Episode 03Clarity in practice: From strategy to activation, with Arica Marfoglia

Welcome to But First, Clarity. I’m your host, Malorie Benjamin, and today I’ll be joined by our senior strategist across marketing and creative, Arica Marfoglia. We’re going to be talking about a problem that can occur even when everyone is doing good work. All of a sudden, that work stops adding up to one single strategy. We’re getting into the real marketing strategy of it all. And it’s really hard to make sure everybody’s moving in the same direction for a lot of different reasons.

So I’m gonna set us up a little bit here. But when we’re digging into this, the fragmentation is real. We know this is a problem that exists across every single channel strategy, any sort of creative strategy that we’re building. And whether you’re on the brand side or you’re on the agency side, there are things that you’re gonna face in the process. So, Arica, how can every team or partner be doing good work and have the marketing still not add up to one cohesive strategy?

That is a great question. I think it happens a lot, unfortunately, mostly because everyone is not aligned around the same goal. And I say that, meaning they are technically aligned around the same goal from like a very overarching perspective, but maybe not aligned around the deeper goal or the why behind the goal, so that they start working on the project with a thought in mind that just isn’t what the other team is maybe thinking about. So maybe creative’s moving in one direction because they’re building on this one idea. And then you have your channel strategy moving in another direction because they’re building on something that’s almost the same, but not quite.

And so these pieces start to almost disperse as they’re working and continuing to move forward, so that instead of being on a parallel path, they end up on separate paths. So really it’s all about starting with getting everyone, even the people you might not think are supposed to be in the conversation at the beginning, in the conversation at the upfront, to align what is that goal and how are we all moving forward?

And then people can take their own paths. But if you get that alignment, you hear questions from everyone, you have conversation with everyone, and you start to then align together instead of just kind of being told this is how you should be doing things.

Yeah, OK. So I love that you brought this topic up and you’re bringing those pieces together because it makes me think about the early days of marketing strategy. Like, early on in my career, it was enough to have just a singular goal and have everybody sort of centrally located around that goal. But I think now, because of the complexity we’re facing, there’s a lot of sort of micro-decisions that get made throughout the process of identification.

And also we’ve talked a lot in our last two episodes about this, like, process of iteration. Right. And so how do you start to identify keeping everybody on sort of the same tracks as those micro decisions get made? What’s that look like?

I think it’s bringing—I think there’s a couple of things. I think everyone understanding—we’ve talked about this in earlier episodes, I’m sure—the why of everything, getting everybody to believe in that to start. So once you have that done, I think then you have to trust your experts to make those micro decisions on their own without having to have huge oversight. I think that there should be some oversight, but you have to trust that they’re going to do the right thing because they’re the experts. They’re the subject matter experts in their field.

Then there are inflection points where you have to bring everybody together. It doesn’t have to be the whole team, so it doesn’t have to be every single person working on it, touching it. It can be a representative of each of those different groups, having them come together so that they’re sharing maybe something they learned, something they want to change because of something they learned, just a different idea that they maybe had.

And once those conversations start to happen, then it can be reflected back so that those people who are representatives can go back to their team and say, OK, because of this thing we found out that maybe the other teams didn’t, we’re all moving now toward this one common goal in this one direction.

I love that. I wonder, too. This makes me think about sort of two pieces as you’re talking through this. One, how do you make sure that the direction, that we’re not diluting the original value of the marketing campaign when these things are happening? And then two, how do you, if I’m the client, I’m immediately sort of thinking, wow, this sounds expensive. What’s the value that you’re providing here?

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of that has to happen behind the scenes. And what you’re sharing with the client has to be the most important thing. Like, I think as marketers, we tend to overshare because we’re like, we learned all these great things and we want to share with you these charts and these stats and all of this information. And, you know, we got here because of this problem and this thing we’re trying to uncover and whatever that is, that’s great, and our team always needs that, and that’s where we find our inspiration.

But I think what you have to share then with the client is the most important part. The things that are starting to answer the why that you all uncovered together and make sure that there’s at least one or two people who are constantly aligned to bring everything back to that original goal. So that even if everybody’s having this conversation where maybe we’re exploring new ideas or new thoughts or maybe saying, do we have to shift our creative strategy or do something a little bit different because of something we learned, there’s always someone who’s saying OK, yes, and let’s now remember to bring it back to this original goal, this original plan, this original thing.

Yeah, I love that. So as you’re talking through this, what has to stay clear, no matter how many teams or partners are touching the work? A lot of times we’re also working with outside partners. Many clients have multiple agencies in the mix. So we’ve got to be able to make sure we’re connecting the dots across all of those touchpoints. What are those things that, no matter what you’re saying, these are the must-haves, and we’ve gotta stay clear on those.

I think ultimately, again, it goes back to the business problem and, like, why. But I think there’s also understanding the human problem that we’re all trying to solve for, because at the end of the day, regardless of what the product is, what the service is, whatever it is, it’s all answering to a human problem. So if everybody can remember this human problem is the thing that we’re solving for, then I think that you’re bringing humanity to the project as a whole. But I think that that’s something that you then can really rely on getting your team to rally around.

Yeah, I want to talk a little bit, too, shifting gears a little bit in this, like how there’s a lot of people involved in this process of a marketing plan, right? If you’re talking clients, internal teams, you know, thinking full service, we’re delivering on all of these different pieces. There’s a lot of leadership elements in that, too. So how do leaders give enough context and remain valuably engaged in the project without becoming bottlenecks to that?

That’s a tough one.

And where do they become bottlenecks to that?

They definitely do become bottlenecks. I think the communication of getting everything out of their brain at the start is probably the most important, because that’s when it’s fresh and that’s when you’re getting the most out of them, because they’ve just heard from the client or whatever that looks like. Sometimes, you know, they invite others to the table so that they can hear firsthand, and I think that’s helpful and great, but sometimes you can’t because of the project, the process, whatever that looks like. Then really ensuring that you have your identified leaders of all of the other disciplines that you might be working with and that they are in complete understanding of what it is we’re all trying to accomplish is probably, I would say, the first step.

And then there’s always the review process. I think that’s another time when maybe leaders, even the leaders from a subject-matter perspective, become a bottleneck, because working on different projects maybe can’t spend the time that they need to reviewing, but they have to kind of commit to getting that done or else we’re not going to move forward with anything. But it’s tough. I mean, I don’t know that there’s really one answer. There’s a lot of balancing the work and figuring out when the right moment’s to step in and make something possible.

So what’s the ideal balance of a project look like? You’ve got a new project coming in. There’s sort of this balancing act that has to happen between the collaboration that needs to happen to drive forward the growth or the outcomes that we want to have happen, and then you also have the realities of, you know, plates and all these other conflicting responsibilities that sort of we’ve mentioned here. And then the reality of time constraint, right?

Like just at some level, from a client perspective, you know, just owning it in the room. There’s a lot where time does equal money. So how do you balance that collaboration, the expense, all of those pieces kind of coming together. What’s the ideal situation look like?

I mean, sometimes you have to think good is good enough. And I think that you want to get to an answer the right, the thing that you think everybody’s going to need, the thing that everybody’s going to find the most inspiring to build a plan from, to build a creative idea from, all of that. And sometimes you have 10 hours to do that and sometimes you have one. So it’s a matter of getting the most out of the time that you have to figure out how to do the thing that’s being asked of you.

And sometimes we have to be flexible straight from strategy through creative through channel. If you’re a PR person, if you’re a media person, whatever that is, you have to do a little bit of your own due diligence. But I think sharing in what we’re all learning helps a lot. So thinking about creative strategy, which is something that I focus on, I might only have an hour to come up with the human problem we’re trying to solve and an insight to help everybody solve that.

But my counterpart in media might have an hour to talk about how people consume media. And if we’re sharing that information, we’re making ourselves, we’re making each other smarter.

Give us a real-world example of a time when there was feedback that was useful enough to change a strategy that you guys had started down a path maybe, you’re working on a project, you get some insight from a strategic perspective and you say hey, the path we were on isn’t really working for us anymore. What maybe made you make that shift and how do you experience that?

I think it all goes back to what you said about understanding human nature and understanding humans and who you’re targeting. I can think of an example of a time when we weren’t really very specific on our target. We knew it was parents, but we weren’t really saying it’s parents of a certain age or having children or not having children, whatever that looked like, who those parents were. And once we got some information on that and got more specific, it kind of unlocked something new because of just the way that those people think.

And so we were able to then just, it wasn’t a huge shift, but it was enough of a shift that it gave specificity to the PR team, it gave specificity to the media team, it gave specificity to the social team. It just aligned everyone a little bit better and made the ideas that came out of it stronger.

Yeah, I love that. So in kind of wrapping up where we’re at right now from a CMO-check mindset, before we start adding more processes or another meeting, it sounds like we’ve got some questions we can ask. Can every team member or partner explain the business decision their work is meant to influence? Maybe tell us a little bit about why that one’s so important.

I think that that one’s so important because if you can’t, that’s where things start to break down. Essentially, that’s when you have people who are off on tangents and doing different things that maybe aren’t all aligned. And it might feel right and it might feel good, but then when you bring it all together, it’s either all doing something different or maybe it’s all the same, but in the wrong way.

Yeah.

So just ensuring that there’s that alignment is really important.

Love that. Number two is, are the right customer creative and channel perspectives shaping the big decisions before they’re final? This one is fun because I think this is where we see the most breakdown in marketing on both client side, you know, brand organizations and within an agency. So any comments on that one?

No, I would just totally agree with what you’re saying. Absolutely. Because you don’t want that. That matched-luggage campaign where it’s all the same, but it’s not, it shouldn’t be. It has to answer to the channels that it’s specifically addressing, the people that it’s specifically addressing and how they’re used to consuming things on that channel. So I think, yeah.

That makes sense. And three is, does what we learn in market change what we do next, or does it just get reported?

No, it should absolutely impact and change so much. I mean, that’s something constantly we’re telling clients, I think. You know, if the world is changing around us at a rapid pace, we need to be considering changing the things that we’re doing at a rapid pace, because we need to be adapting. And so whatever’s reported out should be reflected in the next plan. And we should never just say here’s your results and move on.

I love that. So if I’m a CMO and I’m looking across a team, I’ve got agency partners, I’ve got my internal teams, where should I look first for the signs of fragmentation? Like what are the tells that I need to be looking around this table, because we are not on the same page

I mean, from an agency internal perspective, I would say if you’re sitting at a table and you’re seeing someone for the first time, they probably have not been brought into a conversation. They probably have no idea what you’ve been working on. And they’re going to hopefully come to the table with a lot of questions. But sometimes they won’t, because they’re feeling the pressure and the speed to get the job done. So they might just continue to move forward without any of the context that they need or any of the right kind of information.

And then you have them—that’s when things just immediately start to fragment, because they’re not getting everything they need out of what was meant to be a session where they’re supposed to get what they need. And so it ends up just breaking down from there and causing rework and taking more time than it should.

Yeah, I think that’s interesting, too, because we all know that also account shifts and people coming in and out of projects is just realities of the work world today. So how do you mitigate or what are maybe some strategies to make sure that the dots are connected when that new person, the person that’s being inserted into the project, is showing up for the first time?

Yeah, I think. I mean, there’s a lot to do with just documentation as a whole and having a really strong brief that’s easy for people to digest on their own without having to have it be presented to them. Something that you can just pass on and say, OK, absorb this information is probably the biggest thing. But I think also just having, again, relying on those core leaders that you have within each discipline to ensure that they’re helping to carry the project along is really important.

So we’re gonna shift gears a little here. This one is a different question as we’re starting to wrap things up, but what’s a marketing hill that you will die on? We were laughing about this earlier because I did not ask our previous two guests, and they both said, hey, I don’t know what I would have said for that. And I said, my problem is I will die on all the hills. So.

I have a similar problem. I would say one that recently kind of came up for me is that I think out-of-home advertising is still, when done right, one of the most impactful forms of advertising. And I don’t just mean like a billboard or a fancy activation. I mean, like all of it. And I can even think of examples of different out-of-home placements, a billboard in particular, that, like, still to this day resonates with me. And it had to have been over a decade ago that I saw it, and it was for a bank.

And you might have worked on this. And when I first saw the billboard, it was just a white billboard with a green Sharpie and it was like an extension, and it was blank. And then as weeks went on, there was writing that appeared on this billboard, and it was for the bank. And you started to understand as weeks went on. But I was just, it’s something that I can’t ignore because I’m driving, and I pay a lot of money to not have to watch commercials. Like, a lot of money to not have to consume any kind of commercial.

Hot take in advertising. I love this. It’s our business.

I know, but I watch them. I just don’t watch them in the context that is expected of me.

OK, OK.

But I—

We gotta dissect that later.

I can’t not, I can’t skip. I can’t skip a billboard.

You can’t skip a billboard. I totally agree.

And if done right, this is—

I mean, I like this hill. I love it. It’s hysterical. First of all, I think outdoor is amazingly underutilized space because there’s no way you can ignore it. And when done well, you’re absolutely right. Every single campaign that I’ve walked away being like, well, that was super impactful, had an out-of-home element to some degree with a really cool execution. So I agree with that.

One part of many.

One part of many. I love it. We have to really dissect this lack of ad viewing. I refuse to let my kids have ad-free versions of things a) because I’m cheap, and also because I think that they need a good quality having-to-view-ads experience to learn patience in this day and age. So that’s, you know, listen, I’ll die on all the hills. I said it, I warned it. It’s absolutely true. But Arica, thank you for joining us today.

Clarity is a starting point. Curiosity helps us challenge the perspectives that we have already and connections are what keeps the work from drifting. So really important topic that we covered here today. I appreciate your perspective.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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