How About You Decide? (Gaming Post No.2)

Pic from www.guardian.co.uk

The launch of the WiiU has caused a lot of debate around the gaming community. As with the first Wii console, the 'hardcore' gamers have been scathing in criticising Nintendo for producing something that isn't an all powerful technical behemoth, even though they haven't done that for any machine in over a decade.

Nintendo have always been smart at making the very most from their machines, taking something that is technically less powerful, but utilising it in a way that produces great end results, and importantly, is profitable. Sony got every major technical decision on Playstation 3 wrong, Nintendo rarely do.

The key question though, is what exactly IS WiiU? It feels initially like a machine that has had tons of things chucked at it in the hope that some of them will stick, yet on closer inspection it feels far more clever.

A touch screen in the middle of a gamepad, compatibility with the Wii controllers, it feels a bit like trying to cash in on iPad mania, until you look more closely at the details.

The handheld screen shows two bits of possible thinking that are beyond what Microsoft or Sony have previously done. Firstly, sales of handheld consoles are dropping. Ownership of phones and smartphone gaming mean fewer people are buying, and those that do are far less likely to play them outdoors. So suddenly this screen gives you the option to play your game in bed without having to buy a separate handheld machine and a new catalogue of games. You could also use it to watch Netflix in bed.

Secondly, multiplayer gaming in the same room has always been spoiled by the need to use split screen. The new controller screen finally takes that away, allowing two player gaming with one TV and no splitting of the screen. It also means the usual four player limit on games can go up to five.

Cute pictures and game related chat.
Miiverse even adds a tick to let you know if the person
 writing actually owns the game they are talking about!

Even Miiverse and it's ability to draw players into a simple online community around each game they play, without the horrific over competitiveness and conflict you get on Xbox Live or PSN. Several early users have said the Miiverse has become like Facebook, something they check each morning.

When Apple launched the iPad, there was a lot of talk about where it would sit in the world. People have laptops and smartphones, why would they want a hybrid? Apple, instead of trying to define a position for the device, just showed all of the possibilities and let people and developers work out for themselves what they wanted it to be. Nintendo appear to follow the same strategy in recent years, DS, Wii and now WiiU all take cheap and clever technologies and compile them together into a bundle that can be used in many different ways.

For example: The streaming technology means that the console can process a controller action, send it to the console, update the game, compress the image, send it to the controller and display it with less lag than the average high quality LCD screen. This makes it remarkably responsive, even when used several metres from the machine. It also opens up the WiiU to be used with technologies like Onlive.

So while it looks a little bodged together, what Nintendo have actually delivered is something flexible. A machine that gives developers and gamers a huge scope of choice in the way they wish to play their games. This is why, no matter how weird their machines looks initially, I always trust Nintendo to deliver something worth owning, they think better and they plan better than the competition. Now if only their ads matched up to that thinking!

If you are interested in more games stuff, I've also been doing some writing for a new Gaming Site - Voxel Arcade.

Should Planners Have Ideas?

An interesting twitter debate kicked off earlier today over the merits of a John Steele quote as tweeted by Dave Trott.

"It's not a planner's job to have ideas, rather to create an environment where others can have them." - John Steele

Followed by Mark Hancock (Holycow) responding to say he agreed that planners need to foster an environment, but that the stimulus planners give to creatives usually comes as an idea. W+K's official account also tweeted that they'd rather have people who create ideas across the board, from planning to HR. I've yet to see any response from Dave Trott, but I think it will be worth reading if he does.

I find this a fascinating topic, because while in many respects it feels like a case of semantics, it comes down to one key point for me:

If a brief is devoid of ideas, how is is likely to inspire creatives?

We can't exactly claim that strategy isn't full of ideas. If a strategy has no ideas, we'll just end up with boring cliche'd briefs that will nudge the creatives towards limited ideas.

If people across the agency are creating ideas, it helps to foster people working together better. Not only that if creatives see that the people around them have the capability to generate ideas then it must give them more confidence that the briefs and development around them are well thought out, and appreciate how they are going to produce ideas.

Personally I have to agree with the tweet from W+K. If you run a creative business, everything that you produce is based upon ideas. Strategic ideas to develop great briefs and real useful insights, creative ideas to bring the strategy to life, account handling ideas to ensure everything runs smoothly and efficiently. Why on earth would you not want anyone in that team to have ideas, to share them and create a culture that works together to create a whole that is massively beyond the sum of the parts. In fact if you look at the difference between the best and the worst creative organisations, I bet one of the key differences you will see is their openness to ideas and the culture of collective creativity that it can help to foster.

Of course John isn't bad mouthing ideas, and I doubt he means planners shouldn't have ideas, just that this shouldn't be the key thing we do. However I think ideas are such an intrinsic part of what we do, that we cannot possibly be great planners without generating ideas.

As I've said before, I am a firm believer that creativity comes from anywhere, and that while we are separated as planner, creatives and account handlers for a reason, that doesn't mean that we are incapable of ideas or feedback on those other areas. We inherently have to understand each others' positions to produce the best work. A planner should accept that a creative might have a great strategic idea, just as a planner might have a great creative idea. In a football team no one says to a defender "You should not score goals", you make sure they do their job of defending, but if they turn up and score, you applaud them for their cross team effort, just as you would a striker who makes a key tackle in the penalty area. (Sorry for the football metaphor, it seemed apt.)

I think perhaps the two things are very closely linked. Fostering an environment that encourages ideas is partly done by having ideas yourself. To cut off yourself from having ideas is to stifle any atmosphere of sharing and generation that you try to create. If you want to foster a relaxed culture, you shouldn't turn up in suit and tie every day, you have to live the culture you are trying to create.

I've seen John Steele present his core thoughts at work, and he is a compelling speaker. I don't want this to come across as a criticism of his work, because as we know, context is everything, and this is a quote out of context and without substantiation. I do think it's an interesting topic to debate further though.

Why Planners Should Love Creativity

Creativity and strategy is like a game of chess,
only with less horses and more pawns

Now and again you speak to a creative who has the impression that planners aren't that fussed about the creative output of an agency. That disappoints me, because everyone involved should care about the creativity and quality of the work their agency produces. To me it is absolutely fundamental that planners both understand and fight for creativity in the work they do.

Look at the link between creativity and effectiveness. http://www.ipa.co.uk/news/impact-of-creativity-on-effectiveness-increases

Look (in the UK at least) at the ads that the public truly get involved with and remember, they are entertaining and creative. The ones that stick in your head. It's been said so many times that advertising is far more long term than we ever try and track, and the influence of a great piece of work far far outlives the campaign.
Think about the Smash Martians that over 30 years later are still influencing people to buy Smash and have created a gigantically long term positive association. If we want to change behaviour then what way is more exciting that to create lifelong positive shifts towards our brands.

Consider those brands that have made, or reclaimed their fortune based upon great creative advertising: Stella Artois (a tiny brand until the Reassuringly Expensive campaign), Levis (a brand stuck with dated perceptions at the time - turned around several times by great work from BBH. I know personally that there are many brands that I have bought purely because of a piece of great work. (Sprite - Obey Your Thirst, Tango - You Know When You've Been Tango'd, Kia Ora - We all adora Kia Ora, etc). Hell, the advertising for Sony Minidisc not only made me buy a Sony MD player, the track on the ad was the very first thing I copied over to it.

Let's keep reading creative books as well as planning,
strategy and behavioural books.
(I just wanted an excuse to post this photo,
it took ages to set up)

More importantly, people like entertaining, engaging and creative advertising. No one wants to watch 4 minutes of being shouted at. No one wants to see ads that are painful to experience. (I once sat in a focus group where they referred to an existing ad as noisy, crowded and 'stressful' to watch. How can you expect to change behaviour if the creative idea and execution tunes people out? No one wants to see 50 ads all made exactly the same talking about the same thing for indistinguishable products.

A key part of planning is understanding the people who buy the products we sell, and finding a better, more effective way to talk to them. If you don't understand what types of advertising people like, how can you expect to produce ads that they will engage with and respond to? At the very least we should be finding exciting new ideas to spark off the imagination of the creatives. Taking the right thing to say, the right audience to say it to, and then giving the creatives a platform to create amazing work.

Maybe it didn't happen this way, but John Lewis's Always a Woman Ad perfectly nailed their target customer and brand reputation in a way that you'd hope a planner crafted into the right brief. Tango's 90's work created a brand that was bold, brave and noisy, giving the creatives a perfect opportunity to create some amazing work; the sort of brand thinking that you'd hope was down to good planning.

Every good planner I know cares about the creativity of the work. Maybe we need to put more effort into talking with the creative folk and creating some mututal understanding. Of course as planners we have other things to consider, but just because we write slides and draw graphs doesn't mean we don't love great work, and we should always be clear on that.

I believe that if we don't help inspire and fight for creativity, we really aren't doing our jobs right.

Sharing the Wealth

As you may be aware, a number of blogs I read (plus this one) are ocassionally printed in Campaign Magazine's 'best of the blogs' section. A few people have asked me the the question over usage and payment, so I though it was worth discussing here.

"Don't you think you should be paid for them using your work?" I am asked. Well, if you look at it on a basic level I can see the similarity between a magazine printing my writing and them printing a column by 'another planner' (E.g.: One whom I would never claim to be anywhere near as smart as!).

However, I wouldn't be writing this content if I didn't want to do so anyway, this content is here because it is something i want to express an opinion on. I didn't start my blog to get paid, I started it to get my voice out there, which appearing in magazines helps to do. The blog served its' key purpose of helping me get into planning, and it helps me to keep thinking and to talk with other intelligent people in adland.

The other works are columns purposely constructed and paid for, they have to hit deadlines and need to meet much better editorial standards than my rantings. If I was writing to those timeframes and contraints I would want paying, but the point of a blog is the freedom not to be limited.

So the answer is: not really no. I don't mind not being paid when my blog writing appears in magazines, it's always credited to me and treated with editorial respect so I don't see the problem.

The other good thing is the amount of exposure this kind of thing provides for planners outside the London circle. I have seen planners in Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester and other places included recently; for an industry that too often silo's itself into small areas I think this is very healthy. A small step towards breaking the out of date perception that (even in a digital world) not being based in London somehow makes you an inferior agency or talent.

No one in America claims CPB are rubbish because they are in Boulder, Colorado; no one dismisses W+K because they are in Portland not New York; the sooner we all start to respect each other the sooner we can start fixing the problems of our industry and regaining real creative trust from our clients. The prevelance of northern planners being published is a good start.

Great Planning Words

From Northern's latest post:

So don't stick doggedly to the words on your creative brief when someone suggests something better, or work off brief isn't just great, it's a better strategy. Don't dig you heals in if someone who doesn't have 'planner' in their job title, or from another agency or, a client, has a suggestion that's better than yours.

The job of the planner isn't to DO all the best thinking, it's to make sure the best thinking emerges. A crucial difference that is lost on too many. So leave your ego at home and remember that changing your mind isn't a sign of weakness, it's a source of strength.

The Planning Commandments

As inspired by Charles' blog post yesterday. My thoughts on 10 planning commandments.

1. If thou does not question the morality of advertising now and again, you shouldn't be in planning

2. If there is no client that you would rather resign than work on, you shouldn't be in planning

3. If you feel happier about a small pay rise than producing world class work, you shouldn't be in planning

4. Always be nice

5. Always be honest

6. Treat people as people, not consumers

7. Never stop learning

8. No matter how good or clever it is, a strategy that only produces bad (or ineffective) work is bad strategy

9. Learn to both love and be wary of research, treat it with respect but never without scrutiny

10. Don't hold onto thoughts and ideas for yourself. Sharing promotes caring.

Planning Postcards

Planning is an awesome job, but I do worry sometimes that it is too computer based, we don't have enough tangible things. So I was thinking about what we could do to bring a bit of real life back...

I got a lovely planning related xmas card from Gemma last year, which was what reminded me of the joy of real paper. I then read Postsecret at the weekend, that made me think about postcards and their simplicity in communicating messages.

SO

Planning Postcards... the idea is basic but I think will work nicely:

People who are interested can email me, and I will send out a few handmade postcards, one for each person, with a simple/interesting phrase or opinion relating to planning.

They keep that postcard (and blog/tweet about it if they so wish) and then create a couple of their own to pass on to other people, and so on, and so on...

If it works then lots of us will get nice handmade planning postcards, and after a while we might even get a few each from different people.

I can write up the rules on a sheet that we can send with each postcard to people who haven't seen this post, and maybe we can create something personal and individual.

So who would be interested? (Leave comment!)

Update: Thanks both of the people who have expressed interest by email!

Welcome to 2011!

Well another year goes by, and the world of advertising and marketing continues to be an interesting and exciting place to be, accompanied by some great people that I thoroughly enjoy talking to.

To start the year here are my DOs and DON'Ts for 2011:

DO ------------------------------------

Make Things - I've talked about this to people for a while now, and examples like Newspaper Club show just how important the tangible pyshical object will become over the next few years. People who have grown up with the internet are starting to really appreciate the value of real physical objects.

Stop Shouting - Tell don't Yell, as Gemma T rightly points out. People are not stupid, we don't need to blast our messages at them, we don't need to shove things in people's faces. We need to be engaging, entertaining and acknowledge the way people actually receive our work.

Be Honest - Being honest and open has been gradually getting more important over the last decade. This year is no different.

Be Less Cliche'd - This is always a good thing.


DON'T -------------------------------

Treat Facebook Like an Adspace - This one is blatantly obvious, but people are still doing it.

Use 'Rock' - This week a new radio station went national, a new pop station. Apparently it 'rocks'. No, it sodding does not. Tell you what, I'll go launch a Pop station that plays wall to wall Slayer and Cradle of Filth shall I?

Argue with Ourselves - With things the way they are, Tories cutting budgets and raising taxes (Slagging off Tories for raising taxes, oh the irony), we should be working together. Creatives, planners, account handlers, let's just work together and make some damn good work. We can always start bitching at each other once the budgets start going back up.

Shit Hitting Fan - My Thoughts

The past few days have been completely bizarre in the world of planning. A series of allegations and stories have emerged that have created a storm in the plannersphere, and in particular, have led to lots of calls for one particular person to be punished and turned into some kind of lynching figure.

I'll make it clear that I only slightly know both main parties, and I don't know which allegations are true and which are not.

The problem I have is that in a scenario like this it is impossible to know what are the truths and what are lies. Clearly the person in question has done a number of things that he should not be proud of, and possibly some that he could get into serious trouble for.

However, we must be wary of creating a mob attitude until we know the full truth. We don't know the reasons, the coincidences, the personal opinions and vendettas that could change things for each side of the argument.

He may very well be guilty of all of these things, but he equally could be innocent of many of them. I just hope we can all be as understanding and considered about this as we would be if it were a piece of insight or information that we were using for a client. We would* never try and sell in baseless conclusions to clients, let's not do the same here. Let the people with the evidence and the people with the talking to do solve this, and we can all discuss it then.

The last thing we need is for mud slinging, in-fighting, side taking and bitching to take this difficult situation and create a long term problem between people in our field.

*I hope!

You Are Only As Good As Your Client...

It's an old topic, but one I was asked to write about by a blog follower... so here goes!

You Are Only As Good As Your Client...

One of the key problems with advertising is that the reasons your brands hire marketing managers are not always the same as the reasons we would. Take that money vs creativity conflict that account folk have and ramp it up even more...

It doesn't matter who you are, be you Juan Cabral, Dave Trott, or Pete Smith the DM copywriter; if a client doesn't buy it, it doesn't get made. Good clients will get good work, bad clients will get bad.

Having great account people and planners can help you cheat this limitation. Using their knowledge of client business, customers, communications and the market; they can help sell in strategies, briefs and work that weaker staff could not. Most clients are more than good enough to get great work if you sell it correctly.

Sadly though, there are a small number of clients that just grind creativity to a halt. I have heard stories of all of these from various agencies and friends, though happily I have yet to experience them:

• You spend months in creative development working to an agreed brief, making amends and adjustments. It is finally ready, a perfect fit to the brief; and they decide to go with a safe dull sales heavy idea instead


• The client struggles to make any decisions, so nothing ever gets made


• You create a brilliant, groundbreaking new idea, and the client sits on it so long someone else gets there first


• You go to make a great ad, but the client insists on changing every line and every shot til all the original idea has gone


• Plus the good old - client refuses to have a brief with any hope of creativity

A good personal example of the twists in a client relationship for me was working on a TV and press campaign for a growing brand. The client would go through every detail with a microscope, justifying every word of copy and every mm of layout. It was difficult to sell in work, and a long long process to get the final work. But we were able to make really good work because he fundamentally understood creativity, branding, the use of white space, where to sell and where not to, etc. He turned out to be a very good client.

You only have to look at most great campaigns to see how having a good client is vital. Would a bad aftershave client have spent a big budget making videos to talk to people on twitter and you tube? Would a bad insurance client have bought a campaign about a rich mongoose breating your customers?

Then look at some bad campaigns from good agencies over the years. What are the odds that they did better but couldn't sell it in... A bad client is like a flat tire. It doesn't matter how big your engine is, how good your suspension, how beautiful the body work... you ain't going nowhere.

I guess the thing to remember is that like every industry, there are good people, and there are bad. We should take time to appreciate the good and try and help the bad!

How to Understand Planners - No1

We planners are an unusual bunch, so with tongue slightly in cheek I thought it was time to start explaining some more about us to the creative and account types out there. A Haynes manual may or may not follow...

How to Understand Planners - No.1 (in a series of some)

"Planners are Basically Kids"

You know that phase kids go through when they never stop asking questions?

"Why is that thing Red? ... Why? ... But why? ... Whay's that? Where from? Why? Why?..."

Yeah, that's us; and we won't change. We always want to know something about everything and everything about something. The best planners never lose that hunger to find out more and more things about a client's product, brand, market, competitors, customers, etc. Some of us actually enjoy reading up on entirely random topics and random viewpoints to give ourselves a wider view of the world. A good planner can find something interesting in even the most boring of topics.

We often tend to have the kid like habit of remembering completely random and trivial bits of information that nobody else could find any use for, and then finding a way to make them relevant to something we are working on.

We also like to draw things despite not having developed (in most cases) the ability to draw. Hence we usually end up drawing charts, graphs or tables that we can then fill with the random information we piled up from asking endless questions.

That said, like kids we love creativity; the fun of making something and exploring things other people create is there within us. Most planners I know love things like music, design, art, architecture, fashion and so on. We can be bluntly objective sometimes, but I assure you that just because we don't copywrite or art direct does not mean we don't get it.

England in the World Cup 2010 - A Planning Review

Anyone who watched the England v Germany game today will have seen a terrible result. One that should rightly shake the nation into sorting out it's football team. We have been in trouble for a long time, and it's clear that our good qualifying performance was just papering over the cracks.

Why Fabio Capello Got It All Wrong - A Planning Guide

1. Failure of Research

Fabio clearly missed some major issues during his research. He saw the players in their league games, he had friendlies to test them out; and yet he seemed to blatantly miss the key points of the debrief. In fact, it has to be questioned whether his methodology was right, because even though he got some good debrief pointers (Gerrard is wasted on the wing. Heskey doesn't score. Crouch is a legend. Joe Cole might actually make us do something) Etc... he seemed to believe they weren't the key issues.

Even when the debrief was presented to him, he clearly wanted to take the bad client road and ignore it through stubborness. Which brings us on to point two.

2. There Is NO One Rule Fits All

His policy of only telling the team who is playing as they get on the coach is clearly not working, you could see that there was no togetherness in the play, no real confidence in themselves. Fabio made the mistake of thinking that what works over a season in club football could work in the World Cup. From a planning point of view, he failed to heed the warnings, and ignored the valuable insights at his disposal to the difference between club and national games.

Perhaps worst of all, he seemed to show a lack of market understanding in placing players in positions where they weren't strong, seeing the warning signs and still letting the competition take the dominant ground. He took initial campaign success and saw that as a sign that the team could take on the market leaders without any new strategies.

3. Understanding the Customer

In doing the above, Fabio managed to completely alienate the team's best customers. He got some good initial results, but when the team started to flag he failed to turn it around. Though the customer doesn't always know what they want, there were more than enough opportunities for Fabio to test and try out the tactics that loyal customers were calling for.

The team exhibited all the features that put customers off, that damage both the England and the Fabio brand significantly; and he could not fix them or rebrand successfully.

If England were a brand, they would be holding a pitch.
.

APSOTW Extra Credit - World Cup Assignment

Hi folks, I've been a bit slack with my posting this week; and thought it was time for some updates. I'd like to start with a special APSOTW competition in honour of the world cup.

Now normally Northern Planner or Rob Campbell take care of these, but as this is a topic I felt strongly about I have taken the reigns temporarily...

Background:

The FIFA World Cup is the biggest single sporting event in the world. Watched by billions of people around the world, it brings nations together in a unique way.

The beautiful game becomes the obsession of entire nations, everyone wants their country to win the ultimate prize in football.

But you already knew that...

The brief is this:

The rights to produce and sell the Official FIFA World Cup 2010 ball are expensive (around $350m I believe), with the event providing a huge opportunity for publicity and communication from sports brands.

However, Adidas have had to spend two weeks defending their World Cup ball (The Jabulani) against loud and widespread criticism from players, manager and the media.

The ball is being blamed for everything from the initial lack of goals, poor performances, lack of goals from free kicks, lack of player control, lack of pass accuracy and loss of shot accuracy.

Given the significance of the event and Jabulani product for Adidas; how should they react to the professional and public criticism?

Rules:

As this is an extra credit assignment I won't make it too strenuous...

1. You have 2 sides of A4 for your answer. You can use these in whatever way you wish. You can scan them / email them / post them, whichever is easiest for you!
2. You should consider both the professional and public criticism.
3. Closing date is July 11th (7.30pm GMT) - Kick off for the World Cup Final
4. Judges: Graeme Douglas - (Planning Director on Nike!), Rob Campbell, Moi, others may follow...
5. Have fun!

.

Rob on Planning

[Please note: It's late and I may edit this majorly tomorrow]

A lot of advertising's ills are often placed at the foot of planning. We get accused of being against or stifling creativity, of being account men in disguise, of wanting to please the client not make better work.

Well that's not my idea of planning.

Planning to me is exactly the opposite of limiting creativity, it's about finding information and making great briefs (whether written or verbal, that's another debate) to create better work.

I know a lot of planners are frustrated creatives, and maybe that's true to some extent. But that's exactly why I wanted to be a planner. I know I am unlikely to ever make world beating creative, but I know that I can help others to make it. Or help make sure that world beating creative also creates world beating reactions or world beating sales.

I am not the sort of person who thinks they know everything, I won't sit there thinking I know better; I just try my hardest and say what I think is right. But also, I am not here to make up the numbers. I truly believe if I keep learning and keep working hard I can make a difference to our industry. It might be a small difference, but It's there for the taking.

There are truly great people in this industry that inspire me every day. Some planners, some creatives, some even (ha) account suits. Some I work with, some I just know (and hope to work with), and some I've never met (and hope to work with). It's those people who give me faith that not only can we make better work than we do now, but we can do it whilst producing better results for clients AND making ads that people enjoy and appreciate instead of hating.

Ad land is there for improving, I hope I can eventually help out.

10 Years in Advertising and Marketing

So, we are coming to the end of the first decade of the new millenium (It doesn't feel new despite us being only 1% through it).

It has been a rollercoaster for our industry, the expansion of media types changing the way we think about planning and creative work forever.

To mark the passing of the event I would like to call for nominations for the 'Ad Pit Decade Awards' (I use the word awards loosely). If I get enough interest I will do a big feature on this nearer Xmas.

The categories are as follows, campaigns must have run between 2000 and now:

• Best TV ad


• Best Print ad


• Best Online content (not website)


• Best Website


• Best Thought in a Campaign


• Best PR campaign


• Best Account Person


• Best Planner


• Best Creatives


• Best Ad/Mkt/PR book


• Best Industry Spokesperson


• Worst Ad


• Best Agency


• Worst Agency (please include a brief reason so I can exclude unconstructive votes)

Please reply or send your nominations to me: rob (at) ad (dash) pit (dot) co (dot) uk

How Sacred Is The Brief?

Here is a thought or two on a topic that I have thought about a lot since becoming a planner. Just how important is the creative brief?

Now this is more a debate than an argument, so I would love to hear people's thoughts on the subject.

The creative brief seems in some circles to be seen as this all powerful master document for the creative work that should follow. An unquestionable piece of Moses esque tabletry that defies all who doubt it. But this makes no sense, we know the point of a brief is to inspire the creatives and lead then down the right direction. Yet as is often quoted, there is rarely a right answer... simply more/less right ones.

If we do our job right then being on brief is good of course. But what if slightly off brief gives a better creative territory? What if there is an idea so good that only works with a tweaked brief. What if we discover something new part way through the process?

I had this argument in the pub with a creative who was discussing a brief where the favoured work was actually slightly off brief. My viewpoint there was (and still is) that we should always be confidence our brief work is spot on, but if creatives are to believe that we have creativity at the heart of what we do, we have to be man enough to admit when an idea (whether from creative or planning) is good enough to skip brief anality. Otherwise why should they believe us when we say the next idea is better because it's on brief.

A 8-10am analogy for this was this:

A hard punch that's 90% on target is better than a weak punch that's 100% on target.

Thoughts?

Why Newspapers Will Survive and Planning Will Change

Note: This is theory in progress, it may be flawed!!

People are still decrying the death of tv, the death of magazines, the death of newspapers. That they are history in our instant worlwide 247 internet world. But for the same reasons that social media is a pain, I expect that they will survive and that my job might change a lot as we go forward.

Here's why:

Now I can chat to everyone I have ever met. Hang on a minute, you were a tosser... I don't want to speak to you. Who is that? Social media burnout anyone (Marcus got there first btw)

I don't want everyone I know contacting me.

As I discussed at a social media panel a few months ago... the key word for the internet has become and will remain Filtration. Seperating the millions of pages of guff and giving us the bits we like. It's already taking over via feeds and selective grouping.

It's what we use search engines for. But increasingly we have to do it with our viewing of the sites we then find.

So.

Newspapers and magazines will survive because as well as liking tangible things, when there is too much data to read, we need filters. We need editing and selection. Print media can become these things.

I already do it, I read videogames blogs and news sites; but I trust Edge magazine to select the important bits and look at them critically. Just like I trust NME to do so with music.

Publications that become the critical filter instead of the news breaker might thrive.

So how does this change my job?

Well. Traditionally planning has involved lots of finding data, analysing it and interpreting it. Yet as we move onwards in web technology, we are finding more and more data from more and more sources. If this carries on then filtration of data will become a more prevalent part of our daily work. Web researching means its already easier for brands to commision research and provide more data.

Like I said, this is thought in progress. Feel free to shoot it down if you disagree.

Planning in a box

Check out the brilliance of Two Planners In a Room.
Graeme and Paul from W+K battle to write an APG paper in 24 hours, and stream it live...

Planning Questions No 1

Is it an insight to accept that an idea is perfect despite having no insight behind it?

It's About The Work Stupid!

The Ad Contrarian recently posted on being a Happy Creative Director, and slightly pissed me off in the process. Here follows a hopefully coherent rant... more focused I should say, at people who aren't doing their job properly than the ad contrarians comments himself.

The main problem I have is that it seems to imply that planners (or commitees... strategy by commitee, god help us) are essentially creating useless stratgies that good creatives can ignore or do better than. It also suggests that many planners are simply creating strategy and staying happy with that, as if it doesn't matter what follows.

It bloody well does.

It doesnt matter how amazing your strategic insight is. If the ad is rubbish/not effective (delete as appropriate), and the client doesn't get some actionable (jargon apology) ideas, then it's useless. Not just ineffective or weak, totally fucking useless. It doesn't matter how brilliant your car's engine is, how good the handling is, how good the interior is, if it looks like a hideous box of tin then all that good stuff is wasted.

We are in advertising, not Business consultancy. A strategy serves two main purposes, to improve the clients business, and to help creatives make good work that is right for the brand. Why would we bother finding insights, looking at data, doing research, understanding the client, the market, the customers, the non-customers; if we can't a: Give the client something that helps their business and b: Give the creatives something accurate but inspiring to start the creative process. What state are some planning departments in when a CD says to effectively treat all strategy and insight with scepticism?

But when the creatives do come up with a better idea and insight; why does it appear that they struggle to get heard? A good planner should know good insight whether it comes from them, a creative, the CD, the exec or the receptionist. Yes it will be hard to change the strategy, but our job is to create the best strategy, the best work; and in the long term aren't we better to say (at reasonable points in the creation process) 'actually we've found something better'.

Perhaps it's naievity from being in adland less than a year. But it just feels that comments like this indicate a huge huge waste of planning talent. If this is the case is it any wonder that many creatives dislike us, and treat us with trepidation. I love my job, and no matter how much I like finding interesting and useful chunks of information; its the final ad, and the clients' results that are the purpose of it all. We have to work with creatives to make the best fucking work we can, as efficiently and insightfully, as a team, standing and falling, winning and losing together, otherwise why are we here at all?