Table of Contents:
COLLABORATION | TEAM DYNAMICS | PROCESS | STATE OF THE INDUSTRY | work EVALUATION
NAME: KATHERINE LEE
COMPANY: ATHLETICS
TITLE: Executive STRATEGY DIRECTOR
FROM: SANDY, UT
CURRENTLY LOCATED: BROOKLYN, NY
SPECIALTY OR AREA OF INTEREST: BUSINESS & BRAND STRATEGY, BAKING
SITE: ATHELTICSNYC.COM
“Shortening the space between making work and receiving feedback doesn’t make the process more collaborative… sometimes, it just makes it more stressful.”
ATHLETICS ANIMATED LOGO
Adam Estabrook: In our first interview we discussed your journey into strategy. What you’ve done at other agencies, going into the tech space, and your work with Athletics. Now, I’d like to talk about client inputs and how we evaluate the work.
If work is on a spectrum from radical collaboration on one side to radical division of labor on the other, where does your work fall?
Katherine Lee: Some of the best work comes out of radical collaboration. It's almost like a child that wants to stand exactly where you are or be inside your body again.
That kind of collaboration can be extremely uncomfortable, difficult, and time intensive. But, it can also yield excellent results even if it sucks at the moment and you have to shove the ego away. I’ve found the closer we can get to that point, the more time intensive it is and the more invested you become. That’s why you get a better result out of it.
When you have a firewall between the client and the agency it’s more difficult to deliver amazing work. From a business standpoint, it’s difficult to sustain that level of close collaboration because it’s expensive and it takes a lot of time.
From an operational standpoint, somewhere in the middle is much more comfortable.
What does that middle ground look like to you?
Some clients want us to work in a shared Figma file. Their designers are in there, our designers and strategists are in there. It's a good, easy back and forth relationship with a high level of psychological safety.
Other clients want a high-speed cadence of back-and-forth where we present and they give us feedback, and we present again….
But, just shortening the space between making work and receiving feedback doesn’t always make the process more collaborative. Instead, it just makes it more stressful. Sometimes that happens because we want to make the relationship nimble, but then the shorter cycles just lead to showing less finished work that doesn’t meet expectations.
So shorter cycles do not equal increased collaboration?
Not always. It's a vibe and the psychological safety of the iterative progress we’re making.
What are the key components to that psychological safety?
There’s a lot of science behind it, but the feeling that anybody on the team is able to venture a point of view and say something about the work must be respected.
We need to save space to voice opinions and try new things.
ALBA LARSON - ATHLETICS
“We need to save space to voice opinions and try new things.”
I have a theory that people assume we have to be collaborative or just get shit done. How do you create that psychological safety for a team that has people who want to get shit done and people that want to work iteratively?
Google has done a big piece of research on creating psychological safety for team success.
Something as simple as opening projects or starting a team collaboration process by sharing something potentially vulnerable at the beginning helps set a precedent from the start and makes a big difference.
So sharing more about who you are, what your work style is, who your pets are, who your kids are, what you’re really thinking about…. Things that are actually about you makes a vast difference in how safe people feel.
Do you think that's possible without the right vibe? And is the vibe foundational to setting up that environment?
No! I think that those types of exercises, or having that type of team leadership as a team leader, sets that precedent.
Creating the vibe that is taking a step toward psychological safety.
Where do clients fit into that vibe and sense of psychological safety?
The same. I've been in spaces where clients have leverage. They're paying, so they get to call the shots, but we need to make that space for them to have a voice.
Historically, venerated shops that were known for being design queens where they’d say, “Well, it's this way or the highway. This is the recommendation, this is what we believe, and we're the experts.”
In general, clients are away from all that, and the bigger the team is the harder it is to strong arm solutions like that.
What does that look like in a typical project?
We scope strategists throughout the process, not just the first 3 weeks. After that we deliver the brief and then go all the way downstream, helping to craft the outgoing and executional language, storytelling, and ensuring everything that's designed goes to market with a strategic lens on it.
That’s allowed us to get a little weird, which is fun. But, also because we're structured in a way where we have a team of creative technologists. Experimentation is very much a part of how we get to something fun, good, and interesting.
Over the course of a long engagement, how linear is the project from start to finish?
As an agency, and as creative people in general, we often struggle with the feeling of doneness or closure.
Different people come into the process at various times, but if you think about the process as a line there would be little loops as we progress forward. That’s where we’re cycling through iterations, moving forward, and then cycling through more iterations until it’s refined into a final product.
Do you ever find a client comes in with an initial project brief, but the direction changes completely by the end? For example, do you ever get a client coming for a dynamic logo but end up building a website instead?
Sometimes that happens, but usually we hash out the unknown at the get-go. And, that requires a certain level of self awareness in the first place.
Other times, people just want to do cool stuff. And they might change their minds, add, move things, or change the scope because it's cooler to do something unexpected than the first thing they had in mind.
CHROMEBOOK - ATHLETICS
“If [clients] haven't answered the fundamental questions about the story they want to tell, or… don't know anything about their new audience, they need to do that work first.”
How can creative companies have better conversations with clients?
If you’re a client that wants to do things at rock bottom costs and have it done really fast, maybe Athletics is not going to be the studio for you. There's going to be iteration, and our model includes bringing in creative technologists and strategy all the way through.
Maybe what they really need is a content production studio with some kid on a phone and a bunch of creators spread out all over the world like to go make stuff for you.
What are the parameters for an ideal client and client brief?
I'm answering that question with a similar answer: clear objectives that are grounded in the reality of the business situation.
If they haven't answered the fundamental questions about the story they want to tell, or they don't know anything about their new audience, they need to do that work first.
That’s what I mean about being grounded in reality.
If you don’t know shit about your customer, but you come to us and just need a website we're not going to be able to help you. You have a fundamental business problem that you need to address first before you make marketing materials.
“If [Doritos] gave me more opportunities to fantasize about eating Nacho Cheesier in my day to day, that’s… brand value they can provide to me.”
Recently I saw a statement from Scott Galloway saying that if your CMO believes advertising is their primary focus, they’ll be out the door in 18 months. It reinforced my sense that marketing is increasingly concerned with product delivery and experience.
What’s your take? Do you think marketing and product will just become closer and closer over time?
For technology, yes, almost certainly. Marketing and product are increasingly overlapping, and marketing has to show up in products. But not for everything.
You still have marketing inside the product when you open up a bag of Doritos. So yes, you can always have marketing inside of a product. But, I don't think people working on Doritos marketing and product innovation will be one and the same.
Recently, I walked past a Subway, and somehow got to the insight that their audiences are really into foot long products. So, now they have a foot long pretzels, cookies, churros.
The price of butter continues to go up. So, they might make the cookie thinner, but it’s still a foot long! It's not that they're guaranteeing something massive, but they are saying it's a foot long and consumers know what a foot is. It's 12 inches, and that’s the fundamental thing they’re after.
Let’s talk about Doritos and innovation delivery. You could extrapolate that same thinking over to Doritos, too.
Say I only buy Doritos in the grocery store when I'm hungry, then that CMO is going out the door because we're saying it only has placement in one spot. So, I need to pump up my promotions in order to get people to include it in the larger consideration set within that setting. As opposed to identifying Doritos with many possible settings and methods of delivery to get more Doritos, right?
For me, I think Cool Ranch is disgusting, but Nacho Cheesier is awesome and I don't eat it often enough. If they gave me more opportunities to fantasize about eating Nacho Cheesier in my day to day, that’s a part of the brand value they can provide to me.
Or, if they can help me imagine new ways for it to fit into my life. For example, if I had a 12 inch Dorito, how would that fit into my life differently than the current 10 ounce bag of regular sized doritos?
Right now I have no idea how that would fit into my life, but they have the opportunity to help me think about it… and now I see that I'm just proving my own argument that for Doritos, marketing and product are not the same!
I’ll bring up another marketing provocateur. Mark Ritson has been beating a similar drum, singling out an ignorance of marketing fundamentals and how promotion is only one of the 4 P’s.
Clearly consumer packaged goods go all in on promotion vs. tech. Do you think that will change if the industry sees tech as the vanguard of business trends?
When it comes to tech you, you still have to do the product-market fit first, and then marketing follows. I don't think marketing ever leads in tech. That would mean you have a shitty product, and need marketing to be bigger than product in order to make it move off the shelf which I think is fundamentally in opposition to how tech works.
If you have a sucky product like an AR headset that feels like a drag to use or the product doesn't fit anybody's life in a real way, then it’s going to fail.
But, Fortnite clearly fits into people's lives in a way that is a clear value add and people love it. They can imagine themselves in this world all the time, and they want to even when they're sleeping or eating or doing whatever they wish they were inside Fortnite.
To me, that’s a perfect product-market fit. Even when they're eating 12 inch Doritos (they don’t exist yet, but you can have that idea for free).
I'm happy you feel comfortable sharing that you're a godless communist who doesn't like Cool Ranch! And if anybody from the Doritos marketing team reads this interview, I encourage them to get in touch with you.
I know people love it, but I also think those are people who drink Dr. Pepper.
ATHLETICS 2024 Year in review reel
“As agency experts, we need to be the ones to tell clients what we need from them.”
Let’s use that to shift the conversation to how you evaluate good versus bad work. When do you feel good about a project versus feeling about it?
There are a few elements that I care deeply about. One of them is that we hit brand goals.
The second one is creating a thing that's really for the audience we’re trying to serve.
And the third thing, is the feeling of team satisfaction, because you might be able to hit the first two, but have had to slog through to the mountain of death until you’re finished.
What strategies can you offer someone in a similar position to facilitate these elements?
Clients need to buy something they actually need before coming to Athletics. You can't go to a shoe store and ask if they do perms. Instead, they need to know what they're buying, otherwise what are they doing here? You need to be able to speak the language and know what they're buying. And that needs to be the thing that we sell, or at least in the same neighborhood, even if it's not an exact fit.
Then it’s clear alignment on the brand objectives: this is what we’re trying to do, and it's grounded in reality.
Last question. Let’s say I am a client, and I feel like I'm grounded in reality and have the answers that you need, but I don't understand why we're not communicating. How can we communicate with clients and encourage them to come fully prepared?
For every meeting, I explain what they need to bring to the table.
Sometimes that's beforehand and sometimes that's in session, because they don't need to do any pre-work.
But, I tell them this session is about being open minded or this session is about being decisive. And I’m brutally disciplined about saying, is this right or not right for the audience that we're creating for?
As agency experts, we need to be the ones to tell clients what we need from them.
Thank you.
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