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🙋🏻♂️Ex-CD who made the leap to strategy: Take the experience and gain the cred, even if it stretches you. Strategy skills have a much longer shelf than creative, and a much higher pay ceiling.
Even if you don’t think you want to go down the strat path now, knowing how to walk it will make you WAY more marketable. Inversely, it can also make you way more effective at delivering g your creative reccos when you can ground them in business or market priorities.
💯💯💯
Orange flag. Knowing how to do strategy ultimately helps YOU, but they want you doing 2 jobs. They need to pay you for it.
I hear ya but the worst they can say is “no.” That’s when you put your head down and keep working while trying jump ship (even though the market is terrible)
What Ex-CD said. I’m in your same position — a copy ACD at a small agency with no strat dept. I love it. Now I get to set up our concepts just so, the thinking flows seamlessly, I don’t have to backfill interesting ideas with some wannabe Deloitter’s hackery, and I feel like I’m becoming a more well-rounded marketer. Good creatives should be good strategists. Turning that discipline into a separate job was a mistake.
Red flag for sure.
Director of Strategy AND Creative? 🚩🚩
Should mention I will no doubt be the only copywriter for the campaign and likely be creative lead/CD too.
sorry this is nuts, writing and executing your own briefs?? lol
They're setting you up to fail. The point of having different departments is to have checks and balances and any missteps or failures don't fall on one person. If your beginners' strategic framework has blind spots or mistakes in it, it falls on you alone. Not to mention it would not be a basis for airtight messaging/copy. Then if the client challenges your copy, you don't have a strat team to back you up or a solid framework to point to. You can only point to more of your own work, and you can imagine how it just starts to unravel from there. Not to mention that if you're not a strategist, you probably don't know what you don't know about all the elements, resources and time that go into creating strategic framework—and it sounds like you don't have a more experienced strategist to consult about what you may be missing. The right way to learn strat is to learn from a mentor who knows what they're doing, not by being pushed onto a glass cliff.
That’s a tall order, but if you ever start freelancing, you’ll absolutely be acting as your own strategist at some point. Learn to start thinking that way.
Agree with the majority here that it will ultimately benefit you. A great writer is a strategist already, but Strategy has a lot of elements it can take time to master. I’d let them know they’re asking a lot and pushing you beyond your job title but I also think it’s an opportunity to learn and grow. And while it can be awkward, I always want some role in the Strat process because the worst thing is getting a brief that has such narrow thinking there’s no room for creative wiggle room. Always better to shape the box I’m going to play in later.