Building on Agency 2.0: From Service to Growth Systems
After working across planning, account management and client services roles for a large part of my career, I’ve seen this enough times to know the role gets misread constantly. Someone who chases updates, chairs the status call, stitches three decks into one. This gets it all wrong. The need for a single person to own the growth plan for clients is becoming more important than ever. At Charlie Oscar, this is the role of the Client Strategist.
Kim wrote in Agency 2.0 that the future isn’t service, it’s a growth system: creative, media, creators and measurement working as one connected machine instead of three departments emailing each other. For this system to work, you need someone accountable for its trade-offs and delivering growth for clients.
That accountability sits with the client strategist. The person who needs to own the decision.
The specialists own their craft. The strategist owns the decision.
This is not to say the specialists are not still critical.
A media lead should decide how to structure an account and optimise on a day to day basis. A creative lead should decide which trends are worth building concepts around. A data lead should decide how a model is built. Take a single scenario. A client’s Meta performance is softening, a new creative trend is gaining traction across the category, and spend is down because a promo that ran this time last year is not being supported this year. The media lead sees a case for consolidating ad groups to regain efficiency. The creative lead sees an opportunity to build a campaign around the trend before it peaks. The data lead has already isolated how much of the softening is down to that reduced spend from the lack of promo activity versus this time last year. Each call is right on its own terms, but made in isolation, they can cancel each other out, or worse, make it impossible to tell which one actually moved the needle.
That’s the moment a strategist earns their role: not choosing one perspective over the others, but sequencing and weighing all three into a single recommendation; what to test now, what to hold, and what to measure cleanly enough to know it worked.
Specialists own direction and execution within their discipline. The strategist owns the decision that combines all three.
That’s why clients shouldn’t need to decide whether media, creative or measurement is right. They should expect their strategist to bring those perspectives together into one commercial recommendation. Not because the strategist knows more about media than the media lead does. Because the strategist is the person looking at creative, media and measurement at the same time.
Clarity on measurement is key to the strategist's ability to deliver this role.
Ten years ago, delivering this role across multiple clients on a day-to-day basis would have been challenging. The information a strategist needed sat in three different places, updated on three different schedules. Now apply that to a market where platforms shift week to week, the decision window closes before you’ve even stitched the data together.
Fortunately, things have changed. Central to our proposition at Charlie Oscar is COmpass, our proprietary MMM solution. We didn’t stop at giving teams a monthly or quarterly readout, we operationalised it further. The result is a single daily dashboard, built on COmpass outputs, that uses Forward Indicators of Demand to put the incremental contribution of creative and media in front of every strategist daily.
Implementation of AI enables strategists to play this role on a weekly basis
The implementation of Charlie Oscar OS, our AI operating system to surface this information, has closed the gap between having a view and having clarity on the key numbers.
Picture a client strategist arriving at their desk. Before they’ve opened a single tab, Charlie has already scanned overnight Slack activity across their accounts, pulled the latest performance figures from the data warehouse, and flagged anything that moved enough to matter. She’s checked the calendar for today’s client calls and surfaced the relevant thread or document for each one. Nothing here replaces the strategist’s judgement; Charlie doesn’t decide what actions should be taken. But she removes the time of stitching together access, tools and updates that used to stand between arriving at work and actually being able to think.
If your client strategists are being assessed on how well they can run a status meeting, you’ve built a coordination role and called it strategy. If they’re being measured on the commercial outcome and given the standing to make the decision, you’ve built a meaningful role that will drive impact.
