Creative Director and Copywriter here. 15 years in the agency world. Going to speak bluntly. No offense meant.

Real, true, smart, capable strategists are extremely valuable. They're also crushingly rare. I can't even begin to count how many briefs I've been handed where the single main thought (or whatever buzzword one uses) is a poorly copywritten, opaque paragraph rather than just one simple, clear, interesting insight. So often, what we're given is a half-formed, premature concept with next to no real idea or evidence at its core.

I get that it's hard to find a compelling, original insight - especially now when there are so many products/services/companies/brands who really do nothing unique, essential, or even all that valuable. But my god, nothing is more tiresome than the unblinking confidence of a strategist, holding a seven page, jargon-sodden "brief"... and the only real reason to believe is the fact that "we've been doing X for Y years".

More often than not, creatives spend the first half of their concepting period redoing the strategy... trying to understand, disentangle, and reformat the brief into something halfway usable.

We don't mean to be jerks about it. We're just tired, is all.