Strategies are not written by God. They are written by planners, researchers, account execs, clients and other mildly deranged mortals.
Good creative people sometimes have a better feel for the problem than the committee that wrote the strategy. Sadly, they are often confronted with the brief only after the Committee of the Deranged have committed it to the inflexible logic of official documents..
When you are evaluating a campaign idea that does not conform to the brief, it’s not enough to say ‘this is off strategy’. You must also ask yourself, ‘is this a better strategy than the one the committee came up with?’
If the answer is yes, you’re going to have a lousy week. You have to go back and un-sell a strategy that has probably taken months to develop, has been up and down the client organization, and has lots of (probably questionable) data to back it up. Somehow, you have to convince a whole bunch of people that the work they’ve been doing for the past few months is wrong.
Sound impossible? That’s why you get the big bucks.