28 - U.N.N.A.M.E.D.: strategy is a map, not a shortcut

Speaker A: Five years ago, everyone had creative director in their Insta bio. Now it's strategist. So what's happened? And how can a brand make sure strategy is more than an expensive statement in a PDF?

Speaker B: The act of branding is less about planting a flag and more about map making and feeling out a, uh, terrain. And that's similarly to how I see strategy, where it's a tool for orientation around whether it's a goal or within a certain space. It, you know, gives you focus or meaning for a future you want to create. But it isn't a singular sentence that lives in a deck. It's something that needs to be specific enough to mean something, but flexible enough to mean many things to many people in many departments.

Speaker A: I'm Emma, and for this episode of Private Views, I sat down with Nikita Waglia, strategy director at New York Creative Studio Unnamed. She's worked with Fortune 1002 and she's worked with early stage startups, helping them find their footing in a landscape that's perpetually complicated. So are agencies taking over from management consultants. How much difference can strategy make? And when does a business actually need to hire someone like Nikita? Well, we asked her. We asked her what good strategy looks like, why we all need more fiction and fewer marketing books, and, um, why the very best kind of creative strategy could be described as bendy. Let's talk about strategy. It's everywhere, Nikita. Strategy is everywhere. Everyone wants some strategy. Everyone's talking suddenly about how strategy is the underpinning of every great brand to. Does that feel new or has that always been the case, do you think?

Speaker B: I think that is slightly new. I like to joke that job, uh, titles go through different cycles of hype and sex appeal. And the way five or six years ago, everybody had creative director in their Instagram bio, it's now strategist or brand strategist or strategy director, which is quite funny because in some ways, yes, it is quite a sexy job to have, and in others, it's quite, quite unsexy.

Speaker A: So tell us how you got to strategy. Am I right in thinking that you were focused on social media before, so you've gone down a bit of a journey to get to where you are?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I did not even want to be in advertising or branding. I moved to New York to do a, uh, PolSci program at NYU and then hated the way that it was being taught to me. Uh, I always loved history and, you know, anthropology and learning about people in all of my history classes in high school. That was, like, what I was so Inspired and interested in. And then I got to college and it was all game theory and quite mathematical and I didn't love that. I wanted to learn about people and history and how things change. And so I dropped into doing, you know, my core program the first two years and exploring a little bit. And in that time I started interning at uh, a social media agency and I kind of just got going from there. It was the early days of social. It felt really exciting. It felt like being the first in the room to something like being the first in the room to tech might have felt 10, 20 years ago. And in retrospect it all makes sense because I went from a social media agency to a couple of branding and e commerce agencies, then back to social. Then I consulted for a while, again starting with the root of social. And then gradually I started moving more and more upstream into brand business innovation. And a lot of that was just feeling like I had something to prove. Often as the social marketer in the room, you're the last to be briefed. Everyone thinks they can do your job because everybody has an Instagram account, but it is a lot simpler and also a lot more complicated than that. And so I had all this diverse experience and anyways, I ran my own company for about six years, primarily working with early stage startups, but also doing a lot of foundational like category strategies for brands. Often that would start from a social ask and then they realized there was a bigger business problem at the root of it. Um, and then last fall I joined unnamed and now I'm, I would say 70 to 80% focused on foundational brand business and innovation strategy. And then I also, you know, having a marketer background is really helpful working in a branding studio because you can often check your own BS a little bit. You can think about, okay, if I was a comms leader, you know, going to PR with this, would uh, I even know what to say or take away from this deck to brief in the team? Would I know how to give my TikTok, you know, creator a brief based on this strategy? It's a really nice set of complementary skills to have. So that's really how I got into strategy. It's kind of a rare story in that I've always worked in strategy and I got a strategy title very early in my career. Right out of college I was an associate strategist. And now looking back, of course, hindsight is everything. I realize how rare that is. It's really hard, it seems like, to get a junior strategy role now.

Speaker A: Do you think the same things that made you so good at social media are the same things that make you very good at strategy as well.

Speaker B: Well, thank you for saying very. I'm very good at strategy, but I think above all, it is being curious about people and the world. I think when you're on social, especially the speed that social media moves now, you intake so much information. You intake information from so many different cultures and people, and, you know, even just political movements happening around the world. And I think it just naturally makes you attuned to filtering out what you don't need to listen to, but what you can apply. So I think it's above all just a curiosity about people that can be persistent in social media strategy, but it can also be in brand or anything you do.

Speaker A: That kind of goes all the way back to what we were saying at the beginning. You were saying you found anthropology fascinating. You found behavior and people fascinating. So in a way, you've almost come full circle. Y full circle, which feels like a nice thing to do.

Speaker B: It does. And, you know, when I was preparing for this, something I was thinking about is, I don't know how I thought I wouldn't end up in this line of work, because when I was a kid, I was fascinated with reading the cartons of, like, cereal. When I was eating breakfast, I'd read shampoo bottles in the shower. And it was, like, fascinating to me that somebody wrote what I was reading in that context. Because as, uh, a child, you're often thinking about reading as something you do from a book or at school and not just all around you in that way. And that somebody, like, sat there and did that. I'm like, wow, that's a weird job to have. And here I am, Here you are

Speaker A: doing that weird job.

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%.

Speaker A: What would you define strategy as? Because as is inevitable when something becomes very buzzy in the brand world, in the business world, in the creative world, the word gets thrown around a lot. And I feel like I've seen it so many times, it's almost starting to lose meaning. And I wonder if people are always clear on exactly what it actually is.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, there are a half dozen definitions floating around just in the strategy world itself. And I think it's slightly controversial to say that I don't think of strategy as a fix object. Um, a creative director that I work very closely with at work, Elliot Radenberg and I, we gave a talk called Cartographies of Meaning. And in that, we posed this idea that just the act of branding is less about Planting a flag and more about map making and feeling out a, uh, terrain. And that's similarly to how I see strategy, where it's a tool for orientation around whether it's a goal or within a certain space. It gives you focus or meaning for a future you want to create. But it isn't a singular sentence that lives in a deck. And I also think it's something that needs to be specific enough to mean something, but flexible enough to mean many things to many people in many departments. It needs to set an incentive for, you know, people at the highest level of the business that are making product decisions. And then it also needs to make sense to, like I mentioned, the TikTok creator creating TikToks for the brand every day. So it is quite hard to do that. It takes a lot of thinking and writing and rewriting and checking your own ego. And so that's largely what I think strategy is.

Speaker A: I'd hazard a guess that there's a few people at brands marketers, founders who cynically might think to themselves, m well, this strategy is just a statement. I paid an agency a lot of money for. It's in my PDF now. What do I do with it? It doesn't always become that living, breathing plan or problem solving thing that you're talking about 100%.

Speaker B: And I think, you know, in the past we've all experienced a version of that in assignments. We've done something that I like to set up early for clients is the understanding that this is going to be very much a tool for orientation for hopefully the next three to five years of your business, that for it to work, whether you're a big org or a smaller org, you're going to need to get everybody on board. Building that thing is the reason you all show up to work every day to get behind that goal. Whether you're at a sneaker brand brand and you're making sketches for shoes the next season, whether you're an engineer at a company and you're making product decisions with your product team, everybody needs to feel bought into that. And in our work we do a lot of getting everybody on board. You know, we encourage people of different disciplines to attend all like early branding meetings, etc. And I think that's what makes the exercise successful. Something Virgilio, uh, one of our co founders and creative director says a lot is he talks about, you know, stories and systems and brands as interfaces. He came up through rga, so he has a lot of, you know, thinking about brand through, you know, the interaction at the product level, but also holistically on a billboard. And he is so focused on making sure that that message is singular and truthful and also expansive. So even working with creatives like that in the room, it's so helpful as a strategist to have everybody bought in on that idea, because it's not only the external buy in, it's also the internal buy in of your team.

Speaker A: Yeah, sure. It's interesting. You're talking about something kind of infrastructural there, this idea that you really need to get the whole company bought into this. Do you feel like a strategist? Would you describe it as a business function or a creative function, or a sort of heady, alluring, uh, mix of both of the two?

Speaker B: I think it is, uh, quite a mix of the two. And I think it requires a lot of emotional intelligence, knowing which side to dial up when. There are times you'll be in rooms with suits and you'll have to make a commercial case for what you're doing and why they should change a supply chain decision or, you know, we're working with an app right now and we've told them the. Some of their staffing needs to be in and of the neighborhoods in which this company will operate. And that is a big decision that you need a CEO bought in on that is coming through the lens of brand, but it is very much, at the end of the day, an economic decision for him. So there's things like that where you dial up the commercial side and then there's the creative side, where you're very much, you know, going back and forth with a creative director about landing the right zone of focus or idea or concept to get something across the line. But I'm very grateful that now, where I am at, uh, unnamed, we have a really great relationship between strategy and creative and great respect between both functions, which I think many strategists will say is not always true.

Speaker A: What would you say strategy isn't? Where are the. Because it's. It's kind of a nebulous thing in the way you've described it, and that's its beauty. But where are those hard boundaries? What are you like, no, don't expect X, Y and Z from your strategist. This is not what they're going to give to you.

Speaker B: Interesting. And maybe this makes it clearer or it makes it worse. But I wrote a list of things and I have this whole section in my notes titled what is strategy? It's not just what you say, it's what you're taking A stake in ideologically, which we covered extensively. It's not a set of vocabulary just because you said it's a purpose or a mission. Again, if you're not aligned around it ideologically and business wise, it doesn't make sense. It's not, you know, research stapled to a deck. Research is certainly a part of it. But I have experienced, you know, times as a freelancer where people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we just need to show we did the research. That's the strategy. It's not a shortcut. You often see it brands, there's a changing of the guard, A new CMO comes in, there's a new mandate, they hire a bunch of agencies, they do the same strategy exercise they've done 18 months prior. And it's not a shortcut to showing that you did something. And it's not a shortcut to justify a business decision you've made. You can't just reverse engineer the strategy to match a rebrand you've already chosen. It's, you know, as I mentioned, needs to be broad enough, but also specific enough. So it needs to have, you know, life beyond a singular campaign. So if you rooted the main insight of a brand strategy around a singular, say, phenomenon, TikTok, that would be a wrong decision. You know, things like that are sort of disposable and fleeting, and perhaps if that continues, then that strategy is accumulating meeting over time. But that's just not how things move. And, you know, I think the last thing I'd say is it's not 100% certainty. You know, a strategy is the best judgment of the market at, uh, the time. It's not necessarily a guarantee. And I think we can all agree we're living in these unprecedented times, the last few years, where trade policies are just flights of fancy and geopolitics are just flights of fancy. So, you know, how endearing can something really be if you, you know, are a retail brand and you're making all these big business decisions around those, you know, those things happening.

Speaker A: I spoken to people before about how branding is no longer this thing that you just do and then it's fixed, it's changing, it's iterative, it has to be able to flex. And that feels like it's more and more the case. And it's interesting that what you're saying suggests that actually strategy really needs that level of bendiness in it as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, we talk about something here, unnamed, called regenerative branding, which is really our answer to the AI age. And increasingly, we are Being asked not only to work on AI products, but also AI products that might have a voice assistant or have some sort of central almost mascot guide figurehead. And even doing personality design for that is something maybe you wouldn't have to do 10 years ago. And you have to design for so many edge cases and use cases and also just an intelligent system that's always learning and evolving. And so we talk a lot about how can a brand be regenerative? How can we give clients the tools to take the work forward, to make it something useful for their creative teams, to make it easy to brief in people at the highest and lowest level so that to uh, us practically looks like Figma's toolkits instead of, you know, like a traditional PDF or a leather bound book. It involves a lot of templating. We're experimenting with training AIs on our work so that clients can m more effectively carry work forward. So you know, we're trying to lean into the ambiguity and answer the moment rather than staying in like a very purist ivory tower conception of branding. You know, Manny and Virgilia were both at rga. They saw so many changes, changes in technology. So I think having leaders too that embrace tech instead of resist it is nice to have um, across an org like ours.

Speaker A: All the stuff you're talking about is very much centered around problem solving or ideally it's going to be problem solving and helping a brand grow. And something we've spoken about a bit, ask us for ideas is that roles and jobs that were historically given to management consultants are often now going to creative agencies. They're taking more of that problem solving role. Do you think brands are thinking of creative agencies in that way or do you think there's a lot of businesses still kind of going to the management consultant as their problem solving strategic port of call?

Speaker B: First, I think both sides of the market are trying to crack the opposite problem. Management consultants are trying to be more creative and create creative groups. And then creative agencies are rightfully moving more upstream trying to solve those thorny brand and business problems. And I think that's because I think we've all somehow 50, 60, 70 years into the practice of strategy, realized that often a brand problem is at its core a business problem. And I think that having practitioners that can speak equally well to both is kind of a secret weapon. And you know, controversially, I think everybody is creative, but I think the practice of creativity every single day is not something that everybody is doing. And I think that is why creative agencies are sort of winning out. Uh, over some of these management consultants.

Speaker A: I think it, or I imagine it can be very hard if you're a marketer, uh, at brand or you're a founder, uh, and you really know that business inside out. And in your head you might be thinking to yourself, well, it's obvious to me the strategy for my business is, I don't know, to sell more shoes, to play a bit of devil's advocate. Why would you then go and hire Nikita and say to her, nikita, I need some help. My sales are down. I'm clear on my strategy. But there's a problem here. What is it that that person can do that you can't do yourself?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that is a tough question. I have found more often than not that the sort of successful assignments I've worked on and had are where a client is sort of seeing the writing on the wall, where the business might be going well right now, but it can't go on this way with this strategy three to five years out. And often in those cases they say some version of uh, you know, actually like push us on the decisions we're making because we're living and breathing this brand every day and you're coming in from the outside. I think that is sort of one thing and then I think the other is really who you're working with within the business. We work with a lot of design leaders within these big orgs, we work with a lot of marketing M leaders within these big orgs and the way we work is quite collaborative and embedded and we're also very senior team. Everybody is director or above. So I think when you get to that also that place in your career, you're used to sort of what it takes to build that relationship and trust to get whatever objective you're all running behind over the line. So I think it is really just being a good partner. I think coming from a place of, you know, humble service, we do work in a service industry, um, and really having a great deal of empathy for the problem that your customer or client might be up against and also realizing one thing I've realized is, you know, when you're working with an early stage startup, the problems are very existential and they don't need the same kind of big strategy that a Nike would. They haven't found product market fit yet. It's really about keeping the company alive to get through the next gate of funding or acquire 100 customers. And so sometimes they might just need a Google Doc that takes what's their founder vision in their mind and makes it into something that people in the org can rally around. But then you get to the scale of a Nike or an Apple or a Netflix, and the job is equally about doing what's right for the business, but also knowing that the, you know, brand lead that you're working with is your sponsor within the org. And a part of this is probably them wanting to look good and sell in a big piece of work across the org. And how can you make them look prepared and intelligent and insightful? And that will make the work travel further within their org, too. So it's also dialing up your style here and there.

Speaker A: As we know, lots of these things are in the setup. You know, it's how you brief your agency, it's how you prepare your agency, it's the information you give them. Sometimes I feel like, for a rebrand, that feels like a more obvious thing to do. How do you recommend that brands and marketers brief agencies on a strategy challenge that they're facing? And what is it that those strategists actually really need to know from the business? You don't want to die by data, but you need enough of something to be able to get your head into the game and figure out what's going on.

Speaker B: Yeah, I personally, I'm an information maximalist. I kind of. I kind of tell clients, give me everything, and I'll decide what's not important. Because sometimes, you know, data has biases too. One person looks at it one way and another person might have another perspective on it. So there's things like that, you know, at, uh, an early stage level, it's really just spending a lot of time linking arms with a founder and maybe some initial leadership they're bringing on. And then at, you know, the bigger stages, like right now we're working with a sportswear brand on a big, you know, brand strategy for one of their categories. And that for us, you know, having been through this before, involved doing a listening tour of. I think we spoke to 20 different people across their org with very different disciplines. We spoke with everyone from sports marketing to consumer research to, you know, even people that are, like, physically building product to PR and really learning everybody's interest in and frustration with the category. So I welcome all the information. I think it's like your job as a strategist to be the vessel and synthesizer of all of it.

Speaker A: That, to me, feels like the most fun bit, that it's almost the kind of ethnographic research bit where you talk to all these people who have got these different points of view. That maybe are never encountering each other and maybe don't even know the other person exists. And then you get this full spectrum of exactly how the whole company is feeling 100%.

Speaker B: And also there's some people that are lifers at that company and they have this like, time hardened attitude. And then there's an optimistic new cmo and then they're up against this person that's like, well, we tried this in 2004 and it didn't work. And how do you navigate working with both personalities? Like, that is really interesting to me. And then also as a kid, I loved, like reading and learning. And what I love about being a strategist is I can get really deep on learning about something for a couple of months and then the next day, you know, one day or a couple of months at sportswear, and then it might be like a brand new AI tool. And I am not a technical person and I'm suddenly trying to understand what these engineers are trying to do.

Speaker A: You must have developed some interesting pockets of knowledge over the years. Quite niche areas of knowledge.

Speaker B: I have some really random facts that come out at inopportune times.

Speaker A: Nikita, when is the time? Or how can you identify that you really need to hire a strategist or a strategy agency? Uh, people always say, well, you know, it's obvious sales are down. That's a really big one. But, you know, I feel like sales are down. Maybe you need a rebrand, maybe you need an ad campaign. How do you know which is the creative route that is right for whatever your particular problem is?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a, uh, few things. I think at the earliest stages, it's about bringing clarity. When I work with early stage founders, I often tell them, you know, what you need to do. There's a reason you're putting every bet you have into this business. So tell me what you see and I will channel that. And then when you think about in a company that's a little bit later stage or getting bigger, some of the signs I think are, you know, the story keeps changing. Every six months, you're introducing yourself to the market in a different way. It can be subtle, but it's, you know, dialing up different attributes of the brand. The campaigns don't feel like they're coming from the same brand. Like there's no creative through line. Your employees can't really answer what kind of culture or what you stand for as a company or where you're trying to innovate. You aren't seeing growth. Even though you're putting tons of dollars behind marketing, whether that's paid or it's building a bigger marketing org. You're entering sort of a new terrain. Maybe you have a new product, maybe you need to cultivate a new audience. I've worked on several brands where their audience is quite literally aging and dying. You are trying to enter a new geography and you don't know the cultural customs. That's a great time to hire a strategist. And you know, you're reactive, you're not directional. There's a lot of brands that look at what their immediate competition is doing and then turn to their creative teams and like and say, can we do something like that? And that's a great time to bring in a strategist to bring some order and rigor so that there's less of this steer going on.

Speaker A: I find it fascinating how many brands that you think would really, really know what they're doing. How often they feel like they're just chasing their tails. Yeah, I've seen some really strange product launches from very big companies. I kind of think to myself, wow, what kind of conversations are they having? What's the plan here? Is there a plan or is this just very reactive like you say?

Speaker B: I think that this meme marketing over trend reactive thing, we're going to see a, uh, 180 from it. I think that like memes and trends are useful tools for, you know, one part of the journey. But when you're suddenly building just around a singular trend or meme, that's when you're getting it wrong and you're getting all this knee jerk reaction. Like there is a chance to work with say like a Love island contestant. Sure. But maybe your brand always has a history of working with, you know, like pop culture influencers. Like I would not blink an eye if skims brought on the like most viral Love island contestant. But if all of a sudden Nike's doing that, then it's like, okay, what objective are you trying to meet? And it's very clearly visibility and is it for the right reasons.

Speaker A: Something I've really enjoyed seeing is some conversations around creative thinking and how much it's driven by data and how much it's driven by intuition. And I've seen more people start to talk about the fact that data quite often can help steer things, but it's never really the full story. And that for a lot of creatives it's so important to remember that you have intuition. Like you have intuition about human behavior and what feels right. And is that part of your role as a strategist is deciding when to chase the data and when to chase that kind of feeling that you have that that's the way to go. This is the thing to pursue 100%.

Speaker B: I think that is very much the job, to sort of illuminate the right data, data and the right, you know, pieces of qualitative information. You know, right now, like I mentioned, we're working on a big strategy for a sportswear brand and we have all this data around how this particular sport we're working on is growing and having every emergence. But then also I'm speaking to young athletes in the sport and their story around the sport is not too dissimilar from what you would even hear 30 years ago, which is like, my dad introduced me to this. It's the only way my dad and I can have a conversation sometimes. And so it's nice to have that and like, find a ripe creative territory between like, what the league might be doing from a business level, but then from like the story of the sport almost being like an heirloom. And I think that creates so many things for a creative team. And that comes from the intuition of knowing what data to illuminate, uh, illuminated, and then what insights to carry forward.

Speaker A: Do you feel like you're a natural storyteller and that you're drawn to the things that are good stories, the bits of data that tell that story and then how you can incorporate that into the business?

Speaker B: I think that not always. I think it's a skill I've cultivated. I think, you know, a lot of people are great writers, but they're not editors. I kind of see strategy similar way. I've sat in meetings where someone is presenting to me and you're sitting there like, did we really need 70 to 90 slides to tell us women buy skincare? What is interesting about that? Let's go one layer deeper about what are the insecurities they might be having, what they might feel when they put a particular cream on their face. So it's kind of interesting. I think you have to be a really good editor and, um, to call out your own bullshit. You know, there's so many times where I think like a fact is interesting, but maybe it's not that interesting for the creative process. So I'll cut it because it's not really generative. It just kind of exists in the land of oh, it's interesting over there.

Speaker A: Oh, wow. I really plague my friends by reading non fiction books and then insisting on telling them facts that I'm like, isn't this so interesting? And I can see by their glazed expressions that they're like, no, Emma, that's interesting to know. But you. So it's exact exactly like you say. It's that kind of cherry picking of things and thinking about what other people relate to that's, I guess, so important.

Speaker B: 100. And I also think that a piece of advice that I give a lot of strategists, which is slightly controversial, is to not read too many marketing and advertising books, to not read too much nonfiction, to actually read fiction. I tell young strategists quite a bit to cultivate a hobby that doesn't involve just scrolling, because you really need to go out and see the world and see people and talk to people. And that can just be taking a book and sitting at the bar and nursing one drink for a couple of hours and seeing who's showing up when. You know, there's times where I've worked on, like, certain brands and I've seen, you know, which direction the train's going in and how the, like, sneaker brands, people are wearing changes and what that shows you. So I think you really have to go outside and, like, be an interesting person outside of what we do. And it's easy in this industry to make it all consuming and make that your singular purpose, but it doesn't make your work very interesting.

Speaker A: Read more books, catch the train.

Speaker B: Read more books, Go on the train. Yep.

Speaker A: Final question, Nikita. This is something that is kind of repeated a lot, which is that your rebrand will be a failure if it's not built on this successful strategic foundation. And this seems to be the accepted wisdom. And I wondered if you think that's true. Can brands achieve things without that lovely layer of strategy. Is it as essential as people say?

Speaker B: I don't think, you know, that a, uh, strategy has to come from a strategist 100% of the time. You know, I have worked with so many creative directors that are very strategic and very sharp. So I don't think it has to be a strategy exercise 100% of the time, but there has to be some rhyme or reason for things to be happening. Um, there's a phenomena I call like Instagram Explore page design, where you'll get a mood board and you're like, oh, you just went on the Instagram explore page and like, pulled all the trendy things. Like, there's no reason this brand should have a sunburst, like symbol, but they're a nighttime tea. But you just thought it looked cool. And I think that's where a strategic filter comes in handy.

Speaker A: People just got to be a bit more singular in their thinking, you know, seek out the weird books in the bookshop that no one else is is reading or. I interviewed a photographer years ago who said his biggest tip was to go to the library and just borrow art books and actually look through them. Because he said so many young creators were absorbing all the same news stories, all the same work on all the same websites, and that naturally you all end up making something that's kind of in the same area. Whereas if you're going to the library and you're picking up these art books that no one else is really looking at, you're diversifying all the stuff that you're feeding your brain with so much more.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, another thing I tell a lot of young people is like, whether you like it or not, everything you put in your media diet impacts your work in some way more so than other disciplines. So if you're feeding yourself just tiktoks and not, you know, mix, healthy mix of tiktoks and books and taking a walk, then you're going to have a very specific type of output that is going to be a smaller view on the world.

Speaker A: Any other strategic parting words of wisdom for, uh, marketers that might be listening?

Speaker B: I would, uh, say two things. I would say sort of cliche, but have strong opinions, but hold them, um, loosely. You can often find a new perspective from speaking to a different creative in the org or a product person or when I've worked on spirits brands like going to bars and actually talking to bartenders about what they're seeing sell. So always, like, prepare to be, you know, challenged. And then I think the other thing I would say is it's really not that serious. Please go outside. Do not sacrifice your health or sanity for strategic or creative work. You're actually better when you're away from your desk and have time to think.

Speaker A: That was strategist Nikita Walia and me. Ask Us Friday's Head of Content, Emma Tucker. Thanks to our listeners for tuning in and a quick reminder to subscribe for future episodes. For more about how Ask Us for ideas helps brands find agencies, you can go to aufi.com and if you'd like more insight from us on the trends, waves and big moves in the brand marketing and digital world, we're also on substack@askusforideas.substack.com Till next time, Sam.