Here is a fabulous planner manifesto.

Russell Davies posted this to his blog, and I thought instead of simply providing a link that I should post the whole thing.  It's an inspiring call to action in the business of action calling.  Here it is:

Planners tend to be over familiar with their own navels.

There’s something about the profession that has us always on the cusp of writing portentous articles called things like ‘Whither Planning?’ in which we prophesy the end of our trade, lament the irrelevance of our skills and bemoan the decline in standards since the great days of Pollitt and King.

If we’re not doing that we spend a lot of time debating whether ‘Planning’ is the best word to describe what we do.

I hate all that. It’s stupid.

I think Planning is a fabulous trade, which has never been more relevant, more necessary or more undervalued. And I think the advertising industry should care because planners are increasingly in demand as agency management, as essential personnel demanded by clients and, heaven forefend, as clients themselves.

So my purpose in this piece is to make some sweeping generalisations about the state of the business at the moment, to suggest that planning could be the salvation of a slightly parochial and tradition-bound industry and warn you all that if you’re not careful all the good planners are going to bugger off somewhere else.

My excuse for writing this is that I’ve just been involved in organising, judging and arguing about the Creative Planning Awards; which is a fabulous opportunity to peer under the hood and see how brand thinking actually happens nowadays. And that, having spent 6 months at Nike and having worked on the brand for years, I’m really starting to understand what should be obvious to everyone, but is sometimes very hard for agency folk to internalise – advertising agencies don’t have a monopoly on good ideas.

Most client organisations are full of imaginative, talented, creative people and they partner with all sorts of businesses to get even more good ideas. Agency planners are valuable to us because their skills and experiences have taught them to be good collaborators; they know how to work with people and ideas. They tend not to be precious about where the idea has come from. And, unlike many people in agency life, they’ve learned how to be good listeners. In the world we’re all moving into – client-based strategy and creativity, multiple agency partners, communications integrated across a wealth of media platforms - these will be increasingly important skills.

So here are some things to think about:

Planners are all over the stream.

Remember the good old days of consultancy envy? Agencies looked at the influence and fees that people like McKinsey got and said – hey we’ve got some speccy people who read books, we could do that. Ever since then the whole industry has tried to get as far upstream as it can. Agencies are continually trying to re-brand their planners as market analysts or something and they’re always presenting clients with intricate processes which emphasise how all the strategic problems will get solved way upstream, leaving nothing unpredictable to get in the way and giving the creatives a virtually open goal they just have to tap in. I don’t know why agencies persist in doing this. Personally, as a client, I feel I’m capable of analysing my own market. What I’d really like a planner to do is help make the ads and stuff better.

And what was refreshingly obvious from the judging process is that planners are happily ignoring the upstream myth and they’re going to where they can actually add value. Which means they’re sailing up and down the stream, like Ratty and Moley in pursuit of an insight. They’re upstream, downstream, midstream, underwater and having a drink in The Riverside. They’re doing all the traditional stuff but they’re also getting involved in art direction and casting and internal communications and every aspect of brand building. And this isn’t just wannabe creative meddling. This is planners realising that the executional is strategic. That their responsibility extends beyond the creative brief.

I loved seeing this. It makes for better communications. It means planners have more interesting lives and it’s the only way to do things these days.

Everybody’s having ideas.

When judging these things we were constantly asking – but who actually had the idea? Was it you? Because we felt like we should be rewarding the person who had ‘the idea’.

This is a prejudice we might have to abandon, and it might be something we have to change for the next awards, because it’s obvious that in the modern world ideas aren’t really had by lone genius’s. They don’t come from a clever planner in an ivory tower or a genius creative team in a black box. The modern brand world is too complex for that. Ideas are turning up through teamwork, conversation and iteration. And that team includes the client, agency people, other partners and all sorts of random people like consumers.

So it’s probably unfair to punish planners for not ‘having the idea’. We saw, in many instances, that planners were operating more like midwives of ideas. They laboured to ensure the group delivered a healthy, vigorous idea, even if they didn’t have it themselves.

This midwife role isn’t something you read about in many planning textbooks, but it’s one of the reasons planners are so employable outside advertising these days; because this is how most media/communications businesses operate. Teams have ideas. Teams do strategy. Teams do execution. And knowing how to make that happen and how to swarm all over that process makes you very valuable.

The Gonzo cometh.

There’s never been a huge canon of ‘conventional planning wisdom’.

There’s some shared language, some familiarity with TGI and focus groups, lots of Adam Morgan’s Challenger Brands and some of Dru’s Disruption. Otherwise most planners seem to base everything on the people and brands they’ve worked with, some dimly remembered training courses and lots of Malcolm Gladwell.

But every day another bit of conventional wisdom turns out to be myth or bad habit.

Neurologists and psychologists destroy our basic assumptions about how communications work. Propositions are shown to be old-fashioned and unheard. Media proliferation upsets our campaign planning habits. Markets change before the SWOTS have been SWOTted. New research tells us that ads people skip through are more effective than ads they watch.

So a lot of traditional planning discipline has gone out of the window. Which is good and bad.

The positive aspect is the liberating effect it has on some people. Unusual and unexpected solutions are more necessary then ever and many planners are finding the current strategic free-for-all just what they need to reinvent the way communications are made.

But on a bad day people are forgetting the basics.

When we throw out the bathwater of conventional wisdom its easy to lose the baby of ‘hard won experience’. Yes, it’s important not to be a slave to tools like propositions and ‘reasons to believe’ but if you’re going to dismiss them you have to know why.

The gonzo model – just dive in, busk a way through and see what happens – has its attractions; you get unexpected answers, useful tangents and a more interesting life. But, you have to be really good to make it work. Musicians have to know their scales intimately before they can become great improvisers. Many of the papers we didn’t shortlist were full of out-of-the-box imaginative thinking but lacked coherence and common sense. It was like listening to the worst free jazz - no ideas and no structure. Trad jazz might be boring but at least you know what it’s trying to do and when it might end.

Planners. Bless ‘em.

Whenever we get a non-planner involved as a judge on the awards they always remark what generous, modest people planners are. Generous with credit, with praise, with ideas. They tend to contrast the convivial atmosphere with the backbiting and ferocity of creative awards.

Which is nice.

But it’s more than just nice. It’s just one illustration of why planners are so in demand by industries other than advertising. There are many others.

We also saw some incredibly tenacious and insightful research being done. We saw planners get their hands dirty with art direction. We saw inspired media thinking and expansive total communications planning. We saw planners constructing new facts because the existing ones weren’t compelling enough. We saw planners see opportunities their clients had completely missed. We saw planners leading and inspiring teams. And, refreshingly, we saw planning knowing when to get out of the way.

Planners are almost always the third most important people in any agency, which means we have to know how to collaborate. We learn that to be effective we have to surrender our own ideas. Or at least accept that we won’t get any credit for them.

Planners have to bolt together disparate ideas and post-rationalise intuitive decisions. They have to be sensitive to consumers, to clients and to the multiple partners they work with. They stretch themselves across all sorts of brands, consumer groups and product categories. A decent planner can talk knowledgably about statistical significance, rotation effect, projective techniques, casting, neuroscience, art direction, interest rates, merchandising, onomatopoeia, transactional analysis, grime, the triple bottom line and Coronation Street. Great planners are creative generalists who can apply themselves quickly and flexibly to all sorts of problems.

That’s why good planners are so hard to find. Everybody wants them.

Countless industries have realised that specialised craft skills are quite easy to come by, but the kind of generalised skills planners have are very rare. There are thousands of colleges turning out very talented creative writers, designers, film-makers, what have you. There is a mere handful trying to create planners (and I’d argue that planning’s a thing you can only learn by doing.) So planners are moving into lucrative and fascinating jobs with in all sorts of strange and wonderful industries. Some are even becoming Clients.

This is something British advertising should be proud of. It invented this odd endeavour and now it’s giving it to the world. But you should think about what you’re giving away.

Planning for diversity.

The best thing about being a judge for these things was realising that there are a million different ways to do good planning.

Almost every presentation highlighted an approach I just wouldn’t have thought of. Some led with research, some with brand analysis, some with thinking hard about the consumer, some with the product, some with everything, some with statistical analysis, some just dived in and fixed the art direction. But every solution worked. And these answers didn’t arise because they were necessary solutions to the problem but because individual planners decided to do it that way.

In an industry plagued with earn-out enduced blandness it’s important to cherish this diversity of thinking. (Even as we lament the lack of other forms of diversity.)

I’d suggest that Planning Directors, for instance, are less self-similar than Creative Directors, less interchangeable and more revealing of the character of their agency. I suspect that clients find the personality and work-style of the planners more instructive of the character of their agency than they would the account people or the creatives.

Planners represent the accessible bit of the agency’s thought process; the conscious mind of the organisation. The creatives are very often just a black box, the unconscious mind that you can’t really get into. And this means that Planners are more emblematic than anyone else of what makes one agencies thought-style different from another.

There’s opportunity here for the industry. People like Mark Earls of Ogilvy or Jim Carrol of BBH are doing better, more rigorous, more nuanced, more surprising thinking than many in the wider communications world yet we insist on pushing the same few creative names to prominence (who then bang on predictably about big ideas and content being the new black.)

The final curtain.

Agencies should learn a lot from their planners. They should learn to listen. They should learn to share. They should learn to play nice with others. Because modern communications are built by integrated, multidisciplinary teams of creative people, some of whom work for advertising agencies. That’s the future. And planners are making themselves valuable by getting to that future first.

woh

Given no preface, this took me aback.  Have a look-see.

talk to consumers

Here's a sneak peak to what looks like a great brand book, for all of you who--like myself--have an ever-growing list of books to read.  Pile it on.  

Interestingly, their opening line discusses a bubble.  Outside the bubble, life is easier and more predictable.  Inside?  Not quite the same.  This is mirroring my life inside the bubble known as "college," and although my absorption of news is a desperate attempt to reach out of the bubble to blindly feel my way outside the bubble, I'm still here.  No changing that.  It will always be a bubble, and it will always be a hinderance of some sort. 

I digress.

As I develop thoughts on my independent research, I feel like I'm in a game of pong between the empirical findings of scholarly research studies that delve deep into the mind of the human being, and the other moving platform is the freshness of the constantly moving ad business.  Everyone has their own view, and it constantly evolves as worldly experiences shift our attitudes in real time.  

Y&R's Brand Asset Valuator is the doggie in the window, for me.  After ogling it in the window as a mere child of this business, I'm finally understanding it's niche in the world of brand research -- it's nested quite comfortably, and I think it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Good.  Cheers to that.

An understanding of consumers is the only base off of which any advertising can build.   In such horrifically ambiguously defined times, we need numbers.  We need understanding.  While looking for that solid base, it soon becomes general knowledge that we're trying to build on a pool of Jell-o.  That simply won't do, and I'm glad Y&R is so successful in this venture.  I look forward to reading the book, and the future of the Brand Asset Valuator.  

Cheers.  Here's the clip.

The Brand Bubble from Brand Bubble on Vimeo.

Gerbils from the 90s

energy

It's all about energy.

Whether it's positive or negative, there's always something there.

Follow it.

Foliage

Going to school in upstate NY is shitty quite a bit of the time; however, we do have autumn to look forward to.

I stumbled upon this website  earlier today and I found it quite intriguing.  It's a branch of the larger I heart NY campaign, but it's very focused on weekend getaways and the individual.  Bright move.

There's a certain allure to this time of year -- it's nature's annual fashion show, and the colors are always in season.  Hands down, the most beautiful colors in the world.

Here's one feature that I found particularly cool.  Well, 'warm' I suppose.   

foreign strategy

Recently, I whipped up a strategy for the American launch of the European phenomenon known as the Ford Fiesta and handed it off to some very creative folks to see what they could come up with. (Still waiting). The launch is scheduled for next year, so I suppose we still have some time.

In a country where SUVs are getting bigger, hybrids are pushed as the only answer to saving the environment, and Americans are spending more on gas than ever before, a cute 'n playful ad won't keep keep them happy -- even more, it certainly won't motivate them to go out (or stay in) and buy a Ford.

The benefit for us? The newest Fiesta is being launched right now in Europe. The drawback? Consumer perspective -- what American consumers expect to see in car advertising next year will be a completely different playing field than British consumers right now.

Regardless. Here are 2 spots that popped up today through the blogosphere:

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The first one wasn't my cup of tea, if you will. Not sure if I didn't like the execution (which is not that far of a creative leap from the car's own name . . .) or I just didn't understand the strategy. It may very well be a combination of the two, only because . . . well, I'm not currently in the mindset of a British consumer.

The second one is a bit higher in my books. The strategy and the execution are solid. It's taking the opportunity to motivate people to feel the car personally, and feel that its a part of something larger. That redefinition of the discussion is key. Here's the spot:

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