In this episode of The Digital Edge, host Mark Reed-Edwards sits down with Vanessa Bolosier, the Head of Strategy at Incubeta MENA, to explore what modern marketing strategy really means beyond agency buzzwords.
Vanessa shares why real strategy is about diagnosing growth systems, identifying where commercial value leaks, and delivering measurable outcomes that can actually pass a CFO or Chief Data Officer audit – not just a standard marketing report. Together, they unpack how AI is impacting the balance between short-term campaign performance and long-term infrastructure, why judgment and human craft matter more than ever when content generation is cheap, and how brands can bridge the talent and approval gaps holding their growth back.
Read the Full Transcript Here
Mark Reed-Edwards: This is The Digital Edge from Incubeta. I’m Mark Reed-Edwards. On today’s episode, the first of two parts, I’m joined by Vanessa Bolosier, head of strategy at Incubeta MENA. Vanessa defines strategy as diagnosing growth systems, finding where commercial value leaks, and being accountable for results that would pass a CFO or chief data officer audit, not just marketing reporting.
Let’s get to the discussion. Vanessa, welcome to The Digital Edge.
Vanessa Bolosier: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Mark Reed-Edwards: It’s great to have you here. Can you tell me about your role as head of strategy at Incubeta MENA? And I guess I’m interested in what strategy actually means in your day-to-day, and what kind of challenges you’re helping brands work through.
Vanessa Bolosier: So strategy for me means being able to diagnose growth systems, because I think growth is what most marketers care about in this day and age, and also being accountable for the numbers that they produce. So a thing that I’ve noticed recently is that loads of agencies actually say to clients that they deliver outcomes, but they still are delivering outputs, and I think they’re reporting them as outcomes.
And my test is very simple. Like, would it pass an audit? And when I say an audit, I don’t mean, like, would it pass a CMO audit, but rather the CFO’s or the chief data officer’s audit. And most of what gets presented as marketing impact, however we tell the story, when we massage the data with GA4, wouldn’t survive that room.
So as someone leading strategy, I kind of look across the whole system, the data infrastructure, how the data feeds media, how the data feeds creative, how we measure and I guess how we make the next decision. And I think if I had to put it in, like a s- shorter term, ‚cause I know I talk a lot, it’s that, like, I kind of find where the leaks are.
I find where the commercial value is leaking. I kind of size up the leak and I decide what to fix first, and I think that’s it. Because oftentimes you see the full picture, but you don’t know where to start, and that’s the case for a lot of marketers. So yeah, that’s what wins the low-hanging fruit.
That’s what wins your experience there, which would be your media or your creative to then earn the right to have the harder conversation about the plumbing, the infrastructure, the foundation that nobody really notices until it breaks. So yeah, that’s, that’s my role.
It’s very long, but hopefully that summarizes it.
Mark Reed-Edwards: I think you did a really good job of explaining it, and I want to drill down a little bit more into marketing strategy. You know, it’s always had to evolve, but the last couple of years feel just a little bit different. So how much has the actual practice of strategy changed, and is it more about new tools, new thinking, or both?
Vanessa Bolosier: I think it’s about both. But I obviously will say that the thinking matters more than the tool. You can put the same tools in different people’s hands and still give you a different result, right? So I think being able to get research synthesis, like being able to synthesize research, being able to produce first drafts or building a deck, like building slides. Of course, tools can help you do that. But, I recall like recently Google sent us an 80-page report on the future of travel, so it’s Travel 2050 in the MENA region, and typically that would have cost me a full day of really going through it and drilling down the data.
I read it and I, I insist on still reading some of these reports because I think AI kind of misses some of the nuances, and these are the nuances that win the pitch and, you know, help the client develop better strategic thinking. But what I can do with the tools is I can still get the insights to my team in the fraction of the time that it would have taken me, historically, and that means that the team can get sharper much faster.
So to answer your question, you know, what’s changed, I think the judgment part is where it’s changed in that I think, well, one of the clients that we’ve been speaking to recently, they sent out an RFP and they got six different responses, and four of them were essentially the same, like literally down to the slide titles.
So it actually made their decision easy because they obviously discarded the four that clearly didn’t layer in the level of thinking that was required and I think, they went for the two that had original thinking. So because everyone has the same tools, I think as you put it, people think it’s either the thinking or the tools, but it’s both. I, I think it is both. And the only differentiator that is actually left is the quality of the thinking that you bring into how you use the tools.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah, that’s interesting because the way in which you use tools can change the outcome of using those tools, and that’s what’s between your ears — the judgment that you’ve built over time and experience.
Vanessa Bolosier: And that’s it, and I think people are really bogged down by the tools, and they have been more recently because there’s so many that have sort of hit the market. But a lot of these tools, a lot of this technology has been around for a long time.
It’s just that it wasn’t available at your fingertips at the same rate as it is now. Long before AI was around and machine learning algorithms were around. It’s just now it’s leveled the playing field and everyone’s got access to it.
But it’s also a great way to reveal the quality of thinking of like the people that you work with. Right. And that’s also quite interesting to see.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah. Of course, in marketing there’s tension, right? Tension all over the map, but the area I want to zoom in on is this tension between short-term performance and long-term brand building.
Vanessa Bolosier: Yeah.
Mark Reed-Edwards: It’s not anything new, but I’m just wondering whether AI has made that tension better or worse, and how do you help clients hold both of those at once?
Vanessa Bolosier: Yeah, I think that that’s one of the biggest challenges. The long and the short of it has and will always be one of the biggest challenges that they have.
To answer the question, has AI made it worse? I think it’s made it worse if you use AI for speed, but it does make it better if you use it to build. And by that I mean how we keep clients realistic around AI is a lot of people hear about AI and think efficiency because that’s the messaging that’s out there. And if you look at LinkedIn, it’s all you see. Used that way, it’s all about being short-termist, right? So that means that, like, if you have a short-termist mindset, you think more assets, more pressure on this quarter, more tests. And again, to use the long and the short of it from Les Binet, I think it still holds.
AI doesn’t repeal it, but what AI has changed is the cost of building the long-term foundations. And I think that’s the thing that we’re having conversations with clients at the moment, is that we’ve kind of split the work into two layers. The two layers are experience, which is the short of it.
So that’s anything that’s campaign, it’s search, it’s creative. All of that is rolled out faster with actually ideas that we couldn’t really execute before in the way that we’re executing them now. So that’s the short of it. And that sort of use of AI actually wins you the quarter. But when you think about infrastructure and the types of infrastructure that you have to build for the long of it, that is data quality, that is measurement maturity, that is the technology layer underneath it, that used to take years of change management, right?
So the long-term vision of what AI can do and agentic AI, you know, like, we’re literally living and breathing that day to day. And the idea that, like, AI, agentic AI will make things faster and cheaper to build, that’s not really true because when you think about the long of it, it takes guts, it takes risk-taking, it takes huge investments, and it takes years to build the foundation.
But it does take less years than it would have taken otherwise to then do the transformation that comes with it. And like I said, we’re building this for some of our clients, so I am speaking from experience, and it is about setting the foundations now with the technology that we have available now to compound the benefits later.
So it’s definitely not short-termist, and it’s definitely not fast, and it’s definitely not cheap. So to, yeah, and to, and to summarize it, like, a- again, I don’t want to give a long-winded answer to the question. How we keep our clients balanced is by that twofold approach, which is experience that wins the quarter, and then infrastructure that will eventually win the decade.
And I think every plan that we carry with our clients has that sort of like helping them achieve their quarterly target, but also helping them achieve that level of maturity and reporting on the progress of both. And that’s how we think we can win.
Mark Reed-Edwards: So imagine you’re sitting down with a client and they say, „Oh, we’ve got a brand problem.“
Maybe they’ve hit a growth plateau with a product or a service or, you know, whatever it is, or maybe there’s a positioning issue. Where do you start? And what does, say, the first week or so of diagnosis look like?
Vanessa Bolosier: Mm. I think one way that we approach things, and, our approach, and I know it’s, it’s table stakes to a certain extent, but our approach is client-centric.
But we also are the marketing outcomes agency, so at the end of the day, we start with the outcome. What is the desired outcome? What number are you trying to move? And what’s in the way of moving that? So week one is all about mapping. It’s all about questions. We’re not looking at deliverables. And I think clients often tend to bring two goals that pull against each other, and, you know, just generally it’s about growing revenue.
It always gets to that. Like, they’ll tell you something that’s quite tactical or quite symptomatic, but when you dig deeper, it always is about growing revenue or cutting the cost of sale, right? Or cutting the cost of production or cost of producing whatever it is that they need to produce, right?
So the question is which one goes first? Does efficiency fund the growth that they want to see, or do we need to prove aggressive growth first to kind of earn the investment in the infrastructure? And I think that first week of, like, identifying the tension and prioritization really that kind of shapes the whole plan that we then do. Because if you map out the system and find where the value leaks, again, going back to the role of the strategist, you know, you can understand where the signals are getting lost or whether there’s a missing data infrastructure to be able to leverage what we want to leverage to achieve the goal that we have from a marketing standpoint.
And it may be that there’s an ambition there, but there’s decisions that take months, and there’s loads of reasons why, especially in our region, where these decisions can take months. So, I think we tend to map out the leaks and look at the biggest leak first. Often what we do is proof of concept, so we can try and do things under 120 days wherever possible to show the value quite quickly.
And then we always, and I think that’s why we call ourselves outcomes partners, is because we obviously try to always tie that back to a commercial number that everyone understands. And that’s what we mean by marketing that passes the audit in that, like, anyone questioning this number will, you know, will get a response that’s solid.
Mark Reed-Edwards: A lot of the conversation around AI in marketing is about efficiency, content at scale, things like that. But it kind of ignores creativity, which is the root of the work that we all do. Do we need to rethink what creative strategy means in a world where generation is cheap, but judgment is rare?
Vanessa Bolosier: Yeah.
I mean, do we need to rethink creative strategy? Of course we do. We do. But if you think about the fact that we’re even now, like, using the word cheap, right? You get what you pay for. I think good quality work, even when leveraging AI, is backed by years of craft, and that needs to be paid for.
Because if a client wants cheap, they’ll get AI slop. That’s how it is. That’s how it works. And we’re seeing floods of skilled mediocrity. Like, you will see, relatively competent, fast, and forgettable content out there. And I guess if you don’t have a brand to protect, then that’s fine, but if you do, you need creativity that’s strategic, right?
And I think that’s something that’s worth noting because we talk about AI a lot, and that’s something that we were discussing at one of the Google events in the last few weeks, is that creating creativity in the age of AI needs to also be looked through the lens of the consumer, right?
Like, a lot of consumers actually do not care whether the content that they’re seeing has been generated by AI. I think as long as the story rings true and the emotion is real, I think it’s a little over 50% that will tell you that, okay, that’s a huge number. And in our region, in the Middle East and Africa, you, you will see that up to 74% of people actually don’t care if AI is used in ads.
So, to answer the question more specifically about creative strategy, when generation is cheap, I think the value moves to the brief and what you learn afterwards. So you start with the audience, that’s a given, right? You always do, and that hasn’t changed in the age of AI. But with so many people having access to strategic thinking by way of prompts, if I can put it that way, people sort of forget about the science in creative strategy, so that’s anything that’s behavioral.
So, you know, you’ve got psychosocial analysis and you’ve got social listening and audience observation, and you’ve got all of this science, the real science in marketing. And then people also stop thinking about the funnel. And they don’t really think about the funnel in the way that it is actually manifested, you know, in the sense that people search, people stream, people scroll, and people shop at the same time. And to do that, the algorithms need a lot of content.
They need asset variety. So the creative challenge in the age of AI, as a strategist, is having that single-minded idea that can flex across that funnel, that can flex across every channel, that can flex across these different formats and the audiences without losing itself. And that’s what makes creative strategy important.
That’s what makes the strategist a connector before and after the launch of these campaigns. And, and I guess, again, like, goes back to what we were saying, the way that we’re working is creative knowledge compounds instead of restarting every quarter when you really think about it in a way that’s the long of it.
So, so you don’t have a strategist that writes a brief anymore and builds a deck because Claude can do that very well for you. But they own what the brand learns, and the intelligence of it, and I think that’s what’s most valuable in this day and age.
Mark Reed-Edwards: Let’s talk about talent. You work with a lot of talent across different markets. Are you seeing the right people being used in the right ways, or is there, you know, some kind of mismatch between where strategic thinking lives and where it’s actually needed?
Vanessa Bolosier: Yeah, like there’s loads of talent.
There’s still plenty of talent, especially in the MENA region. There’s loads of talent. I think there’s a mismatch, yes, in where the judgment sits and who owns, again, that system, right? So there are a number of gaps that I’ve seen when it comes to talent.
So first there’s the interpretation gap, and my colleague, Lewis, who’s a strategy lead here in the MENA market, has named it well, in that people kind of know what’s needed, but turning it into something that’s actionable is very hard. So, again, there’s talent. People know how to identify, how to map, how to, you know, spot the problems, but they really don’t know what to do with that.
Then you’ve got another gap, which is a massive gap in this region, which is the approval gap. So, you know, you’ve got a team that proposes the right thing, and it eventually gets diluted by people that don’t have the skills to evaluate it, and sometimes the same people that set out the ambition, which is where that gets a little bit sticky, right?
And then you’ve got another gap, another type of gap, which is the ownership gap when you’ve got brand work with multiple partners, multiple agencies, who each sort of own a piece of the pie, but no one really owns the whole system. So, I guess you’ve got people here and there doing things, trying their best, but the talent is not really leveraged. And I don’t think the fix is really hiring people.
I think it’s putting that strategic thinking where the work gets approved, not only where it gets produced, and making one person accountable for the system end to end. That’s one of the ways that I see some of these gaps being plugged.
But by way of talent, individual talent, of course there’s loads of talent, but again, who’s responsible for leveraging the talent in the right way?
Mark Reed-Edwards: I really enjoyed my discussion with Vanessa. The good thing is it’s not over yet. In the second part, we talk about Vanessa’s white paper on the MENA Readiness Gap, which shows that 94% of those surveyed say measurable growth is their number one priority, while only 10% have integrated AI across every function.
Thanks for being with us on The Digital Edge today. See you next time.
Guests: Mark Reed-Edwards; Vanessa Bolosier
Discover more: This episode is also available on Youtube and Spotify.