APG Sideways
About our guest: Hazem Oueslati
Hi, I'm Hazem Oueslati, strategist at Absolu. Before I knew strategy was a job, I was already doing it obsessively.
As a kid I drew soccer jerseys and copied sponsor logos, asking questions nobody needed answered. Why this sponsor? Why this club?
I eventually studied marketing, probably in an attempt to answer some of them, and discovered that brands were both much more complicated and occasionally much simpler than I'd imagined. Since then, I've worked between Tunisia and Canada, with stops at TBWA and Cri Agence along the way.
Outside work: soccer, photography, discovering new places.
Brilliant Weird Best
Planners are curious folks so we asked Hazem to tell us the most brilliant, weirdest and best things he’s come across recently.
BRILLIANT: After hours athlete by Puma / Droga 5
Brilliant, for me, is something that made me think: "I wish I had thought of that."
I've been obsessed with sports brands since I was a kid, and for most of that time Nike and Adidas decided what an athlete was. Then Puma said we're all athletes, even the guy who's good at darts. Ping pong, bowling, staying out till 6am. "Give 75 per cent" still makes me laugh, because everyone else was telling us to give everything. Fifteen years old and I'd still bring it into a brainstorm to break a convention.
WEIRD: Gorilla by Cadbury / Fallon
Weird is something that should not work. And somehow does.
Ninety seconds. A gorilla. Phil Collins. No chocolate anywhere.
Watch the first minute again and nothing happens. It's just an animal breathing, waiting for a drum fill, on a national buy.
Someone at Cadbury looked at a man in an ape suit and said yes to all of it. I think about that decision more than I think about the ad.
BEST: Small World Machines by Coca Cola / Leo Burnett
Best is something that reminds me why this industry can still be incredible.
Two governments couldn't get people in the same room. A soda company did it with a vending machine.
The reason it worked is that Coke asked for nothing. No petition, no pledge, no message to agree with. Just a screen, a stranger, and a small task you had to do together before the can dropped. People participated in something political without ever being asked to take a position.
Coke didn't fix anything, and it never claimed to. But brands can go where politics can't. Most never try.
Top Guilty Pleasures
Not all of our consumption habits can be academic. That's why we asked Hazem to give us the sources to his creativity.
Nobody hands you a manual when you move to Quebec/Canada. There's a whole layer of rules about language, identity and who counts as being from here, and you mostly learn it by getting it wrong.
Sugar Sammy says all of it out loud. Son of Indian immigrants, born in Montreal, Punjabi at home, French at school, English on the street.
I watch partly to laugh and partly to take notes. A good joke is a truth people recognize before they can explain it, which is more or less my job, with fewer laughs.
Watching Soccer Games
People say it's twenty-two guys running after a ball. It's also one of the biggest businesses on earth, and I love that both things are true at once.
A match is a broadcast deal, a sponsorship inventory, a transfer market, a merch cycle, a hundred years of local identity, and ninety minutes of people losing their minds. All on the same pitch.
I watch for the game. Knowing what's underneath never ruins the pleasure. It just makes it bigger.
Fun fact: We started with soccer, and we ended with soccer. I'd call that strategic consistency.
This month on Slack
Over on our Slack, strategists are supporting, debating, and shitposting. Click on a link to see the full convo.
You Don't Need a Great Insight to Make Great Work. You Need an Interesting Observation.
Spencer MacEachern shared the K18 Tumblehair Spencer shared the K18 Tumblehair story alongside a provocation worth sitting with: most of what passes for insight in strategy is really just an interesting way of looking at a product benefit. K18 rolled a 150-pound ball of 161 billion real human hairs through New York City, a number that comes directly from multiplying their product's hair-retention claim by NYC's population. It's not a deep human truth. It's a stat that becomes impossible to ignore once you make it physical. So what are we actually looking for when we say we need an insight?
The Mall Was Never Really About Shopping.
PK Lawton shared this essay from Zona Motel's Mallcore column, and there's something in it worth thinking about beyond the nostalgia. The mall was essentially a physical algorithm, curating your exposure to culture, taste, and identity based on what was placed in front of you. The difference is it left room for longing. The stores you weren't allowed into, or weren't brave enough to enter, did more work on your identity than the ones you actually shopped in. A feed optimised for engagement can't replicate that gap, and it might be worth asking what we lose when desire gets replaced by instant access.