Insights

Good Ideas Are Cheap.
Good Problems Are Rare.

Strategy · 7 min read · 1618 Media Insights

Every brief arrives slightly wrong.

A client says they need a campaign. Or a new logo. Or more followers, a sharper tagline, a launch film. Each request sounds specific, and most of them are symptoms wearing a job title.

The real problem sits underneath, and nobody has said it out loud yet, because it is less comfortable than a deliverable.

Most agencies answer the brief as written. They are fast, polished and occasionally brilliant, and they solve the problem they were handed. That is exactly where the trouble starts.

The work that wins on effectiveness, the kind judged on sales, share and behaviour instead of taste, tends to begin somewhere else. It begins by asking whether the brief is describing the right problem at all.

That is what strategy-led actually means. Not a deck before the design. Not a funnel diagram with a confident arrow. It is a willingness to argue with the question before answering it.

Creativity is a multiplier. Strategy decides what it multiplies.

Ideas have never been cheaper. Anyone can produce a decent visual, a decent post and a decent line of copy in an afternoon, and the tools available to everyone are only getting better.

What has not got cheaper is direction.

A strong idea pointed at the wrong problem is an expensive way to be clever in public. A modest idea pointed at the right problem can move a business. Strategy is simply the act of choosing where the force goes.

So let’s look at four recent pieces of work from the top of the effectiveness awards, and ask the same question of each. Where did it start?

Maggi didn’t need a new message. It needed a new role.

Maggi is one of India’s most loved food brands, which is exactly why its problem was hard to see. The brand had hit its first decline since 2015, and the cause was not dislike. It was that people reached for Maggi mostly as a rescue: dinner gone wrong, a late night at work, hunger at an odd hour. It was a helpful fallback, not a first reflex.

The obvious brief writes itself. Remind people it’s tasty, run an offer, shout louder. The strategic move was different. McCann’s team reframed the role of the brand, moving it from emergency hunger to emotional hunger, and tied it to everyday feelings like rain, gossip, chai, mountains and a lazy Sunday mood. Those feelings became cravings, and Maggi became part of how people feel, not just what they eat.

The agency reports the highest annual sales in the brand’s history after the shift, and the work took the Grand Effie at the Effie India Awards in February 2026.

Take that agency claim as a claim, but notice the shape of the thinking. Growth had stalled, and the answer was not more awareness. It was a bigger, more frequent reason to be chosen.

The lesson: when a loved brand stalls, ask when people think of you, and why only then. The role is often the real problem.

Uber Eats changed what it sold without changing who it was.

Uber Eats had a quiet strategic problem. It was known for restaurant food, and the business wanted to deliver groceries, alcohol and general retail. That meant moving the brand’s positioning without damaging the food-delivery revenue that paid the bills, while entering categories already owned by giant retailers.

The insight was refreshingly human. People had become more willing to indulge in small treats, so the job was to make getting almost anything delivered feel normal instead of excessive. The platform that came out of it, “Get Almost Almost Anything”, expanded the brand’s promise but kept its playful, self-aware tone and its distinctive assets. A new position, an old personality.

That combination appears to be the reason it has lasted. The campaign has run in multiple iterations since 2021, has been exported to other markets, and in 2026 won the Grand Effie at both the Australian and the APAC awards. An earlier award entry for the platform reported 82% revenue growth in new categories, 7.4% growth in core food delivery and a record 990% return on investment.

The lesson: repositioning is expansion, not replacement. Keep the parts people already love, and change only what the business needs people to believe next.

The Field Museum found its idea in the weather.

Every Chicago winter, museum attendance drops. The Field Museum had a new exhibition about creatures that live on blood, and it needed people to leave their warm homes to see it.

The brief could have asked for a better poster. The insight sent the team somewhere else. Chicagoans, as the strategists put it, will only brave the cold for great food.

So the museum stopped trying to make itself more tempting and attached itself to a behaviour that was already happening. It partnered with well-known local restaurants to serve limited-time dishes made with blood, and diners received discounted museum tickets. Attendance rose 42%, more than double the goal, and a nonprofit beat far bigger global brands to the US Grand Effie.

There is a small budget lesson hiding here. Nothing about this idea required scale. It required a sharp, slightly inconvenient truth about how people in one city behave, and the nerve to build the whole campaign around it.

The lesson: a good insight is not a statistic. It is a tension. Find what your audience already does, and find a way to make your brand part of it.

Suncorp played the long game, which is the point.

Not every strategy shows up in a single campaign. Suncorp, an Australian insurer, took the Grand Effie in 2025 in the long-term effects category for work that kept questioning the way insurance brands normally behave. It ran over several campaigns, including One House to Save Many, Resilience Road and If Your Home Could Talk.

The judges described it as a business and brand transformation, with strong return on investment and gains in market share and consideration. Public detail on the exact numbers is limited, so we won’t quote any here. The shape is what matters.

A campaign is an episode. A strategy is a position you hold across many of them. When the position stays steady and the executions keep changing, the brand compounds. When both change every year, the brand resets.

The lesson: pick a stance you can defend for five years, then let the creative be as restless as it likes.

What the four have in common.

None of these projects is about a clever execution, though all of them have one. Look at what happened before the execution.

First, each team questioned the brief. Maggi was not really a sales problem and Uber Eats was not really a food problem. The Field Museum was not really an advertising problem. They were a role problem, a belief problem and a behaviour problem.

Second, each started from something human. A feeling, an attitude, a winter habit. Not a feature, not a slogan, not a category cliché.

Third, each held a clear position long enough for it to build. Strategy was treated as a thread running through the work, not a slide that got presented once.

Notice what is missing from that list. Nobody started with a logo, a colour palette or a content calendar. Those matter, and craft matters a great deal, but they are how a decision shows up. They are not the decision itself.

Three questions to ask before any brief is signed.

If you run a growing business, you don’t need an awards budget to borrow this thinking. You need better questions at the start.

What are we actually trying to change? What people think, what they do, or when they do it. Those are three different jobs, and each needs a different kind of work.

What do people already do that we could join? The fastest strategies attach to a habit that exists, instead of asking people to build a new one.

What are we willing to leave out? Strategy is mostly subtraction. A brand that says one clear thing is remembered. A brand that says six things is a brochure.

Write the answers down in plain words. If they sound vague on paper, they will sound vague in the market, and no amount of beautiful design will repair that.

Where this leaves you.

The pressure on brands right now is to produce more, faster, in more formats. It is a reasonable pressure, and AI makes it easier to meet.

But the more content any brand can make, the more valuable the decision about what that content is for. The scarce skill is no longer making things. It is knowing which problem is worth solving, and proving it before the first pixel moves.

That is also a question of proportion. Enough thinking to point the work in the right direction, enough craft to land it once it is there, and each in balance with the other.

Good ideas are everywhere now. A well-chosen problem, held with discipline, is what turns one of them into growth.

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