Giorgia Butler, chief strategy officer, INNOCEAN
How many strategies do you need? TL;DR: the answer is one. Just one.
I know, I know. Strategists love to strategise. We’ve got ideas rolling around in our heads like pebbles in a creek, each one a little treasure polished by the gentle ebb and flow of our ever-firing neurons. We thrive in curiosity, always trying to crack a new insight, parse it perfectly, find a new “way in”.
Our thoughts are our currency. Let’s face it, that’s our contribution to this game. So more is better right? Wrong. Sorry to my brethren. We don’t need more strategy. We need much, much less.
The power of a straight line
One strategy connects your business goals to your audience priorities, which then directs your media plan, which in turn informs your communications content. You don’t need a media strategy and a creative strategy. You need one strategy that does it all.
The most effective strategy is a straight line. It has a clear starting point and an inspiring destination that your whole team understands, and is excited to reach.
If this sounds like crazy talk, or naive idealism, then maybe you’re already in the weeds. But you’re not alone. For most modern marketers, a clear, linear strategy is about as elusive as a MAFS contestant who’s “in it for the right reasons”.
The cold hard truth
You only need one strategy; any more than that will cost you much more than agency fees.
Between managing in-house resources, creative agencies, media and performance agencies, and reporting up on business planning and results, marketers spend too much precious time untangling mismatched strategic directives. Too many cooks rarely make a good thing, but in marketing, it’s a recipe for disastrous wastage and utter confusion.
You literally pay twice for strategy, sometimes three times. You pay the creative agency to think, and the media agency to think, and then you pay yourself (in time) to fix the fact that they thought differently.
And if they were thinking holistically and clearly, they would agree with me. Less navel-gazing, more discipline. And yes, it’s more work upfront, but surely that’s what you pay for.
The puzzle piece trap
At the risk of taking us all back to COVID days, I’ll use an analogy that might evoke the scent of fresh-baked banana bread and sourdough starter, but neatly illustrates my point. Picture your mid-2020 lockdown puzzle shelf, and give it a quick dusting off.
You’ve got a 5,000-piece landscape of a mountain, a 1,000-piece neon cityscape, and a circular puzzle of a cat. Now open all three boxes, dump everything on the floor and get to work. How do you feel?
Most marketers work with at least three different puzzles at a time. The business strategy might be a landscape, the media agency handed you a cityscape, and the creative agency then chucks you a circular cat. You are then tasked to “make it work” by Monday.
Making the pieces fit
You spend your life trying to jam the “cat” pieces into the “mountain” slots. Meanwhile, the team assigns 80% of your budget to the cityscape.
Each puzzle on its own is a complete, well-considered set. It slots together into a lovely end-game image. But when you try to make one puzzle out of three sets of pieces, inevitably, you get a FrankenMonster that works as badly as it looks.
The pieces don’t fit because the creators never designed them to fit. You waste weeks in meetings trying to shave the edges off a creative concept so it doesn’t break the media budget. When you force a creative idea into a media slot it wasn’t built for, you get a compromised product.
It’s “fine”, but “fine” doesn’t break through the noise. Even if you get the pieces to stay together, the final image confuses the consumer. Every hour you spend trying to “align” each agency’s clever thinking is an hour not spent optimising the actual work. It’s a dog’s breakfast.
From puzzle to pathway
A singular strategy isn’t a puzzle at all; it’s an architectural blueprint. Anything less wastes your time and money.
A 2025 ANA (Association of National Advertisers) report found that 86% of advertisers report a lack of synchronisation between their creative and media distribution. The fact that 82% of ANA members have also moved functions in-house is the ultimate proof of this frustration; they do it specifically to reclaim the time lost to managing the “pieces of the puzzle” that don’t fit.
The shift successful marketers make in 2026 moves toward a single, clear strategic pathway, removing the need for constant mediation.
Stop managing and start leading
When you clearly translate the business goal into a focused audience and communication directive that drives every brief toward a common goal, your business grows and you spend your time on the right things.
The creative team knows exactly what they need to make and why, because the media strategy has already defined the “where” and “who”. Short-term and long-term objectives can co-exist in harmony. Instead of choosing between a “sales” ad and a “brand” ad, the strategy dictates how a variety of executions will work together to serve both masters.
This is how you stop being a project manager and start being a leader. Execution happens faster because the team settled the “why” and “how” before anyone wrote the first brief. And now you can work on making the work brilliant.
The bottom line
Marketers shouldn’t be puzzle-solvers; they should be architects. And it’s incumbent on their agency strategy teams to deliver singularity and clarity of vision, not confusion. Fewer thoughts, more thinking.
When you have one strategy that aligns all your activity to one intended outcome, you stop fighting the friction of your own ecosystem and start driving the business forward. One puzzle. One set of pieces. One outcome.
All it takes is one strategy.
Feature image- Giorgia Butler, chief strategy officer, INNOCEAN.