On types of planners.

'Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see' - Arthur Schopenhauer. I was thinking about types of planners out there following a conversation with a great planning director and we were debating the virtues of various 'types' of planners. Labels abound of-course, account planner, creative planner, communication planner, digital planner etc. Yet the only types I could come up with were simply two: the first are planners who are brilliant at de-construction: these are the folks who are great at telling you how the world works. Typically because they come from research and curiosity backgrounds / mindsets. The other type are the planners who are brilliant at construction. These are the ones who are into how the world 'could' work. The latter type don't need a curiosity background. Sadly i was say that the latter are the rarer variety. I suppose the difference between the two is what Schopenhauer described between the talented and the genius. Finally, as far as planning processes go wouldn't it be simpler to narrow down the planning cycle to two phases: Deconstruction - Reconstruction. The first is about understanding 'how the world works?' and the second is about 'how it could work?'. If it is one planner who is doing both then he/she would need to swap hats somewhere in the middle but you could always have two planners the de-constructionist and the re-constructionist in charge of each phase.

via Planning on Subversion

Planning Stories

Things are happening slowly but surely and I have a phone interview later on today with a NY agency called Red Scout for a possible Junior position in NY
On croise les doigts

Everybody wants to work at Wieden

A push pin rendering of Wieden's Fail Harder ethos. Image courtesy of media bistro.

Despite the Nike bombshell and a recurring sense that Dan's 'I'm just an old hippy' routine is wearing a bit thin, Wieden is the plannersphere's ideal agency to work for. And with work like Old Spice and Honda, and that lovely blog, who can blame us.

That's according to new research amongst planners conducted by Heather LeFevre of the Martin Agency which places Crispin Porter at number two, BBH at three and Chiat at four. Goodby comes in at five, with Fallon (London surely) and Mother sixth and seventh. Of course the forthcoming APG Creative Strategy awards will give us a chance to see whether this lot are actually up to much in the strategy department.

Heather's work, which surveyed 466 planners (42% inside the US and 38% outside) also tells us that 41% of planners think that the standard of planning is increasing (for which blogs get some of the credit Mr Lowery) and that while 60% of us really like or love our jobs, many of us are up for a move (suggesting that being a planner is fab but not necessarily at one's current agency). And in a result likely to upset Mr Stolkin around 70% of people didn't get their current job using a recruitment consultant.

There is also loads of detail on salaries (just for US and UK owing to the samples sizes elsewhere) which offers you a chance to benchmark your remuneration or indeed to decide to move to the US or UK. I note that 12% of the heads of planning describe their package as 'really awesome' so there is something for the rest of you to aspire to.

For the full monty download the PDF here.

via Adliterate

Ad d'ici & d'ailleurs

Sony Bravia Thread Spot Drapes Ancient Tombs with Rainbow Shroud We were skeptical about how many more ways Sony would be able to push its swath-everything-in-color manifesto for the Bravia campaign, but at this rate, we're pretty sure it could go on forever. Y&R, Egypt is responsible for this pyramid and thread spot. It's appealing -- even without a Rolling Stones tune -- but it also filled us with a sense of dread. How many takes did this require? Who cleaned up all those spools? A gorgeous spot as usual, but some seamstress out there probably had a heart attack from all the decadence. Plus, the pyramids were tombs, right? This is roughly the equivalent of letting a bunch of technicolor bunnies run amock across the Congressional Cemetery. Now that we think about it, that seems strangely poignant. Written by Angela Natividad Bet You Can't Do This With Your Cereal In the Morning Everyone plays with their food from time time time. Perhaps, because what's on the plate isn't very palatable. Maybe it's the result of nervousness while on an awkward date. Maybe one too many martinis were consumed prior to dinner and one more bite of food will, assuredly, turn the stomach into a launch vehicle for its contents. But how many people play with food just to make a commercial? OK, so a lot of people do but this Leo Burnett Toronto-created, Head Gear Animation-produced commercial for Kellogg's All-Bran Guardian goes far beyond pushing food around with a fork or styling it for a photoshoot. In this commercial, the food becomes the makings of a video. Enjoy. Written by Steve Hall

via Adrants

Who wants to be a planner?

It is always nice to see I am not the only one looking for my lucky break into planning. It motivates me even more. Thanks no man's blog
via Asi Sharabi

Right. So I'm settled in Grand Union; couldn't ask for more, really. Now its time to reflect back a little, and give some advice to all of you looking to break into planning. I didn't know whether to write just a quick list of tips & advices or to write something more personal and reflective. I'll try to combine the two. For those of you who don't have time for the longer one, here's a quick 8 point version (not in particular order):

1. Don't go to recruiters/head hunters: they don't see any business in you.
2. You need a rich parents (or in-laws, or nicely paid flexible job) that will keep you going until you get your first planning job.
3. Never ever send your CV either by email or post. Even if you've printed it on a purple A3 sheet.
4. Read read read and read some more. Anything you can put your hands on, particularly planning/branding/advertising blogs.
5. Start your own blog and document your job hunting experience and creative/strategic development.
6. Think creative, act creative, live creative. Getting a job as a planner should be your first guerrilla marketing job. Creative pestering is your tactic.
7. You need a great deal of patience and determination. You need to hang around planning directors long enough until they'll just ask themselves: how is it that we didn't give him/her a job yet?
8. Head(s) of planning are both very busy and usually don't give a damn about you don't take anything personal.

Now to the longer version, but first, a quick reservation/qualification: I'm a bit of a special case: when I realised that planning is my calling I was what you can easily call : overqualified, under experienced. I was just about to finish my PhD, 31 years old, no relevant experience. Forgot something? Oh yes - I'm a foreigner, and creative agencies are strikingly homogenous (that is, British, white, middle class). So my starting point and the rest of the story are quite personal and subjective. Nevertheless I think there are still some lessons to be learned.

I can't remember exactly how I discovered planning but when I did, it was 5% knowledge of what is planning and 95% very strong intuition that this is the right thing for me to do. It simply felt like a great match and I was religiously convinced that this is what I want to do. But at the same time it's quite challenging to convince someone that you can be very good at something which you don't really have a clue about.

Now, if you're just out of uni, you're young and ruthless and can live with your parents, than go to one of the big agencies graduate schemes and work yourself up. But bare in mind the closing date for applications is February, for a programme that starts the following September. For me it wasn't really an option both time and money wise.

As far as I remember, John's planning above and beyond was my first 'wicket' to planning. A couple of weeks after my planning 'revelation' I crushed on one of the free tap evenings he runs every now and than and this is where I first started to talk with planning directors and kick-started my self-marketing. At the APG they gave me an obvious yet wrong advice to talk to head-hunters. Those I've met were completely blunt and discouraging.

So I decided to go on my own and at that point I was making that utterly stupid mistake of sending my CV to planning directors and realised that its time for something more creative. So I made this file (Download a1.Sharabi.pdf) with a friend, and turned it into a big boxed 96 pieces jigsaw puzzle. Two notions influenced this idea. The first was inspired from Honda's 'hate something-change something' campaign. I really couldn't stand the idea of that dull, lame and boring CV template. The second was the 'age of engagement'- I knew that I needed these people to spend some time with me, not just their random attention. I made15 copies of this and sent it to every head of planning in either a big (JWT) or an extremely desirable (Mother), ad agency. Out of 15, these puzzles got me into 12 meetings (money well spent!), and so I started a frenzy tour in almost every creative agency in town.

So if there's one (quite obvious actually) lesson to be learned is that if you want to get a job in creative agency, than work yourself in creatively. And when it comes to getting your first job, we're still in the age of interruption. Big time.

To make a long story short, after few almost, and same amount of disappointments, I was offered my first 3 weeks placement at WCRS working on a pitch for Strongbow. Unfortunately (back then) they didn't get it and so I moved on to 5 weeks at AMV BBDO.

It takes 'maturation time' and lots of learning to come to grips with the planning craft (I believe it takes at least one year of learning and doing to start being a would-be planner) so observe and absorb and try to get as much experience as possible. As much as I seriously toyed with the idea of hunting down some of these heads of planning and chairmen I met that promised to call tomorrow and never did and than ignored my emails and calls, I now know that I got my job when I was brand/planning-literate enough to convince someone that I am not only talented and nice but also know what the fuck are we talking about here.

So be patient and talk to as many people as you can. Make sure to leave every coffee meeting you get with at least 3 contacts: friends, colleagues, whatever, talk to planners and ask them general and specific questions like what they do, how they became planners and so on (98% of the planners i met were genuinely nice people so you’re in a good company).

Another thing to think of: there are roughly 5 months in a year 'March to July' to try to break into the agencies. There's no one to talk to in August to mid September, then they all need to rest from the summer hols. By the time they've rested and caught-up it's already November and then everyone is trying to get to the end of the year with a tight budget. Then it's x-mass. Then there's x-mass hangover. February is the saddest months of the year. March. Hello, world! Time to go back to full-time (job) hunting.

That dead time and degrading avoidance on behalf of the agencies, can really take you down don't give up. Try to channel this frustration to creativity. Learn the agencies' clients and start writing creative briefs and strategies to real or imaginary brands. Write some crazy (yet thoughtful) presentations to some business or communication problem you observed or read about and send it to the directors. Read Russell's blog and be passive or active student in the planning school of the web. By that time you are, of course, reading campaign every week so you know who won some and who lost some so you know who to keep hounding and who is not the best agency to call right now. Tact and knowledge are really important here.

While at AMV I started to feel that perhaps advertising agency is not exactly where I want to be. Especially in AMV it felt too grown-up and corporate and somewhat archaic. There were too many people there who seriously believed that the 30 sec ad is still the main event. At that point, while still hounding these heads of planning, I started to shop around digital/new media agencies and ended up with job offers from Naked and Grand Union where I am today.

So, to conclude, be resourceful and creative, adopt creative pestering as your most precious trait and read W+K blog every day, even if you hate them for being so effortlessly cool and clever and optimistic one day you'll be there too.

And last but not least, it really helps if you have an amazing partner that reminds you how worthy you are and keeps you sane all the way through the ups and downs. Thanks babe.

*good luck and feel free to email me for more info and advice.

Innovative Consumer Profiles

An innovative way to present consumer profiles using words & imagery

More blogging and planning

Is blogging killing planning?

There is a mood abroad, often fostered by non-blogging planners, that the emergence and popularity of planning blogs is killing the discipline.

I certainly feel that the community, like all communities, has begun to coalesce around specific 'new marketing' ideas that are in danger of becoming an orthodoxy every bit as dangerous as the antiquated ideas about brands and communications that it is seeking to replace. Specifically it encourages a view that the marketing landscape has already reached a kind of utopian future without offering any clues about how brands and the clients that own them should get there.

But is blogging really 'killing' planning?

This topic first came up in an email from Grey planning chief John Lowery, who raised his concerns about the potentially corrosive nature of blogging.

"One thing I noticed as I hyperleapt from one planning blog to another was an almost total lack of quantification of anything anyone said, at all. To that extent I thought perhaps one could make a case that blogging is killing planning, or at least planning as I know it. The publication of baseless pontification has, it seems, been democratised and offered up as a glamorous new role-model to a whole generation of 'planners' who wouldn't know what a tracking study questionnaire (not to mention an awareness index) was if it bit them in their left hemisphere".

And I have certainly heard a version of this argument at Coffee Morning, particularly from planners like John Griffiths. His concern is specifically that the pannersphere looks like a brilliant training resource but it fails to discuss or encourage the development of core craft skills.

While I do have some sympathy with this view (most notably that the content of planning blogs tends to be around the more 'out there' thinking that we do in our day to day jobs), after nearly two years and just over 100 posts I can't help thinking that blogging is the best thing that has happened to planners since Moleskine notebooks.
So in a spirit of 'what has blogging ever done for us' here are the reasons I think it is important for our discipline.

1. Community and networking

Blogging has created a planning community online (I call it the Plannersphere) that provides introductions and builds close ties within the discipline based primarily on the commodity we value most highly - how people think. And while this community is strongly represented in traditional planning industries and territories, where considerable mutual support already exists, it obviously works for those planners that work in places where our kind are rather thin on the ground. Whether they are in industries outside advertising or countries outside the planning hotspots. Indeed as a bunch of people who often shy away from traditional networking and schmoozing it has filled a very valuable need amongst planners.

2. Beta testing thinking

Every good planner thinks constantly about brands and communications, but unless this has direct and immediate relevance to their accounts it goes no further than an internal dialogue or idle banter with planning collegues.

The Plannersphere provides a place to crystallise and air thinking for others to build on or contest before it is aired more formally. But more than that it represents a group of people that are interested in your brand thinking no matter how rudimentary, people that encourage you and drive you on.

3. Collective intelligence

I reckon we are getting smarter as a result of the plannersphere. In nearly 20 years in the business I have never experienced as much intellectual stimulation and intense conversation as I have over the past 18 months - both because of thinking that exists on line and offline stimulus that it has led me to. New ideas, however ill formed at first, spread with ferocious speed at the moment making you aware of all sorts of thinking and giving you the ability to contribute to it. Transmedia Planning from Faris and Brand Enthusiasm from John being two clear and very recent examples.

4. Training and education

OK so the plannersphere isn't hot on the craft skills, although it is interesting that Russell's Account Planning School of the Web has gone back to basics more recently to try and respond to this criticism, but the plannersphere is incredibly successful at knowledge sharing. On a daily basis seriously good people are falling over themselves to give away their intellectual property or simply share a new campaign or brand they are interested in. It may not be providing the 3 Rs of planning but you'd be a fool if you were starting and you weren't consumming your body weight in wisdom from selected planning blogs.

More than that, by showcasing thinking at its very best we can help to teach emerging planners the standards that are expected of great strategic thinking beyond the approach or expectations of their current environment.

5. Influence and profile

Planners rarely hug or hog the limelight - I guess we are just built differently to your average account handler or creative. I have often joked that it is only planners that blog in advertising because account people have nothing to say and creatives have better places to say it but maybe its more that blogging was built for us. Creatives have their work and by and large that speaks for itself, account handlers their client relationships and the revenue they sit on or win but planners never really had much of an outlet to show how good they were (although the APG and AAAAs Jay Chiat awards have helped). Blogging has given us planners a way to show we are good and create influence within our agencies, the broader community and potentally with our clients.

6. Effortless internationalism

After years on international business stubbornly failing to understand anything going on outside the M25 I love the way that blogging makes you instinctively international as a planner. You see work from around the world easily and without cost, you are read throughout the world (albeit shamefully the blogs I read in return are English language) and your comments come from people throughout the world. In an industry that has always had a ugly strand of national arrogance running through it (particularly in the UK) blogging and the tools we use to bring our blogs to life (like you tube and flickr) are pulling down national barriers in the communications business.

As far as I am concerned, the plannersphere has created a kind of intellectual soup for a global community of brand thinkers to feed off, contribute to and create value from. As such it is and has the power to significantly improve the quality of planners and planning in the brand advice business.

For my money blogging and planning are a marriage made in heaven.

(P.S.) Since I wrote this I have been pointed at Hugh's thought about what makes a good blog. Seriously worth a read.

via adliterate

Road to

......Planning
I have been thinking about a change of career, I am currently working as an editorial assistant for a publishing company. The job can be exciting at times,, but I do not want to be an editor. Which might be a bit of an issue.
I have been considering adverting and more specifically planning. I am overwhelmed by the amount of information you can find on planning.
It might be the one profession in advertising non erudite never really mentioned, however the planners out there are well vocal would be the word.
There are numbers on them blogging around and they offer you: the junior planner wannabe, plenty to think about.