Connections Strategy + Cheat Codes for Attention

The On Strategy Showcase podcast (a truly great listen from Fergus O’Carroll, every single time) has been diving into the new(er) discipline of connections strategy through a three-part series (catch up with parts one and two here).

As someone who worked to introduce this discipline to an agency with a 45-plus-year history of developing brilliantly effective brands, I have a vested interest in seeing how others are talking about their roles and the processes they’re developing to see how we stack up and if there’s anything worth stealing.

There’s tons of great thinking from each leader who has contributed to the show so far.

That said, I’m still concerned that the language being used isn’t specific enough to help other agencies integrate the role effectively, nor prescriptive enough to help clients understand how to work with teams that feature connections strategists. Everyone (rightly) wants to have their contribution recognized and credit claimed; I think that in trying to highlight the impact of the new role, folks are overselling it a bit, and in doing so making the job seem more complicated/convoluted/realm-of-magical-thinking than it really needs to be.

So as someone who has built a connections strategy team from the ground up, let me get more specific.

The role exists because of two factors: (1) the increasing fragmentation of the media landscape and culture making it harder to capture attention at scale, and (2) suppressed marketing budgets attempting to do more with less. That’s a recipe for shrinking ambitions – connections strategy helps us think our way out of that world to reignite and harness an ambition for interesting, memorable, effective work. Rather than build scale through simply adding more and more channels with watered-down versions of an ad concept (again, each channel has less reach, and smaller production budgets make bespoke work more challenging), connections strategy works with three core collaborating disciplines (brand strategy, creative, and media) to make a SYSTEM that works harder than any one ad can on its own. This rallies a campaign (and, longer-term, a brand) around a central theme for consistency. Each additional part of the system – whether a bespoke activation on a channel or something built with a subculture – integrated effectively adds breadth and depth to the theme. Over time, this builds a rich network of memories attached to the brand.

Part of building out a new strategy discipline has been training our team on new ways to think. Instead of simply leaving the team with our overall purpose (engineer ways for our campaigns to earn more attention than they can simply buy) that sounds clever but is ultimately self-important puffery, we developed a system that breaks down that mission into more discrete components.

We call this the Connections Guide.

Super Secret Connections Guide Things

It is a series of questions and provocations (not a template to be filled in) that ultimately creates a connected system. The four main areas for exploration are:

1. Audience Signal(s): Who are we building for, and what human truth or cultural norm are we tapping into with this campaign?
2. Attention Cheat Code: What will help this idea earn more attention than we can buy? How will we invite people into this idea?
3. Context: What will we do to give this idea the biggest stage possible? How do we increase creative commitment?
4. Sequencing and Integration: How do different parts of the idea work together? How does it change over time?

Our intention was to turn connections strategy from something aspirational and unknowable into something more coachable, repeatable, and welcomed into the process. This foundation allows our team to more reliably help our brand strategists, creatives, and media partners create more interesting, timeless work without overstepping or being redundant. By giving the team a guide to follow, we’re no longer left waiting for a simple spark of brilliance: Everyone has a framework we can work to further the craft.

The fear in doing this was that by establishing a – I hate to call it a template, but it’s a process, a way of thinking – guide to connections strategy, we would reduce the potential for magic. That we were establishing boxes to be checked. Granted, there’s still a risk of that happening, but the way we’re building up with our Connections Guide (a series of provocations for connected thinking) simply helps create a pattern of thinking that helps make ideas bigger.

The part of this guide that gets the most questions is the Attention Cheat Code. It seems to be the secret sauce because there are a lot of ways to go with it. In my mind, it often becomes the most revealing feature of campaigns developed with a connections strategist involved and those without. So, what is it? It’s the “unlock” that helps the campaign break free of the bounds of paid media/guaranteed quantities of attention. Said another way, how do you get 30 seconds of attention for a 15-second ad? Do the math – are you aiming for rewatchability? Are you priming social spread (share with a friend, which turns one into two)? What other mechanisms can you engineer that get people to lean in or pick up the pen? Borrowed interest? Priming, scarcity, and hype? Personal relevance?

With so many routes to engineering excess attention, picking the right approach seems daunting. But it’s not simply color by numbers – you have to create the cheat code that best reinforces the core theme of the campaign. To help our team get at the heart of what that should be, we use provocations like the following to set up good conversations with creative and media about which paths are most viable:

• What takes this beyond the boundaries of an ad? What are we asking people to do with the idea?
• How can we break expectations? How are we earning more than our fair share of headspace?
• Is there language or a trend within the community we can tap into?
• How can the audience find this idea on their own?
• Does the story build over time? Repeat exposures?
• What can we create with the audience?
• Whose voice matters more in ratifying an idea for a community?
• Can we trigger remixing?
• How can we inspire FOMO? Exclusivity and drop culture? Inspire collections?
• What can we give the community to create with? What never-been-done experience can we grant them?
• Is there an unexpected voice we can tap into to amplify the message?
• Can we tap into or allude to a story from the brand’s heritage or nostalgia in some way?
• Can we take a stand or make a pledge? Broker a collaboration?

All these provocations have to fit with decisions made (or how they’re shaping up to be made) in the other areas of the guide. Focusing on the specific language and culture of a group obviously requires choosing what group or groups to build for in the first place. Context matters deeply for how people can find, lean into, or build on an idea. It’s all connected thinking.

But more often than not, getting the cheat code right is what helps you create work that lives beyond a simple ad.