A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
– Robert A. Heinlein

In the Canadian advertising landscape, strategy and specialization have gone hand-in-hand for the last 15 years, at least. I didn’t specialize within strategy, which gets pointed out as, well, weird. I’ve been a social strategist, a digital strategist, a hybrid accounts/strategy person in PR, a connections planner, a creative strategist, several flavours of brand strategist, and a manager of strategy departments. A specialization focused approach to strategy doesn’t help, in most of those situations.

When I started out in the mid-2000s, agencies were splitting strategy between “digital” and “traditional” teams. It made sense at the time: clients wanted reassurance that the agency understood emerging platforms and technologies; more experienced strategists knew a ton about marketing but less about the digital space; and young people were happy to play a distinct role that let them into the world of strategy without spending years trying to break in. But we kept subdividing, into social, into brand, into content and into channels.

Clients aren’t asking agencies to think in thinly sliced verticals. They’re asking us to understand how everything we recommend fits into a broad mix of activities, channels and behaviours that impact customers. By creating layers of specialization that reinforce that separation, we’ve structured organizations (and careers) in a way that pretends the person watching TV and the one scrolling Instagram aren’t one and the same.

Agencies have somehow not caught on, and continue to act as though it’s possible for a strategist to have only half (or a third) of the required skill set, and still get to great work. A strategist that doesn’t have a baseline understanding of digital platforms or behaviours isn’t traditional; they’re just unqualified. And a strategy department that isn’t built with this understanding isn’t traditional either. It’s just broken.

A strategist should be able to explain the role of group chats in modern social dynamics, explain the messaging limitations of OOH, debate doomscrolling, write a creative brief, have a coherent discussion about the difference in a brand tone adapted to TikTok vs. one used in a full page newspaper ad, and help sell a client on an idea.

When I talk to and work with young strategists, they already approach the job like this. The issue is that many agencies still insist that the goal is specialization, not overall strategic expertise. Agencies tend to tell talent that the next step involves more specialization – and then when they want to try something different, we tell them they’ve gone too far as a social strategist, so the big brand discussion is not for them.

When I was at Diamond, we spoke a lot about “T-shaped” strategists. The idea being that deep expertise in a subject is great, but that depth in one area needs to be supported by breadth in a lot of other ones. If you don’t understand enough about everyone’s areas of deep expertise, collaboration across silos is at best painful, and at worst impossible. Especially at an integrated agency, the job of strategy leadership is to take those with deep expertise and help them develop broad understanding, and vice versa.

A team of T-shaped strategists means greater efficiency for clients, more consistently engaging and challenging work, better career development opportunities for those strategists, as well as tighter and more expansive collaboration with creative and accounts departments. It means fewer great ideas lost in the time it takes to schedule a meeting with “the team that handles that.” It leads to a discipline that actually considers the whole life of a consumer.

Jon Crowley is head of strategy for Fuse Create.