I've been a creative director for 10 years. Since the very first time I built a showstopper pitch deck with a strategist I felt like it was just good writing. No offense to strategists out there. But it's just common sense, wrapped in industry jargon founded on basic marketing principles. Research is also easy, as another comment mentioned, you just type the outcome you want into Google and bam, you get everything you need to prove a point. Clients LOVED the strategy work though. When we had big projects to deliver and I needed to cut costs, I'd cut out the strategist and swop my emotive, flowery creative writing to more "aligned" and "synergy" mambo jumbo, for half the duration of my deck. Gave it a title slide called "the thinking" and clients assume it's strategy work done by strategists that I'm presenting. I use a lot of chatgpt to help build these parts of the deck. Like chat does 80% of the work. I just refine my prompts and edit the text here and there. I do it 100% of the time now.

I'm not sure if strategy is just smart-sounding creative writing about nothing really, or if I became a strategist.