By Ashley Bergren, Senior Marketing Manager
Brands today need to be more adaptable and responsive to change than ever. Insights and tech stacks are often the stars of the show when we talk about agile advertising. But as Damien Lemaitre, global commerce director of dentsu’s iProspect said in a recent a conversation, agility, in its most distilled sense, is “Data plus speed and collaboration.”
Tools and technology enable that collaboration, but the person-to-person work within and across teams remains crucial to a brand’s ability to be agile, and thus competitive. In short, you still need a good team to succeed.   
For a Q&A series on the Amazon Ads blog, we interviewed several industry leaders on a range of topics, intended to help brands better navigate the advertising landscape today. In discussing agile advertising, these executives invariably hit upon the fundamental importance of building and leading agile teams.   
Here, we’ve pulled together some of their tips.
A clear vision for a team is key to helping everyone understand what they need to prioritize and where they can add value, in order to move toward the common goal. Speed requires clarity of purpose, and to get that, it helps if every team member feels comfortable speaking up.
“I encourage everyone to ask 100 questions,” says Amy Ginsberg, chief investment officer at Havas Media Group. “It might seem annoying to some people, but you’re going to learn more and have a better understanding of what you’re doing. Sometimes people are afraid to ask questions and then don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, or why that thing is important and to whom. Everything is always changing, so you have to be comfortable in the uncomfortable, but, most importantly, you should always do all you can to understand that fundamental why.”
When viewing a business challenge through a diverse range of lenses, you gain a depth and breadth of insight—and thus, more opportunities to identify better solutions.
“It’s easy to hire someone whom you relate to, someone who’s just like you,” says Megan Pagliuca, chief activation officer at Omnicom Media Group. “It’s harder to hire people who are different. I think that is one of the broader challenges we’re trying to solve as an industry. But it’s so important, because you need that diversity of opinion, and the perspectives of people who are smarter than you are in a range of different areas—in order to get the right output.”
Fostering a culture of inclusion creates space for each individual to bring their best work and thinking to the table—to be themselves authentically.
“You have to coach the player,” says Mike Law, president of dentsu’s Amplifi US. “You’ve got to give the team a goal, but you have to look at every individual on their own. Some people need to be pushed; some people need a hug. But you have to think about every individual. What are they going through? How do you relate to them?”
That leadership approach of always working to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and view a challenge from their perspective, with empathy, is as beneficial to connecting with clients and customers, as it is to leading a high-performing team.
The pandemic and the rapid shift to remote work joined our home lives and work lives. As a result, we’ve been forced to redefine what we share with colleagues and what we don’t, like if or when we discuss details about our personal lives or responsibilities.
“Sometimes as parents, we think taking care of our kids is more important than other people’s personal priorities,” says Amy Lanzi, EVP of Publicis Commerce. “So, now if I have to get off a video call to go pick up my kids, I just say: ‘Hey, I’ve got to go,’—not ‘because I have kids’ or ‘because my children are more important than yours.’ When you just say ‘I have to go,’ it unlocks people who may have different personal choices, and encourages them to go do the things they need to do.”
Re-examining our boundaries in a new light applies to the industry, in a broader sense, as well.
Siloes are detrimental to agility, and yet many remain.
“There’s a false choice today between data and creativity,” says Dimitri Maex, CEO of IPG’s Reprise Digital. “The two work together. And there’s a number of aspects to that. For one, obviously, data can lead to an insight that can spark a creative idea … that can lead to a very creative and effective campaign. In addition, there’s a huge role for data in driving creative experimentation. With rigorous insights and measurement, you can actually try a lot of different things very quickly.”
To that end, the brands that are built around teams, which are built around realizing the immense potential of so many technological innovations, will be the ones who are best positioned to deliver for their customers.
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