Welcome to The Strategy Journal, a resource for aspiring creatives to get real advice from the most unique and experienced voices in the industry.
On this motivational Monday, I’m exchanging thoughts with Diamond Abdulrahim, a Strategist who’s formerly worked at RAPP and BBH. In 2018, she won the Daniel Marks Planning Academy Strategic Star Award and has developed a taste for trophies ever since.
There’s some really great advice for us here. It’s new and refreshing, but it also got my curious brain whirring again: searching for old bits of content to try and work out the creative thought behind it. It’s a good little exercise, right? Way easier said than done, but something that wasn’t really obvious before Diamond told me.
It hasn’t always been non-stop grafting in lockdown either, and if it wasn’t apparent to the before, then it definitely is now: TAKING A BREAK IS GOOD FOR YOU, even if the anxiety of taking that break might turn your brain to a pulp. While finding ways to build her portfolio (which she shares below), Diamond has been spending this lockdown rewatching Desperate Housewives and laughing at its absurdity from today’s standards. There’s also a quick shoutout to Foot Asylum and their video content with Chunkz and Young Filly, she’s even subscribed to their YouTube channel!
She wants you to know that Diamond is a North-West Londoner and believes the borough of Brent should be the cultural hub of the UK. Apparently, she’s been spending way too much time watching dermaplaning videos and playing Super Mario Run when she’s not giving creatives advice on how to progress.
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In terms of thinking, learning and doing, what has lockdown allowed you to do?
This whole Moment has forced us to displace any idea of 'normal'. Lockdown let me unlearn normality like it never really existed, it was just our collective finely-tuned ability to exist on auto-pilot and passively accept the way of the world.
This has been really liberating for me. It's made me more accepting of vulnerability, my own and of the people around me in terms of health and safety and also in our stories; what we believe about ourselves and each other. For example, being open about hits to employment and income feel surmountable when you know your problems are not unique to you. And on the other end of the spectrum, being faced with the historic and unrelenting oppression of Black people worldwide has seen people ready to display their sincerity and commitment to change.
Lockdown has let me lean into my communities and continue to make solidarity a central part of my praxis.
Lockdown's allowed a wealth of new content to be created - how do you keep up with feeling inspired and why?
Ah. Inspiration is a fair-weather friend. I like being slow and deliberate with creative ideas, if I'm still thinking about it after a while then I know it's got legs and I'm passionate enough to develop it. I don't feel a pressure to keep up with anything, I like getting to dictate my own pace.
One of my favourite things to do has been re-watching old TV shows with a new lens and figuring out what's changed. I'm currently doing a Desperate Housewives rewatch with a friend and we have the funniest, rambling 2am conversations about life on Wisteria Lane via urban geography. The suburbs are mad, man!
What advice would you give to young Strategists looking to crack into the creative industry post lockdown?
Find a way to practise 'thinking' that feels right for you. It could look like setting yourself thought exercises: inventing problems and figuring out how you'd solve them, responding to ads new or old with what you'd do differently, and just building up a little portfolio of examples to share with senior Strategists for feedback in interviews or in real life.
Use this time to figure out the kind of work you respond positively to, what you're really interested in and most importantly how your unique skill set or background or lens of viewing the world can add value, because trust me, the industry needs you more than you need them!
Also - reach out to people! Watch and read as many weird and wonderful things and enjoy being a critical 'consumer'. Before you know it, you'll be in the driver's seat!
That's super interesting, I'm intrigued to know how you'd format or approach your responses to these Strategy briefs that you mention. There'll be some reading this who'll be clueless about where to find these resources.
For making up brand related/Strategy questions, I meant like thinking about your own consumption. It could be anything and playing around with how you could get a completely different audience involved in something. For example "how could Sesame Snaps become the ultimate party snack for young European club-goers" or "how could VICE attract a 40+ audience" and literally making a couple slides to illustrate your thinking - I like using Canva for easy designing.
You can present your research using the 4C's quadrant too: splitting a page into 4 boxes with Consumer / Company / Culture / Category in each box to bucket all your research into it. You might see where there might be space for something interesting. You could then present your strategic thinking using the classic get/to/by template.
I'm not sure about places with existing briefs...but you could just watch TV and dissect the adverts or find the latest work on Campaign or The Drum and critique it. One of the most difficult tasks I was set as an intern was to watch a bunch of adverts - it could've be anything - and attempt to identify the business challenge and what their creative strategy was. It wouldn't be super easy for me even now but thinking like that would make you such a perceptive Strategist.
Which brands do you think are doing the most right now?
Where would I be without No Signal radio! Both the Black Brit demographic and Internet first brands operate with a level of fluency and natural innovation, it was bound to blow. I'm really proud to get to witness their meteoric rise and hope they are here to stay for a very long time.
Also shoutout to FootAsylum for the most consistently entertaining long-form branded social content I can ever recall seeing and enjoying. Chunkz and Young Filly own Youtube to me and I can't wait for the new series of "Does The Shoe Fit?". Like, I have notifications set on a shoe retailer’s Youtube page - that's mad! They're doing incredible work.
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