Hayden
Lawton

Most of what I know about strategy came from my first assignment out of the gate: sit inside emerging online cannabis subcultures as the category rolled out, and mine those communities for tension, consumer pain points, and controversies. So for the first two years of my strategy career, I spent every morning reading and analyzing posts, looking for tension and creative opportunities. All the things an audience lived with, but couldn't articulate. This experience taught me that what people said, what they actually did, and what they said they did were usually three completely different things, and there was real value in understanding each.

Six years into my strategy career, this remains the core to my practice. The rooms where people talk when they think no one is listening tend to be the rooms worth being in. The categories might change and evolve, but the skill of listening, observing and measuring become more stable.

I'm currently working as a Junior Planner at Zeno Group in Toronto, planning earned-first work for CPG, alcohol, and tourism accounts. The default at most earned-first shops is to reverse-engineer a strategy behind an idea someone has already fallen in love with, but I'm working on building trust with my account leads and moving planning upstream.