MARTY MERCADO

Why Every Practice I've Built Started the Same Way

There's a version of this story I've lived four times now. Different company, different city, different category. Same opening scene.

I walk in and the strategy is fine. Smart people are making smart decisions. Account leads are thinking critically about their clients. Product teams have a point of view. Nobody is failing. But nobody has a strategist, and the gap shows up in places that are hard to name until you've seen the pattern enough times.

The pitch deck is 80% right but doesn't land the way it should. The client relationship is solid but stays transactional. The team wins work within their current remit but can't expand it. Everyone is being strategic, but nobody is doing strategy.

That distinction matters more than most organizations realize. Being strategic is a capability. Doing strategy is a specialization. The difference is the same as the difference between a founder who can sell and a sales team that can scale. One is instinct. The other is infrastructure.

I've seen this at McCann, where I transitioned from account management into a strategy practice that was still finding its shape. At VaynerMedia, where I was hired as an account executive and within two weeks realized the agency had no dedicated strategy function at all, just talented people doing their best to fill the gap between social content and brand thinking. At Fast Horse, where the capability existed in pockets but needed a more modern planning approach to match the work the agency wanted to be doing. And at Braze, where I was brought in to build a creative strategy practice from scratch inside a SaaS company that had never had one.

The pattern is always the same. Strategic thinking is distributed across people whose actual jobs are something else entirely. They're account leads, product marketers, solutions consultants. They're doing strategy on top of their real responsibilities, which means it gets the time and energy that's left over after everything else is done. In a slow week, the strategy is pretty good. In a busy quarter, it evaporates.

The other thing that's consistent: resistance. Not malicious resistance, but the friction that comes from trying to formalize something people believe they're already doing. If everyone thinks they're strategic (and they often are), the natural question is: why do we need a strategist?

The answer only becomes clear in practice. It's hard to argue for in theory.

So everywhere I've built, the playbook has been the same. Don't ask for permission to build the function. Ask for a chance to prove the value. Find a small pitch, an underserved client, a brief that nobody else wants. Put a strategist's touch on it and show what changes. At Vayner, my co-conspirator and I started building our case as a side project, winning small pitches that nobody expected us to compete for. Within six months we were a department. At Fast Horse, we used new business pitches as proof of concept, eventually winning work that expanded the agency's remit from PR to integrated lead. At Braze, I was the only full-time strategist on the team for the first stretch, proving that creative strategy could influence enterprise revenue before the company invested in scaling the practice.

The shift from skepticism to buy-in always happens the same way. Leadership sees that the strategy function can open doors to rooms they weren't in before. A CMO meeting that wouldn't have happened. A pitch that wouldn't have been competitive. An existing client who expands their investment because the conversation moved from implementation to imagination. Once they see that a dedicated strategist can expand capabilities, deepen relationships, and differentiate the company in a competitive pitch, the switch flips fast.

But getting from zero to one is always the hardest part. Not because the value is hard to demonstrate, but because the definition of "strategy" is so inconsistent that everyone in the room thinks they're already doing it. Part of the job, in every single build, is aligning people on what strategy actually is as a practice before you can show them what it does.

I've now spent 15 years doing this across agencies, consultancies, and SaaS. I keep ending up in the same room. The scenery changes but the pattern holds: an organization with smart people, strong work, and a missing function that nobody realizes is missing until someone builds it.

I'm the person who builds it.

What Brands Get Wrong About "Culture"

A retailer comments "yas kween" on a TikTok. A bank posts a meme during the Super Bowl. A CPG brand drops a limited edition product tied to whatever micro-trend is cycling through the internet that week.

None of this is culture work. All of it is visibility work dressed up as relevance.

The mistake most brands make is conflating presence with participation. Being in the comments, posting on trending audio, referencing whatever everyone is referencing that day. It reads as engagement. It feels like the brand is "part of the conversation." But audiences have become deeply skilled at distinguishing between a brand that belongs in a space and a brand that's trying to be seen in one. The former earns attention. The latter earns a screenshot and a quote tweet.

The reason this keeps happening is that most brand teams start from the wrong question. They ask: "What's happening in culture that we can attach ourselves to?" The better question: "What role does our brand actually play in people's lives, and how do we fulfill that role so well that culture comes to us?"

That starts with an honest audit. Not a brand perception study filled with leading questions, but a real look at how people use your product, what they associate with your name, and whether any of that lines up with the story you're trying to tell. If your brand positioning says "adventure" but your customers use your product on their couch, you have a gap. And no amount of influencer spend is going to close it.

The brands that do this well understand something that most don't: your job is to bring your audience more of what they already want. If you sponsor an event, did that event become better because of your involvement? If you partner with a creator, did they get to make something they couldn't have made without you? If you show up in a cultural moment, did you add value to it or just attach your logo?

This is where creator partnerships go wrong most often. The standard model is a brand integration that amounts to a scripted ad read in the middle of someone's content. The creator pauses their natural flow, reads copy that sounds nothing like them, and the audience fast-forwards. Everyone involved knows this is what happens. The brand gets an impression number on a report. The creator gets a check. The audience gets nothing.

Compare that to a brand that funds a special episode, hosts a live event, or enables a piece of content that wouldn't exist without their support. The audience's experience is: "this brand made something I love possible." That positive association is worth more than a thousand mid-roll reads, because it's earned through contribution, not interruption.

The principle underneath all of this is straightforward. Your brand has a role. Play that role better than anyone else. If you're a sports brand, make the game-day experience better. If you're a food brand, help people eat in ways that surprise them. If you're a financial brand, help people feel more in control of their money. Do that with consistency and conviction, and the cultural relevance follows. People talk about brands that are useful, generous, and true to what they actually do.

When I build strategy for a client, this is where I start. What do people actually see when they see you? Is it what you want them to see? Where is the alignment and where is the gap? And once we know the role, how do we play it in a way that earns us the right to be in the rooms we want to be in?

Culture is something you earn your way into by being valuable to the people who make it.