that as soon as you start to fill in time shoots and look at time, it commoditizes talent. And at the end of the day, we all have the same number of hours in the day. But sometimes when you start putting in time into spreadsheets, you're going to very quickly put a commercial ceiling on what you can earn. and you encourage sometimes procurement teams to compare apples with apples when in fact talent isn't apples and apples it's apples and pears and bananas and oranges and I think we would much prefer to to look at things differently rather than the time it takes and I also worry that as soon as you're looking at time it just incentivizes time wasting it encourages agencies to put long lists of people for long amounts of time and weirdly you should be paid twice as much if you're twice as quick right and that feels very over generalized i know it's not as simple as that because sometimes it takes a long time and but i just think this notion of time is just it just feels fundamentally flawed and then i joke in the article that if anyone's been on linkedin recently there's a thing called artificial intelligence uh ai for short and that's going to make a lot of kind of things quicker so if you're charging for time i feel like that's that's quite problematic so at ace of hearts we're trying to to change that because i think i think most of the industry you can see by the data in walk realizes that time-based fees and time sheets is a problem it's just how do we begin to solve that yeah sort of getting the clients to catch up

4:47Baiba Matisone: with it rather than doing the way things the way they've always been done especially with you know as you say that ai on the horizon well and not on the horizon it's right here um changing the way that everyone's doing everything. But so you built your agency around sort of a different model. You know, how does that work in practice?

5:05Martin Beverley: Well, one of our sort of principles is that we want to be paid for the value that we add rather than the time it takes. So we don't have time for time sheets. And we openly explain why that's problematic to potential client partners. But at the same time, we know that every single business that we work with is different. So So value looks different for every single business that we work with. And so our commercial model is bespoke each time. And we also importantly don't pretend we have all the answers. So we are making it up as we go along. We've never done this before. We're only a year old, but we're prepared to experiment.

5:41Martin Beverley: And as a company, we quite like the idea of thinking of ourselves as an experiment because it takes the crushing pressure off very slightly because you can either win or you can learn. so we are experimenting with lots of different types of models and we have a real blend across the different client partners that we work with could you share an example of you know some of those different ways yeah so broadly speaking we have four four ways that we approach it so the first is outputs and this is probably the most straightforward we will deliver something in return for money it's a very simple construct and it chimes with the increasingly kind of project based nature of the industry but it's a bit like a set menu in a restaurant where you pay for what you get but we don't deconstruct oh this person spent x time chopping the onions we just we just charge for what we think for the finished product yeah and what we think it's worth but at the same time we we want to be neutral in how we solve things so we don't like to just assume we know the answer we want to get to the problem and then charge for the the solution that we help create so some of our client partners we work in those terms the second kind of option is outcomes so we try to create an agreed sort of shared goal with a client partner and if we reach those goals then we have financial rewards are kind of unlocked.

7:09Martin Beverley: And I think this can be fiendishly difficult to agree a metric because depending on the nature of your work is quite hard to isolate that effect. But I also think the very best organizations tend to be quite single-minded with what they're trying to achieve. And we feel like the more upstream we can get, the more unified the objective. So there are a number of partnerships that we have where we are rewarded for the success, and that might be book sales or it might be growth in customers and we really like the idea that we get that sort of shared outcome and we're rewarded so we kind of have skin in the game we're all trying to achieve the same thing and it encourages us to get really upstream and at the heart of that's nest which is part of what you try to do at asem my thought was though but how do you make

7:58Baiba Matisone: sure it's not too sort of focused on the short term i guess saying that yeah well well some of

8:04Martin Beverley: them are they are longer term but I think that's that's where it also creates a sort of opportunity and a challenge for a company like ours because we have to balance the books in the short term yeah you still got to pay people yeah we still got to pay people so we have we have a number of outcome based sort of deals that we've done and sometimes it's blended with outputs the third thing we've we've done is we've looked at like intellectual property so we maintain the ownership of an idea and then we're financially rewarded the more that that idea is utilized over time or across markets or channels and the reason for that is that when a creative company comes up with something that has a compound effect in the long term they're often they're not rewarded for that when so much of the evidence shows that the long term compound effect that can be generated so we want to really try to incentivize ourselves to do that to come up with something that's long term and really works in the long term for a client.

9:04Martin Beverley: So sometimes we've done those sorts of things. And then last but not least, but we've only done this on two occasions in our first year, is we have an equity partnership where we have actual equity of the company. We work directly with the founder of the company. And that's the most all-in. It's the most risky, but it's also the most emotionally rewarding. You can really affect the heart of that business.

9:29Baiba Matisone: Yeah, quite exciting.

9:30Martin Beverley: Yes. but there's a that's obviously a long-term play without short-term rewards so that's why we have a kind of blend of different models so far well that's super interesting and some you know really

9:42Baiba Matisone: interesting ways to look at the future there vibrant you know welcome how does this resonate with what you're seeing you know have you are you seeing this sort of similar evolution of strategy

9:52Catherine Driscoll: models i think that uh whenever we talk about like some sort of like generalized ways how to do things We always need to understand that in every country, there is like a completely different business environment and also in every category. And also based on the size of the agency, the ways how they will be doing the things will be completely different. And sometimes when people are asking me like, you know, very general questions like how to prove a value of strategy or how to, I don't know, go about the client. And I always talk about or I always encourage people to think from a system thinking perspective that, you know, it is a system, but you need to then understand each layer to kind of figure out like, you know, how you need to go about your client or how you need to sell your strategy or how you need to even deliver the strategy.

10:39Baiba Matisone: Yeah, I know I can see that it sort of speaks to Martin's, you know, getting really close to the client to sort of work with them in terms of exactly what they need. But as you say, every area is different and the companies you work with are different and it makes a huge difference compared to the size of company. You know, not all brands are going to be looking for equity stakes. You know, they'd very much keep the agency at arm's length. But, you know, would you agree that, you know, it's a problem with the way that strategy is priced or, you know, do you think there's a bigger issue around, you know, how its value is understood by, you know, client companies?

11:13Catherine Driscoll: I think that this topic is very kind of like it has a very long history even in my article that I wrote for this particular future of strategy edition I mentioned at the very beginning that since 2017 future of strategy this yearly report is coming out and I think since the very first report I have seen the same question kind of like you know rotating around like how can we prove the value of strategy? How can we show that strategy needs to be more valued or how we can prove our, I don't know, place inside of the, I don't know, client's meetings and stuff like that. So I don't think this is kind of like a new thing.

11:50Catherine Driscoll: I think that this problem is kind of like, has some sort of like a history. And I think it's very important to show to the client, if the client doesn't understand the value of strategy, like how the work would look like without the strategy and then versus how the work could look like with the strategy and then give them clear kind of like reasons or clear kind of like an overview how one versus the other would look like and also i think it's very important to empathize with the client in the room to understand their point of view uh where they are going what is important for them and also like you know how to really help them because a lot of strategies goes in the room and they try to be experts like we have the right answers, we know how to do things.

12:33Catherine Driscoll: But then this aspect of empathy is kind of like missing out. And I think even with the help of AI, we are mimicking a little bit the machines.

12:43Baiba Matisone: Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, sort of really getting close to what they actually need. And another point I liked from your article was sort of, you talk a lot about how strategists, you know, in terms of understanding their clients need to, you know, speak the language of the board, but also think about how the CMO can translate that strategy internally when the strategist isn't in the room. And so you've really got to think of it, you know, present it to the CMO in a way that they're able to take it forward, you know, to the next level of conversations. And I thought that was a sort of a layer that doesn't always get talked about.

13:16Catherine Driscoll: This came out from my one-to-one interviews with marketers. And I found that a lot of marketers and also CMOs, they have used to work on the agency side as a strategist. and for me the biggest question for them was like what is the difference now what do you see differently compared to the moment when you were like working inside of the agency as a strategist and what they have told me is that most of them sees that strategist doesn't understand actually how the client's daily work operates like how what kind of like jobs they have on the table and how much time and money they are kind of allocating to each thing and I think there's some sort of like a a little bit too much maybe obsession with our own work on the on the strategy side also makes some sort of like an impact on how we are reacting on clients feedback or clients interest into our work and i think that also uh what i i got out of these interviews by talking with strategists and also with marketers is that there's a very big question also about them you know the credibility or authority of the CMO who is going to the board and then selling that kind of like a strategy or asking for more budget for the marketing campaigns to the board.

14:28Catherine Driscoll: And if the CMO doesn't have the credibility, then, you know, there can be some sort of situation where things won't go that smoothly. And I think that for the strategists and also for the agencies, it's very important to understand again the whole system around the client's business as a whole does the board understands the value of the brand do they see the brand as an asset as an investment in their business uh kind of like a future for the growth or do they see it just only as some sort of like expenses and just as a cost and i think that's also super important then to kind of like understand how to help your marketing team or your cmo then to talk in the language of investment and finance So they could easily, much easier sell these, let's say, strategies and ideas to the board.

15:17Catherine Driscoll: So they would understand like why we are investing money in particular thing.

15:22Baiba Matisone: You're right. You know, unless that sort of fundamental knowledge and understanding is there, then the most brilliant strategy is not going to get very far, you know, when it comes to outcomes. so you know i guess this is getting on to it but um in her article byber talks about fundamental strategy skills and you know that being like versed in the language of the board rather than sort of staying strictly in that more of a marketing bubble we could say you know and that feels really relevant for what you're doing at ace of hearts with this sort of very close collaboration with clients but you know if you're sort of financially accountable for the value you create um you know and you might be much more involved in the client business than perhaps in other client situations what does that mean for the people in your agency I mean I would imagine

16:05Martin Beverley: that takes a bigger array of skills and expertise yeah I think it does I think it requires a real curiosity in the fundamentals of business so our we talk about putting creativity at the heart of business at Ace of Hearts and we we will openly say to client partners we don't just want to do the coloring in around the edges but we love the coloring in and yeah we've we've enjoyed doing that and that's great but we want to really get into the heart of the business and ultimately affect much more than just the communications. I've just seen in my career when there is a brand and business that has an idea at the heart and it affects everything you do just get this multiplier compound effect and I want us to be more influential when we go into boardrooms and when we go into CEOs I want us to affect everything and so similar to the story about the interviews that I was talking about like we've we've done that with different Elkos and you just start to understand the entirety of the business and the things that they're trying to influence and and then you realize that actually the advertising bit is a relatively weak force and might just help add some top spin onto everything else that that brand and business needs to achieve and I think for us at Ace of Hearts that's exciting that we can have a bigger influence and we can affect ultimately have a bigger impact so that that's the thing that we get excited about and we always start with the heart of the business and what we're trying to achieve and trying to interrogate that because i think that's the important place to start i think um we talk a lot and i mentioned referenced it in my article about maslow's golden hammer which we we love to sort of reference which is if you have a hammer in your hand everything looks like a nail and I think that's the issue sometimes if you work in an advertising agency that you start with advertising as the answer you think the problem is advertising awareness and it might not be and we're just trying to start in a different place and yes we're still we still love advertising we still love communications and we know the impact that can have but we see it as a a piece

18:09Baiba Matisone: of a bigger puzzle yeah and perhaps you know applying that creativity you know across the business not just in you know a particular communication campaign yeah and like as soon

18:20Martin Beverley: as you start to try and apply creativity to the business more broadly you realize like a recent conversation I was in we have created a campaign and hopefully a brilliant part of the idea for that organization but we're now talking to the commercial chief about how does it affect customer service how does it affect future propositions how does it relate to pricing and how and that strategy over time and that's just a more interesting to me at least a more interesting

18:49Baiba Matisone: conversation yeah absolutely it's kind of the holy grail of what you know marketers want to be involved in because you can then join all the dots you know across the whole value proposition

18:58Martin Beverley: but they don't always get that chance no but but we're also we're trying it's not you know sometimes sometimes we start with what we're kind of known for and then we look to move in upstream and I think we're as I said up front where we see ourselves as an experiment and we're just looking to try new things and try and move upstream but from also starting sometimes with what we're we're known for as a position of strength and then try to be more influential from now and get into

19:28Baiba Matisone: the heart of the business no absolutely and of course you know you're sort of deepening those client relationships as you go. So, you know, that will no doubt lead to more opportunities.

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20:23Baiba Matisone: So, you know, in your article, you made a slightly uncomfortable observation that strategists don't always know the timeless principles of strategy. And so perhaps some of those problems might be of their own making. But what are the main issues are you seeing with that?

20:38Catherine Driscoll: I think that Paul Feldwick wrote in his book, The Anatomy of Hamburg, that we have these three, some sort of ways how we look at the time in advertising, that there's a sort of group of people who is looking at advertising as a golden age. So everything happened like, I don't know, 10 years ago, and now nothing is any more important or it's not as good as it was like 10 years ago. And then there are people who are like constantly living in this year zero and they are constantly trying to see everything from the, I don't know, from a scratch where we should actually need to ask the questions about in the context of fundamentals.

21:16Catherine Driscoll: And especially when someone is kind of like, you know, talking about this kind of, I don't know, way to think about fundamentals in new way, or we need to have new new fundamentals because there are things that are changing we need to actually think from a perspective like is this some sort of like a timeless problem or is it temporary because every year in every report that talks about let's say some sort of like new ways how to do marketing how to do advertising or how to you know think about the brand there's always some sort of like timeless principles there combined with temporary and if we take if we pick up let's say a report that was published or released like i don't know five seven years ago we will still see that there's like some truth that holds up until today which are timeless principles and then there's a lot of let's say nonsense that does things that come and go yeah that doesn't make sense anymore and i think that this is very important to kind of understand when we are like you know shouting out that we need to, I don't know, focus on new ways how to talk about advertising or we need to create new language around advertising and fundamentals and stuff like that.

22:27Catherine Driscoll: And I think that also what Martin said when he mentioned about the fact that clients see advertising as a weak force, I think this is a very fundamental question, like even for strategists, like do you see the advertising as a strong force or as a weak force? Because one way of thinking is evidence-based, which is that advertising actually is a weak force and the other is very intuitive one that just has a longer history and that that's why it keeps this myth still alive but if you start to kind of like look for be a little bit like a cinderella who is kind of like you know sorting out what is the what is the grain what is the chaff then you start to understand that a lot of these concepts are very intuitive they just sound good they just are very used to um they are very kind of like a common to be used around the agency environments but then they keep up a lot of myths like for example even the the focus on proposition or that we need to think about the message first campaigns where we know from the evidence-based point of view that actually we need to think about how to build memories and how to build emotional associations around the brands and there are still a huge i would say amount of strategists and practitioners all around the world that would say like, you know, we need to think about message, we need to think about the proposition, and they would not be aware that actually evidence-based view is completely different.

23:52Catherine Driscoll: And then again, even if we are focusing on, let's say, these kind of like concepts that are timeless, we still need to create our own critical filter. Does these concepts actually apply to my client and their current situation? Because maybe these concepts are very relevant for, let's say, one percentage of Fortune 500 brands, which are, you know, the leaders in the markets, but maybe they are not applicable to your, I don't know, small local brand with whom you are operating in your, I don't know,

24:21Baiba Matisone: on your daily basis. I think that's such a good point because it's a question we have a lot with walk clients. You know, they see the amazing, you know, can campaigns that might be award-winning, but, you know, the distance between that and actually their current budgets they're working with and restrictions of those clients are quite different. And so kind of knowing those timeless principles really matters. And of course, that's something that we're really keen on at WALK. We love to collect them and share those best practices. But how does that link commercially, as well as being a craft problem that perhaps people are jumping on the latest bandwagon without, you know, one of the thoughts is the sort of, there was a lot of thinking that digital replaced everything that had come before you know when there was more of an era of broadcast advertising and of course you know we still seen that a lot of those timeless principles which as you say it comes around emotion absolutely remain true even though the delivery method might have changed

25:16Martin Beverley: a lot yeah i think i think it's a really important point that you guys make that it feels like everything's changing rapidly and it is but there are timeless principles that stay that one of my favorite quotes was from for this industry is from bill burnback when he talked about it i know it's out of date and sexist but he talks about unchanging man and how everyone is obsessed with changing man and what's going on but unchanging man and sort of emotion and humanity and what motivates people that's gonna not change rapidly that's kind of human beings and and i think too much of the industry is very quick to change things as well so there's like a new brand platform every year or two and that just doesn't build to fiber's point the the emotional associations and the memories that are really important to create a compound effect so whilst things are changing very quickly it's really important to also look at what shouldn't change

26:13Catherine Driscoll: and some of those fundamentals i think it's very important for every strategist and even every practitioner even for creatives and whoever is working in advertising industry and also on marketing side is to build a sufficient their own knowledge base because this is a critical filter that is actually working in our mind to judge the stuff that we are kind of receiving from others and also from ai and if we don't have a sufficient knowledge base or very critical filter how to judge the information we will accept stuff that actually doesn't hold any truth we know how much ai and And LLMs are kind of like a hallucinating stuff that where we have, let's say, expertise.

26:56Catherine Driscoll: We can easily see like, oh, this is not true. That's not true. This needs to be, I don't know, improved or I can still ask some questions for the AI to be more clearer. But can you imagine how much of the information is also LLMs hallucinating when we don't have the expertise? Like it's the same thing. We just fall for that stuff by not knowing like how to critically analyze that information.

27:20Baiba Matisone: Absolutely. It's always very plausible and very agreeable, which helps make people feel smart, but they might be doing something that is definitely not smart by accepting it all. But I mean, with the discussion about AI, there's a lot of talk about reduction in junior roles because of tasks going towards AI. So how can we make sure that future strategists develop these kind of timeless knowledge that helps them make decisions when it comes to what they're looking at?

27:47Catherine Driscoll: I think the question is about being right fast or being right in advance. And that makes a huge difference. Because if you want to be fast and being right at the moment, then you can go and, you know, you can get those answers immediately. But then for a young talent is also another problem on the other side when they want to be right in advance and learn those, let's say, fundamental principles. It is that they are kind of like sharing this feedback that there's too much information out there. And they are getting tired of all of these also contradictory opinions. And then comes the question like who is right and who is wrong, to whom I need to follow or who I need to kind of like reject or skip from my timeline or from my, you know, learning journey.

28:32Catherine Driscoll: And I think for them, it's just getting very, very overwhelming to kind of understand what is actually important and what is not.

28:40Martin Beverley: I also think in relation to that, the importance of distinctiveness. I know that's always been important but I think it almost becomes even more important as you get this kind of regression to average and everything kind of feeling the same and I think I'm right in saying there was a Malcolm Gladwell quote from a few years ago where he was talking about the difference between right and interesting he was like if I was a surgeon I'd want to be right because I need to save someone's life and get that operation correct but I'm not I'm a journalist so much more interested in interesting and standing out and getting people talking and i think that's still as a fundamental so important to what we do is doing something distinctive that grabs attention and sticks in people's memory and and positions a brand that we're working on as there's just something in people's minds rather than the the sort of smattering of everything else that might be in and around our brains so i think that just becomes something we can't lose as a fundamental.

29:43Baiba Matisone: And that distinctiveness also works for the two audience problem in that AI is able to kind of identify brands more efficiently if they've got real distinctiveness compared to each other. But we've talked about a few problems with strategy, from fees to knowledge. But one thing that was actually a really interesting theme from this year's report was strategists were more optimistic about the future of strategy than they had been in previous surveys especially last year so do you both share that optimism and what's changed over the last year

30:18Martin Beverley: well I should start by saying I feel like I have an optimism bias which is a little bit of a psychological problem that I have at the beginning of this year I did a talk on 26 and a half reasons to be cheerful in 2026 because I do think it's helpful when you're glass half full and I think strategy is about seeing the future and writing a more optimistic vision of the future. Now, it can't be blind optimism. You do need, obviously, to really understand the realities of today. So you kind of need to be an optimistic pessimist, if that's a thing. But I do share some of that optimism. We started a company a year ago, which I think has a real optimism to it.

30:57Martin Beverley: It's double positive in its name and I think I feel like at least I've seen a number of kind of studies and things where client partners are looking for strategy and maybe that is because everything feels so discombobulating at the moment and they feel like they want a sense of direction and clarity and that's what the best strategy gives it helps set a path and a direction but I feel like at least what I'm seeing, clients are looking for that a little bit more alongside creativity and the two really fitting hand in hand. So yeah, I do feel optimistic overall, but I'm not also pretending it's not tough out there.

31:39Baiba Matisone: That's true. I mean, Bible, would you agree? I mean, the other side of it is that, you know, we've seen that perhaps AI is making strategy more valuable and sort of Martin alluded to that, that clients are looking for a bit of help navigating all of this change.

31:51Catherine Driscoll: I think that past two years, at least based on future strategy reports, there were a lot of these kind of like frustration and fear, like a lot of also negativity that strategists doesn't know how to use properly AI tools and stuff like that. And now I feel like the industry has went through this crisis and now we have figured out how to use AI more or less properly in our work. And maybe from there, this kind of like a little bit overhyped optimism is coming out. It's just my personal kind of like feeling because I look back because normally every year I go through this future of strategy report and I analyze like, you know, what are some sort of parents that are popping up?

32:34Catherine Driscoll: And I was like, oh, those past two years kind of look very dark. And now suddenly it's like people are very optimistic about like the future of strategy. It's like it feels like that was like a dark times. And now we are just going up and feeling more positive about ourselves in the future. versus if you talk to the futurists, they will paint a completely different picture about our industry and how much strategy will be needed, let's say, in the next five to 10 years. And what they are kind of like drawing as predictions is that strategy will become more and more programmatic and there will be less need for strategists in the room.

33:09So I don't know.

33:11Catherine Driscoll: It depends like how we feel and what kind of future is actually kind of like, you know, arising behind the corner. and those are two different things. It's true.

33:20Baiba Matisone: There's always cycles.

33:21Catherine Driscoll: Yeah.

33:22Baiba Matisone: But, you know, perhaps Martin's approach of becoming more of a client partner, you know, is a way for strategists to kind of enhance their value for the future, we hope. But, you know, thinking about two different features perhaps here, you know, to ask you both, what's one thing that you would change about the way, you know, strategies bought by clients or how it's practiced today?

33:44Martin Beverley: I mean, I would go back to the, I guess the essence of the article that I wrote, which is that I would like us to be paid for the value that we add rather than the time it takes. Because I think if that is the sort of North Star, it encourages us to get more upstream. It encourages us to influence more and ultimately really realize more value than just the timesheet based model that feels out of date. So that would be my summary.

34:11Baiba Matisone: Yeah, that's a great way to sort of, you know, ultimately make your whole business about getting more upstream, which works better for everyone. How about you, Baiba?

34:20Catherine Driscoll: I will still go back to the fundamentals. If you don't have a clear understanding about the fundamentals and how to judge your own work and your team's work, you can't create a good output. So you need to first kind of like, you know, make the clarity what is timeless, what is actually a temporary, and also what is intuitive and what is evidence-based. when you have that clarity you can also then shift the conversation in the client room if the client talks from a very intuitive point of view like hey let's now shift the conversation into more evidence-based way because then you can actually get closer to the real growth and real success otherwise we will just be doing some cool things around trends and some sort of cultural i don't know events but then if you really want to grow the brand you need to look at completely different kind of like a parent and you need to focus then on these law like parents in a evidence-based way of thinking around the marketing so yeah my suggestion is still yeah

35:20Baiba Matisone: go back to the fundamentals well i think both of those things are a really optimistic future for a strategy if we can embrace them so that's all we have time for in today's episode some really interesting advice and thoughts on the future of strategy and i feel we've given listeners a lot to be optimistic about by looking at how strategy provides value to the business. So Martin and Byber, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your expertise. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you'd like more information on the future of strategy report we've discussed today, head to walk.com or reach out to us directly.

35:57Baiba Matisone: Thank you for listening.

36:06Thank you.