Here's a fun thing about my job: I sell thinking for a living, and thinking is the thing companies least want to pay for. They'll spend $2 million on a campaign without blinking but balk at $50,000 for the strategic work that determines whether that campaign will work.
I get it. Strategy is invisible. You can't hold it. You can't screenshot it for Instagram. When it works, it looks obvious in retrospect ('of course that was the right positioning'). When it fails, everyone blames execution. Strategy never gets the credit and rarely gets the blame, which makes it very hard to prove its value.
But here's what I've learned in my years at Nemo: the campaigns that win awards and drive business are never the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones with the clearest strategic foundation. The thinking makes the making possible. Skip the thinking and you're just making expensive noise.
But here's what I've learned in my years at Nemo: the campaigns that win awards and drive business are never the ones with the biggest budgets.
I can tell within five minutes of a kickoff meeting whether a brand has a real strategy underneath it. The ones that do can answer 'why should anyone care?' in one sentence. The ones that don't take forty slides to say nothing. The forty-slide brands outspend the one-sentence brands by 10x and lose.
Someday I'll figure out how to make strategy feel as tangible as a TV spot. Until then I'll keep making the case that the most valuable deliverable is often the shortest one. A strategy that fits on a napkin is worth more than a deck that requires a standing meeting to present.