“I don’t think this is particularly relevant to the world of brand positioning or campaign strategy.” That was a comment on a recent piece I wrote. I think it was meant as a flag - a polite way of saying I’ve gone off-piste. Possibly off the deep end. I get some version of it every few months. Different people, same confusion. What does this have to do with advertising? Where’s the brand framework? Why is she banging on about Ursula Le Guin or geopolitics?
They’re not wrong, exactly. My writing doesn’t have much to do with advertising anymore. But the expectation that it should - that’s the bit I want to unpick.
Because I’ve worked in agencies, the assumption is that’s where I’m coming from. But my career was never purely that. I worked in international development, organisational design, innovation strategy, entertainment futures at Ridley Scott, nonprofit strategy, client-side change management. I moved through agencies - Naked, Droga5, etc - but I also moved through a lot of other things that didn’t fit neatly into the “strategist at an agency” box. I’ve written before about never quite fitting. The claustrophobia of being inside one discipline, one definition of what the work was supposed to look like. I always had one foot somewhere else, pulling in references and problems that nobody had asked me to think about. It drove some people mad. It drove me mad too for a time, but for different reasons - I could see wider applications for strategic thinking everywhere I looked, and the container I was working inside kept telling me they didn’t count.
I spent years trying to stretch that container from the inside. Then I stopped trying. I left.
When I went independent about seven years ago, I didn’t have a grand plan for what the work would become. I just knew I needed more room. What I didn't know was that the room was essentially infinite.
Out here, strategy is whatever you make it. There's no template. No predetermined output. No one arguing in circles about what constitutes an insight or the difference between vision and mission or whether brand purpose is dead yet. No one telling you what the discipline is or isn't, what counts and what doesn't. You define the edges. You define the work. The freedom is extraordinary and the terror is constant.
I want to be honest about the terror part because I think people assume it goes away. It doesn’t.
The first time I started working for an NBA player, I had never watched a basketball game. Not one. Not even casually. I knew nothing about the sport, the league, the culture, the economics - nothing. I sat there thinking: this is insane. They are going to find out that I can't name a single court position and I'm going to be fired before I've started.
That was years ago. And I felt the exact same thing last month walking into a different room, on a different project, in a different sector I had no credentials for. Seven years in and my imposter syndrome is off the charts. It hasn’t faded. If anything it’s got worse, because the work keeps getting wider and the rooms keep getting less familiar. Every single time, the same inner critic running its mouth: this is terrifying, I'm not qualified, nobody asked me to be the expert, you're a fraud, someone's going to rumble you and it's going to be mortifying. That voice is loud. It always goes first. But there's another one behind it, quieter, slower to show up: well no one else is connecting these dots, no one else is standing where I'm standing. So why not me?
That second voice is usually right. I know less than everyone in the room. That’s the point. I’m not inside their system. I ask questions they’ve stopped asking because everyone in there is so deep they can’t see the shape of the thing anymore. That’s what an outsider does. Not better. Different. And “different” keeps turning out to be exactly what the problem needs.
That feeling - the terror followed by the moment where a connection lands that nobody expected, least of all you - is the most addictive thing I’ve ever experienced professionally. More than any award. More than any big agency pitch win. The pure thrill of being inside a problem you have no business being inside, and finding that your brain works there too.
I chase that feeling now. It’s the thing that gets me out of bed.
I’ve also made peace with something it took me far too long to accept: I don’t need to be an expert. In any of it.
That sounds like a confession. In our industry it practically is. We’re trained to believe that depth is credibility - that you need to go into the weeds to add value, that the strategist who can’t match the client’s domain knowledge is a strategist who’ll get found out. But that’s bollocks. It always was, even inside agencies. You’d work on baby food, handbags and streetwear in the same quarter and nobody expected you to have spent a decade in each category. Your value was never expertise. It was navigation. Translation. Sense-making. Seeing the throughlines. Finding pathways into culture that might be relevant, threads that could be pulled on, connections between things the people inside the system couldn’t see because they were too close, too domain-centric.
And that’s exactly what we do as strategists - or should do. It’s why the work can be so wide and varied. Because those skills, that lens, can be applied to almost anything. As long as it’s not purely theoretical. As long as it’s genuinely helping people think differently and creating solid actions on the back of it. That's the job. It was always the job. Somewhere along the way we let "strategy" shrink to mean brands and campaigns, when really it was about the range of your inputs, the quality of your thinking, and where you chose to point it.
Out in the wild, you don’t need perfect answers. You need to be better at asking questions. Better at sitting with ambiguity. Better at pulling from unlikely places and making sense of what you find.
Let me show you what last year actually looked like.
I helped design a global youth sports grant programme for an athlete’s foundation - figuring out how to build a structure that works across multiple countries, multiple sports, multiple federations, getting money to kids whose families can’t afford to keep them playing.
I twice accompanied board-level teams to Silicon Valley to meet with AI companies over the course of a week - there as translator, sense-maker, and the person who helps you process what you’ve just seen before you get on the flight home. Watching very senior people have their assumptions dismantled in real time and then sitting with them while they figure out what it means is some of the most intense strategic work I’ve ever done.
I worked on a brand new youth basketball curriculum to be rolled out across North America. Built a fandom architecture and engagement playbook for a publisher navigating one of the biggest and most complex fan ecosystems in the world - millions of passionate readers, an author who is the sun to their minor planet, and a community that can turn on you in a heartbeat if you get the tone wrong.
I authored a board-level AI strategy for a major retailer and then stuck around for the hard part - the organisational change that turns a strategy document into something people actually do differently on a Monday morning. I’m currently designing an AI and emerging tech programme for their UK leadership - not a one-off session, an ongoing programme designed to rewire how those steering the ship think about what’s coming.
Coca-Cola asked me to build a module for their top leadership programme with a completely blank slate. My choice what to focus on. No brief. No predefined topic. I went with the fracturing of societal contracts - what it means for them as leaders, as people, as parents. How to digest a world where the agreements we grew up with are dissolving. How to operate in uncertainty. How to lead without absolutes, in some cases without clarity. Try fitting that into a brand positioning template. That isn't strategy in any traditional sense. But it’s some of the most important work I’ve ever done.
I mapped the future of sports for IMG - new economic models, the intersection of data, AI and IP, fans becoming reciprocal infrastructure rather than passive audiences. And then there’s the rest of it - the sprints, the workshops, the odd consultancy projects, the “I don’t even know what to call this but can you help?” conversations that are honestly some of the most interesting work I do.
So far this year I've keynoted for Microsoft on liminality and the generational fault lines reshaping how institutions relate to people. For Eli Lilly on AI transformation in the medical sector, for Just Eat on what happens when AI becomes the discovery layer for restaurants, for Dentsu on what a Maslow's hierarchy for AI adoption looks like. In the coming weeks I’m speaking at Meta’s IWD event on what women bring to the intelligence era, for Experian’s leadership team on the recomposition of organisations, for Lisbon Digital School on new creative practices leveraging AI as a cognitive prosthetic. Each one a different topic. Each one a completely different set of problems.
None of that is a brand framework. None of it is a campaign plan. All of it is strategy. And all of it in the same twelve months.
So when someone tells me my work isn't particularly relevant to brand positioning or campaign strategy - they're right. It isn't. But the strategic skills I built in agencies didn't atrophy out here. They accelerated. Every unfamiliar domain stretched them further. Every new system I walked into expanded what they could do. Seven years of pointing those skills at wildly different problems and they're sharper now than they've ever been.
Now, you’d be well within your rights to ask the question: what credibility does she have advising the executive leadership of Eli Lilly on their prioritisation around artificial intelligence in drug discovery and patient care?
And the honest answer is: fuck all.
I’ve got no right to be in that room. I don’t have a science background. I don’t have a medical background. I couldn’t tell you the difference between Phase II and Phase III trials without looking it up. If you judged my credibility by domain expertise alone, you’d be right to show me the door.
But that’s not why I’m there.
I’m not walking in pretending to know more about pharmaceuticals than people who’ve spent their entire careers in that industry. I’m there because the people who’ve spent their careers inside a system can’t always see past it. They know the landscape intimately - but intimacy breeds blind spots. I’m there to scour the landscape they already know and then bring entirely new ones into the spotlight. From abstract categories. From completely different economic models. From fields of specialisation that have never crossed their desk and wouldn’t, unless someone dragged them in from outside.
What I’m actually doing is helping them ask better questions. More expansive questions. Questions about where they should be focusing their time, energy and thinking that they simply couldn't get to from where they were sitting. You just can't see the shape of something you've never stepped outside of. You need someone who just walked in from somewhere completely different. Someone who’s been inside a fandom ecosystem last month and an organisational change programme the month before that and a youth sports foundation the month before that — and whose brain is quietly, constantly mapping the structural similarities between all of them.
That’s the value. Not knowing their world better than they do. Expanding their ability to see beyond it.
And this is where my writing comes back in. The essays about strategy under conditions of collapse. The explorations into science fiction as a lens for emerging technology. The geopolitics of AI. Strategic practice in the upside down. Platforms as world-building infrastructure. I know it looks like I'm off on one. Like it's intellectual tourism, or a hobby that got out of hand. I do love a good rabbit hole, I'll give you that. But this isn't background reading anymore. It hasn't been for years. This is the work. Every one of those explorations feeds directly into what I'm doing for clients. It's where the unexpected inputs come from, the ones that open up problems in ways nobody in the room had considered.
Inside an agency, that kind of thinking is interesting at the pub. You bring it up in a planning meeting and people nod politely and then someone says “okay but what’s the insight for the brief” and you put it away and get back to the brand onion. And fair enough - how do you apply Octavia Butler to selling deodorant? What does the concept of Pullman’s daemons do for a wellness supplement strategy? Inside those walls, the answer is: not much. It can’t be billed. It doesn’t fit the template. It lives in the margins of your brain but never earns a place in the deck. You carry it everywhere and deploy it nowhere.
Outside those walls, it’s different. Let me give you one example.
I was working on the fandom strategy - the publisher project. Deep in community mapping, trying to understand why this particular fan ecosystem was so volatile, why the love and the toxicity seemed to come from the same place. Standard segmentation wasn’t cutting it. The usual marketing frameworks for “fan engagement” were useless because they assumed fans were consumers, and these fans weren’t consuming - they were world-building. They were living inside the stories. Their identities were wrapped up in fictional characters in ways that were profound and also, sometimes, genuinely frightening.
I’d been reading about myth-making. About how stories encode survival knowledge. About the deep structures that make communities form around narratives - not brand narratives, actual myths. Ursula Le Guin on the power of naming. Tolkien on sub-creation. The role of ritual in binding a group identity. None of this was in the brief. None of it would have survived an agency planning meeting. But it was exactly the lens the problem needed. It unlocked a way of understanding that fandom that no amount of segmentation or persona work ever would - and it became the foundation of the entire strategy.
That doesn’t happen once. It happens constantly when the work is wide enough. When you’re building a youth basketball curriculum from scratch that needs to work across an entire continent, you end up at the frontiers of education design and emerging research around how young people learn and develop. That’s a long way from a brand pyramid. When you’re helping a board navigate AI transformation, science fiction’s long history of imagining human-machine relationships is genuinely useful for helping people think past their defaults.
Everything that made me a pain in the arse in agency life - the tangents, the weird references, the refusal to stay in my lane - turned out to be the entire value proposition once the lane disappeared.
And here's the thing about breadth: it compounds.
Year one, you’re connecting two things and hoping for the best. Year three, you’re connecting five or six and the connections are faster because you’ve started to recognise the deep structures underneath. Year seven, you walk into a room and within twenty minutes you can see how the problem in front of you relates to three others you’ve worked on in completely different sectors, because your brain has been inside enough different systems that the structural similarities jump out before anyone’s finished the briefing.
Something you learn inside a fandom ecosystem shows up in an AI strategy a few months later. A pattern you spot in youth sports reframes how you think about organisational change. The reading you did at midnight because you couldn’t sleep and fell down a rabbit hole about how mushroom networks communicate turns out to be exactly the metaphor a CEO needed to understand distributed decision-making. You can’t engineer those connections. But they’re not accidents either. They're the cumulative returns on range. And that’s your true value. It’s the thing that can’t be replicated by someone who started last Tuesday, or by a machine that can process information but hasn’t been inside the rooms where it matters.
Plenty of brilliant strategists thrive inside agencies. Plenty thrive in a specialism. Some of the best strategic minds I know have gone deep into one thing and built something extraordinary there. I’m not for a second saying that’s lesser work. It’s just not mine.
For a certain kind of brain - the kind that gets twitchy inside one category, that wants to pull from everywhere, that physically cannot stop making connections between things that aren’t supposed to be connected - this is the most fulfilling strategic work you’ll ever do.
I know because I'm seven years off the leash and the work is wider and weirder than I ever imagined it could be. Messier. Scarier. More interesting. The rooms don't get more comfortable. You just learn to trust yourself in them.
I wish someone had shown me this was possible when I was still inside the walls - wondering why everything felt too small, feeling simultaneously stuck and restless.
So this is me showing you.
Go explore.
I left the agency world 20 years ago and in my consultancy work since have almost never worked on ‘advertising’ with my clients and only rarely on brands. As you say Zoe, the work outside agencies and marketing is so much more diverse, broader, interesting and worthwhile.
I get annoyed by the assumption that ‘strategists’ and ‘strategy’ are the province of agencies.
After 20 years, I don’t feel imposter syndrome any more, I know my value in those rooms and it’s about asking good questions, bringing a different perspective and seeing what they can’t, connecting dots that seem unconnected and helping them navigate a way forward. The diversity of work I’ve done and working at leadership level rather than at the marketing level, means I’ve had the experience that allows me now (it took a while!) to do this with confidence.
At 64, an age when no agency would consider hiring me, I’m doing some of the best, most meaningful and most rewarding work of my career and I’m still learning.
Hell yeah to this.