• by Stacia Hanley , Op-Ed Contributor, November 2, 2015

We all know the story well: Our landscape has evolved from setting established objectives focused on moving the transactional needle to moving our audiences’ emotional and behavioral needles to stay visible amongst the clutter.

And, we’re all evolving ourselves along with it, right? We see in the weekly columns here, for instance, a call from our own to establish new roles and processes that can more fully enhance and leverage this landscape by incorporating new processes that address this new, melded world of creative, strategy, media and technology. 

But hey, guess what? I work in an ad agency that employs 13 full time people. Not media people. Total employees. We don’t have the luxury of some of our holding-company-held friends to create and fund new positions of expertise. I have to figure it out myself, using what I’ve got in front of me. Bootstrapping is the stuff of small agency dreams.

Regardless, I find that changing up my ideas and trading them in for new ones — even if the trade-in is only temporary — has been hugely beneficial in the pre-planning and strategic phases of our cross-channel campaigns.

I offer up the list below as a place to get you to start thinking outside of your usual means.

Be critical of, and know the difference between, a media plan and a communications strategy.
Media plans and creative should naturally fall out of the strategies that come before them in the pre-planning stages of a campaign. The work you do in the strategic phase that connects to the brand strategy and informs the creative brief is always the most important. Get that right first and cross-channel planning will pass much more easily.

(A note for those of you without access to brand work: Track it down! Ask for it! Oftentimes the media brief is coming at you after strategy is all said and done, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take what’s there and make it your own by bridging the gap between that brand strategy and your cross-channel media plan.)

You will have to tell more stories, maybe more than you feel comfortable telling.
Pre-planning is 10% research and 90% the story you craft as a result of combining that research with intuitive knowledge and real-world experience. The latter two make most planners uncomfortable — they can’t track it! — but few great stories were ever told as the result of some data and an exact formula. If the story you’re trying to tell is interesting and relevant, it will serve your communications strategy and media plans that much more.

You are going to have to try lots of different things, and not all of the spaghetti is going to stick.
This is why the pre-planning phase is so important. Strategy is the thing you have to get right. But because this process isn’t as straightforward as a media plan, you won’t always be as sure of your answers.

Options help. Brainstorming sessions help. Storytelling helps. It’s all a means for stress-testing the field of opportunity and selecting what not only feels best but also includes data points to support it. It’s hard. And that’s okay.

Ask different kinds of questions, even if you think they’re weird.
Focus on how media might behave that’s similar to different kinds of real-life experiences. How those experiences make you feel presumably are similar to how you want your audience to feel.

• “What if the media acted like a tour of a museum?”
• “What if the communications were to act like the most interesting guy at the party?”
• “What if the campaign rolled out like a story someone would follow in the news?

If all else fails, talk to your most friendly (and free!) resources
Sometimes it’s a friend at another agency. Sometimes it’s a rep you’ve worked with for a long time who knows your work or your client’s industry particularly well. Even better, maybe you have editorial contacts who can share what kinds of stories they’re telling to relevant industries.

Don’t be scared.
Do you have a lot on the line? Of course you do. Agencies and clients alike live and die by their ideas and results. But you’re not going to get any better at this unless you’re actively seeking out the things that make your campaigns feel right: The stories that make sense on a tactical, strategic and emotional level. 

If we’re really serious about revolutionizing the world we work in, we need to revolutionize the way we work so that we may be better stewards of our clients’ problems and dollars across all kinds of new landscapes. It’s going to take time. It’s going to stretch our minds and resources and comfort zones. And it’s going to be a helluva lot more fun once we open up to changing it up.