The Overthinkers

Award season is very fond of breakthrough campaigns. But somehow, those are very rarely followed by similarly inspiring ideas. They come and go, and what was the talk of town ends up catching dust on shelves. Why is that? Are marketers lying about their effectiveness? Incapable of striking gold twice? Or endlessly chasing the new?

Facebook's recent announcement they would now be known as Meta has certainly raised a few eyebrows. Is that a strategy to get past Facebook's flailing brand, and if so, can it succeed?

Getting the right client brief can be really hard. A recent study showed that 90% of agencies were not being briefed properly. So outside of a better template (where most companies seem to start), what do we think makes a brief good?

Purpose made the headlines (again) this week, with new research supporting the effectiveness of some purpose driven advertising. But even if sometimes purpose can work, can marketers generally serve a purpose beyond driving sales or profits?

According to a few, the years of advertising as we know it are counted. But even if the most likely outcome is that such predictions are wrong, it doesn't mean that working in advertising is as safe a career path as it might have once been.

"It's marketing." Three words that are usually used to describe something that is not worthy of anyone's time, misleading, if not even manipulating. What went wrong?

Big day for The Overthinkers! This is our 100th episode, can you believe it?! To celebrate, we take a stroll through some of the people that have (and still) inspire us in the marketing industry. People that are worth following, or at least paying attention to.

Well well well... This topic has been on the back of our minds for a little while. Our industry seems to be making progress, but for many it still rings hollow, and the mountain to climb still discouraging.

The client agency relationship is often a love-hate relationship. In this episode, Rachel and Shann explore how clients can set that relationship up for success and extract as much value as possible from their agency partners.

Strategy can be a central part of the pitch process, but what are the best contributions? And how rewarding (or unrewarding) can they be?

Having to deal with underperformers is a reality for all leaders at some point in their career. What approaches work best, and how can the event be used as a constructive step for the talent in question?

Sometimes things like they're too much (or too little) and the dream of just dropping everything is a temptation many people in corporations go through. Can this be overcome, and could it even be used to your advantage?

Innovation is generally a good thing to stay ahead of the game, but in many instances it can have perverse effects on a business. This week, Rachel and Shann explore some of the things they have seen hurting businesses, from using the wrong KPIs to generate draining clutter for both your teams and your customers.

Most modern marketing is obsessed with data, and "data-driven" marketing has often been pegged as the future of our industry (and generally, still is). But there have been many voices clashing with this certainty that being data-driven was the only way forward for our practice. As a matter of fact, could this be the hill on which marketing loses one of its superpowers?

In the last two decades we've seen a huge acceleration of the number of specialists in marketing, to the point where being a generalist is often described as a "master of none". This has been a problem because we often end up with siloed views and practitioners that fail to understand how their field inserts itself in the grand scheme of things. The question is whether being a generalist is still...

Founding a business is equally scary and hypnotic. In this episode, Rachel and Shann share their impressions after starting new companies, and what it's been like pivoting from head of strategy type positions.

Very special guest this week with JP Castlin, self-proclaimed strategy nerd and one of the most interesting voices in our community. The question that got us started led us to discuss many big tickets, from the definition of strategy to the ways complexity limits the potential of strategic planning, and even talking about the similarities with evolutionary theory.

Since the mobile phone, we haven't had much in the way of hardware tech that has transformed the way we interact with the world. As a matter of fact, it's kinda hard to imagine we're going to see something as disruptive anytime soon. In this episode, Rachel and Shann discuss what technologies they see potentially impacting experience design, and what excites them about these. Tune in for an unusua...

Clearly having a purely objective strategy is an impossible task, but it does beg the question - what role can objectivity play in strategic planning, and what benefits are there from its subjective counterpoint?

Consumer segmentation can be a dangerous exercise - get it wrong and your strategy could completely fall apart, going after the wrong kinds of consumers or simply impractical. Coupled with digital means of targeting, and it can also lead businesses to buying against the wrong people in media. This week, we're joined by Anil Malhotra from ad-tech company Bango, exploring the virtues (and limits) of...

As we see the accelerated decline of linear TV leadership, leading voices of our industry are quick to equate that with the decline of brands, unable to access the means through which they were built. Is that really happening? And isn't there a case for that reality to actually reinforce the brands able to stand out?

Somewhat ironic question for a podcast called The Overthinkers... But often a real issue for strategists, who can easily get trapped in always wanting to add nuance to their thinking - sometimes at the cost of action. In this episode, Rachel and Shann discuss how they try to stay in control of it, and how they try to manage it with others.

Let's be honest, the daily grind doesn't often feel like a massive win. Dealing with failure is something most of us have to learn to do at some point in our careers, and it can easily bleed into our overall happiness. So what can we do to better deal with those feelings, and how can we stay upbeat when all goes to shit?

Getting the right talent is critical for an agency business. But it seems incredibly harder for them to attract and retain talent. In this episode, Rachel and Shann discuss whether agencies can pay and reward their talent in a way that is competitive and attractive, but also some of the ways in which they could be a more talent centric approach to the way their do their business.

Strategists tend to love their processes. Some even use them (wrongly) to define their work in the guise of "frameworks". Meanwhile, others tend to avoid them like the pest, preferring more chaotic and unstructured approaches. Of course the answer often lies in the middle, but how do we define this middle, and what should strategists keep in mind to make the most of them, without becoming slave to...