Strategists Going Client-Side

Notes from StratMonday with David Chriswick

I won’t go into David’s extensive experience as a strategist, but you can find it here.

We had a great conversation yesterday about the challenges and opportunities for agency strategists.

David was sharing his recent experience with Strava and now as SVP VP, Brand Strategy & Experience at Purpose Brands (Orangetheory, Anytime Fitness, and The Bar).

We touched on seven themes in our conversation and questions.

Based on the transcript, here are the major themes from David’s conversation along with some supporting quotes:

1. Identity Shift — From Agency Strategist to Marketer

David had to consciously reframe his professional identity when moving client-side, parking his agency credentials and developing new skills.

“I’m not here as an ex-agency, brand strategist, creative planner, I’m here now as a marketer and whilst all those skills are transferable, I need to develop new muscles as well.”

“Nobody at Strava in this tech company appreciated what I’d done in terms of like all the awards... they’d never even heard of it, they never heard of Effies, they haven’t even heard of Cannes Lions, there’s not things that were important to them.”

2: Transferable Strategic Thinking

Despite the identity shift, core agency skills around problem-solving and articulation remain highly valuable.

“I can apply the way I face problems at the agency which are very heavily communication, marketing communications problems, I can apply that kind of these frameworks to different types of problems.”

“The way we can cut through noise and clutter and get to signal fast and then articulate what problems are and roadmaps to solutions, we just naturally do it in a very different way. We sound differently, we talk differently, we use different language.”

“People would invite you into these meetings because you just were a bit of an oddball and you would bring a new perspective to things.”

3: Building Credibility Through Business Language

Getting a seat at the table requires shifting from creative outputs to business outcomes.

“It’s only when you get in those rooms, and you can start talking the language of business, and outcomes rather than the outputs of your work, and always be always be referencing growth, and what’s this going to do for the business that you get that credibility.”

“I remind people saying that I’m actually not a... I am creative, just like many people, but I’m not the creative that makes the ads.”

“I hear them say, Oh, ask Chizzy, he’s the creative one. And then people come to me going, Oh, hey, I need a poster. I’m like, all right, I’ll get you a poster. But what are we trying to solve here?”

4: Broader Problem Exposure Beyond Communications

Client-side roles offer involvement in product, pricing, and experience decisions that agencies rarely touch.

“The exciting part is exposure to so many more problems and opportunities that go of course beyond marketing communications... you find yourself in conversations about product development and pricing and customer experience and then just you know, lifetime value and technology challenges.”

“Some of my highlights I think from the first two years has been inventing a new class type, you know, Strength 50. We just launched a new performance monitor... which kind of was part of the design team from the ground up, not just packaging and communications.”

5: Speed Over Polish — The Death of the Deck

Client-side work demands rapid, scrappy thinking rather than elaborate strategic presentations.

“There is no time to wait around for a strategy just to go and sort of do some chin stroking and pontification and come back with a flashy deck.”

“I have requested I say, Hey, give me a couple of weeks, I’ll come back with some options. And like, what do you mean a couple of weeks, we just talk tomorrow.”

“I’m finding myself doing very few decks. If anything, I’ll just do like a one pager... I don’t think I can remember the last time I did a really cool deck. And I kind of miss them.”

6: The “Brand” Word Carries Different Weight

The term “brand” often means something quite different to client-side colleagues.

“A lot of these people use brand just as a cooler way to describe the business. Like, hey, what’s good for the brand? Actually talking about the company and the business. They’re not talking about those, these kind of like fluffy mental associations.”

“I was butting my head against the wall in the early days trying to get people to, hey, don’t say brand because you’re saying it wrong. And it’s like, well, hang on, maybe they’re not saying it wrong. It’s just, I’ve been brought up thinking it’s this way.”

7: Instability Exists Everywhere

Moving client-side doesn’t necessarily mean more job security.

“Part of me was thinking, all right, I’m moving away from a very turbulent agency work, agency industry. But trust me, you know, uncertainty and instability is just rife everywhere.”

“I actually got laid off. It was a restructuring after the founders kind of stepped down and Sequoia Capital came in and just relooked at the whole leadership stack.

A full copy of the recording is here…a fair bit of preamble and chatter and the beginning - you’ve been warned.