Setting Yourself Up For Ambitious Problem Solving

By: Anna Gaudio, VP, Experience Strategy Director at McCann Health NY

For everything, there is a season. And in the advertising agency world, tactical planning is one such season. Just the words elicit a sense of intense foreboding, striking dread and skepticism in even the most seasoned marketer’s mind.

Yet for some of us—who believe ourselves to be the chosen few—tactical planning season is our favorite time of the year. Rather than dread, it elicits curiosity. We view tactical planning season as a world of opportunity that we’re desperate to explore, where our creative concepts grab hold of moments in time to captivate our audience and make a lasting impression.

While each brand, account, and client is different, there are a few processes and approaches that have proven to be a strong companion in each of the tactical planning seasons I’ve faced. I hope these serve to support your activation efforts and rebrand the perils of tactical ideation to instead reveal invigorating potential.

Crystallizing human problems

Perhaps the biggest reoccurring obstacle I face in tactical ideation is the temptation to simply pull through marketing objective or strategic imperative language directly to creative brainstorming. While they should serve as a North Star, your marketing objectives (or similar strategic guideposts) are not generally framed in a way to elicit organic, creative problem-solving. Simply put, they’re framed as brand-centric goals rather than human-centric problems.

We are naturally storytellers. We connect to people and empathize with one another when we understand context and can imagine ourselves filling up the spaces of those stories. So to best partner with your team’s creative minds, aim to rephrase your strategy-heavy goals into human problems. Consider your stakeholders, who—we are quick to forget—are living, breathing people, and challenge your team to meet a need they face. A need that would serve both your customers and your brand.

How might we…

At this point, you’ve reframed your marketing challenges into approachable, empathy-driven human problems. This next step isn’t always necessary, but I’ve found that creative minds tend to respond better to possibilities than directives. Meaning if we take the power of a “how might we…?” question to interrogate the problem through the lens of possible solutions, we may improve our chances of landing on tangible ideas.

Take a look at the below for a few examples. You’ll see that these interrogations are starting to suggest solution avenues or methods or even channels. For each human problem, you may have 3-5 “how might we…?” questions. The goal is to attack the problem from multiple angles, guiding solutions down an avenue of possibilities. This guidance often leads to additional thought starters or sub-ideas that build a more inclusive approach to problem-solving, striking the balance between a jumpstart to ideation and prescriptive direction.

Avoiding snooze-fest stimuli

I can’t tell you what stimuli is best suited for your brand and ideation needs. But I can tell you that the best tools I’ve used have been intuitive; they’re able to be applied to a range of challenges so that teams become comfortable with the process, but they also help to foster unique ideas regardless of challenge details. My team has used a technology matchmaking game, a list of cultural tensions passed around in round-robin-style small group ideation, out-of-industry inspirational case studies, and emerging and existing channel capabilities.

During your ideation sessions, quantity is important and rapid list-making is valuable. But don’t lose sight of the goal: quality ideas and themes that can be executed across multiple points, both in high- and low-fidelity contexts. I’ve found it best to show the breadth of fewer ideas with multiple components rather than a long list of disparate ideas that don’t exhibit scale. Of course, you know your account and decision makers best, but you may find efficiency in determining potential by working through a more focused, deliberate tactical plan.

Tactical formulation

Perhaps the least exciting but most important step is landing the plane on the tactics themselves, and grouping and mapping similar themes back to your marketing objectives. When not dictated by an existing template, I prefer to group tactical solutions by problem. With this template approach, each tactic and/or program includes the overall objective (that brand-centric language we discussed earlier), the problem it addresses, the summary of the idea, and the components that support the larger idea. By using a consistent template, it ensures that ideas exist at the right “altitude,” not getting bogged down in the details of channel activation or too high level that a tactical brief would require extensive additional ideation. And of course I’d recommend a “creative snack” to better visualize the idea, so be sure to give ample time for your creative partners to work alongside you in finalizing the tactics/programs (this should go without saying, but alas…).

Brilliant block-and-tackle

“Block-and-tackle” gets a bad rap. It seems to be a global catch-all for the tactics and programs and channels that are assumed as part of a “standard” marketing plan, and therefore are tacked on as their own bucket at the end of many tactical planning decks. I suppose the general assumption is fair, but to take that at face value would be a gross under-appreciation for the potential of a properly executed block-and-tackle initiatives. What happens when budgets are cut and what’s left on the table is the tried and true, “standard” plan? Do you throw hope to the wind? Of course not. You block-and-tackle the hell out of that plan.

The single most important piece of the B&T puzzle is scalability against multiple contexts. If your goal is set broadly to raise awareness, all of your messages and channel activations will be fairly consistent, giving you little flexibility or adaptability across your marketing funnel (read: customer journey).

Instead, while you’re creating your messaging and channel plan, prioritize modular content creation. Build your messaging against an adoption ladder, identifying the current beliefs and behaviors compared to the desired beliefs and behaviors, and the barriers to achieving the intended result. This will inherently build communication objectives, which allow your messages to scale across your goals, meeting objectives designed around your customers’ behavior rather than forcing your customers into a marketing stage. When paired with data-informed deployment logic that’s triggered based on users’ contextual data, your B&T initiatives will bring you all the joy of “big ideas” without the inflated price tag.