Northern Planner

Account Planning School of the Web returns

 

Gareth's doing the next shool of the web project here. You should do it, it's good.

Top Tip Number 2 - always be closing

So you're a clever clogs. You sit in meeting's stir things up, make people think, get them excited over all sorts of stuff. But somehow the strategy that get's signed off, and the resulting work is never what you had in mind. How come? if people were that interested, why did we revert to type?

Here's why. People like to get exited about stuff, but when it come to actually doing it, it suddenly becomes risky, so they revert to type. You need to keep the momentum going. The more it builds up a head of steam, the more 'real' it becomes the more it's going to happen.

So keep that initiative. Next time you get people interested in something, get an agreement to make something, or do something. That might be some desk research to share for next time, an agreement to do a workshop to develop stuff together (make the stimulus amazing), could be proposition boards if you have some sort of direction to explore -anything. But get an agreement to make something or do something for next time, don't let it fizzle out, don't let doubt creep in, don't let the easy option in.

In the end of a day, we work in a factory, it may be an ideas factory, but it's a factory nevertheless, so keep that production line going, keep working to go beyond talking - to making or doing stuff.

In other words, always be closing

Levis Go Forth

Thought it was worth building on Flat Eric to discuss this campaign (the ad is here). Interesting - big call to action telly, lots of stuff to do online, encourages young people to rediscover the pioneering spirit that built America and remake it anew.

 

Why?

Lots of context I guess - few would disagree that America is in a bad state, makes sense to tap into all that 'Obamaness' breaking with the past, rejecting the generations and 'system' that got them there.

Levis hasn't been about product for some time, it's about how wearing the jeans make you feel - rebellious, anti-establishment, an 'original'. But probably not to the current generation of young Americans. Like every new generation, they'll be rejecting all that came before, Levis needs to become relevant to them. But not like in the past. They see through 'image' advertising, ads alone won't cut it anymore. They demand credibility, they demand to be involved.

So this campaign bridges the gap between the Levis of old and today - it doesn't tell them what to do, how to be, who to be - it challenges them to put the money where their mouth is, to do something and gives them a forum to come together and do it, share it, feel like they belong, become a movement. Own it.

Very smart. The most commercial thing Levis can do is become The Jeans for every young generation. They've understood that today isn't about 'telling' it's about starting, joining in and housing conversation. Influence culture, sell more.

APG awards and Top Tip Number 1

You can read the APG Awards shortlist here (they'll add them week by week).

Mother's PG Tips paper is a joy. Reminds me that there's no point just having the best strategy or actual work when it comes to pitching, presenting or even in your day to day. It's how you present it.

Which reminds me of a top tip for meetings (especially if you're shy). You're likely to be going with the account team - agree with them who will be saying what, make sure you have something to say, you know what it is and so does everything else.

There's many a planner who's done the thinking, written most of the deck (if you're doing one) but not agreed who's doing what bit, so on th day, the suits, verbose, charismatic people as they are, go through the whole thing, leaving planning person no chance to have any impact, unless they're equally brimming with chutzpah and effortless charm. Most of us are not.

So agree what you're going to say before hand. Make sure you have something to say.

Levis Flat Eric

This was an incredibly popular campaignback in the late 1990's. It spawned a number 1 hit single and God knows how many toy Flat Erics.

But what were they trying to do?

Let's roll back to the 1980's and the launch of Levi's Laundrette,followed by some of my favourite ads ever including Creek and Drugstore. They knew what they wanted to do, rather than have a jeans brand about fashion or style, have one with real meaning with their chosen audience.

That chosen audience was young people. Their observation was that people this age are non-conformist, rebellious and reject the establishment - 'The man'. So they wanted to make Levis the ant-establishment brand.

One problem, were very cynical about America in the UK then (and now). Anything to do with contemporary America was likely to fail. BUT - we loved, and love American heritage. That might mean the America of the fifties, the pioneers that conquered the American West and everything in between. Levis were the original jeans, they has been there since the days of the Wild West, they were part of American history. Part of that pioneering spirit.

So that's how they brought the rebellious spirit to life - they told stories of young people challenging authority in America's past, not right now. The Hollywood version rather than the 9 'o' clock news one.

And my God it worked. But the problem with becoming the brand for a generation is that the next one coming behind wants to do the exact opposite of the one before - like Punk rejecting Rock and the New Romantics then rejecting Punk.

Levis had to make their anti-authority DNA relevant to  new generation which meant a break with their own recent past. So rather than the sweeping, filmic grandeur with the soundtrack of American music history, they moved to something contemporary. With a new hero product - Sta Prest, that was only intended to be short term, and really make most people feel different about buying the core jeans range.

I guess I'm saying they were still following the strategy of building meaning into the brand, selling the same attitude to the same audience, but they had to modernize how they brought that to life, so a new generation could feel like they were rejecting the one that came before.

And then they reinvented again with Twisted, and yet again with anti-fit. But then they ran into a new challenge, which I reckon I'd like to cover next time.

British Airways

I have always loved this British Airways adfrom way back in the 1990s.

Others can talk about the way the ad is made, the casting of PJ O Rourke etc. I want to talk about why I think it was made.

I think it all comes down to consumer insight. That dreaded, dreadfully over-used phrase.

This ad wasn't aimed at everybody thinking of flying that year. It was aimed their specific premium, frequent flying audience:

'British opinion formers who are highly cynical, speak loudly over other people at dinner tables and express their opinions as fact. Unlike every other country in the world who talk up national success stories, they delight in knocking them down'.

What a great observation about the British! And how true, it doesn't matter what subject you're on, if you're British, you'll be suspicious of success; anything that's done too well. We love underdogs, we celebrate cheerful failure.

So if we have a communications challenge of making influential British opinion formers proud of British Airways, feel good about it, rather than knocking it's success...what was the business challenge?

This to me is all about justifying BA's price premium, creating emotional involvement and longer term loyalty. Much more commercially effective than promotions. Make feel good about spending money with you and you won't have to continually bribe them. Despite what many will tell you, reducing price sensitivity is rarely about delivery of facts, it tends to be about emotional, communicating the brands r'aison detre in a compelling way.

BA was a great British success story, they has sheer bigness, world wide success, that would make any normal country feel proud and want to join in with.

That's where the clever communications strategy at once identified the barrier and the opportunity. With this audience, showing off will work against us, not for us. But if can get to the heart of this, find a way to make the conversation ABOUT this very British habit, we can not only overcome the barrier, we create all that pride, loyalty and, ultimately, price premiumness we we're looking for. All we really have to do is laugh at ourselves a bit.

What do you think? Does that make sense?

Let's talk about advertising

I realised the other week how much my job doesn't consist of talking about advertising. By advertising, I of course don't mean the old fashioned 'above the line' thing, just ways of making people want the thing your selling. But whatever you want to call it, planners don't do a right lot of it next to all the other things.

'All the other things' will vary, depending where you work of course, but amidst commissioning, managing or doing research - groups, quant, ethnography, TGI runs, desk research etc etc, analyzing data, preparing and running workshops, strategy presentations and a whole lot more, writing creative briefs and doing creative briefings, attending creative reviews and tracking meetings don't make up the bulk of our time.

I suspect most of us like talking about the actual work though, I know I do. So, to vent that particular spleen, I'm going to do more of that here.

Not in that dreadful, self serving way they doing in Campaign Review. A trick to get better at thinking about strategy for new work is to look at stuff that's been made and 'work backwards'. Try and think about what the strategy was, what the brief might have been. It worked for me back in the day and seems to be useful in training bits and bobs.

So I'm going to do a bit of that, look at stuff I find interesting (not necessarily like) and write about what I think they're trying to do and why. Hopefully that will be a bit constructive. Hopefully, if anyone thinks I'm wrong, they'll quickly set me straight.

What are we like?

 

I'm in the middle of reading Pies and Prejudice by Stuart Maconie. Not only is it fun, he manages to get an incredible amount of detail into everything. Really worth looking at if you want to understand what people are like Up North - and if you're a planner in London, isn't that essential?

This book is pretty essential for anyone involved with communicating to the English. In 'Watching the English', Kate Fox, a 'proper' anthropologist, has looked at all aspects of English behaviour, from food rules to dress rules, from our houses to why we always talk about the weather. Much of planning is understanding why people behave as they do, this book gives you lots of hidden behaviours that will help.

The point of focus groups and defensive research

I did something I haven''t done for quite some time, moderated some focus groups. It's not my favourite way of researching stuff I have to admit, but you know what? Groups are still  a pretty good way of finding stuff out.

Don't take everything at face value, watch for when everyone is agreeing to fit in, be careful of selective listening, but still, qual groups ALWAYS throw out something interesting - quickly. Not an answer, not a definitive direction, but input, something you haven't't considered, a spark, a clue...stimulus. What's so bad about that? I think that's pretty great.

A common criticism of groups is that you don't get to what people really think, you get a misleading consensus. That doesn't have to be so bad. Few people act alone, few want to think for themselves, most are influenced by other people.

It can be useful to sit back and watch that in action. Let them talk, let them debate, watch a real conversation, look for what they want to talk about. Brands these days are largely about starting, or joining in with, a conversation. It's no bad thing to find something they actuallt want to talk about.

I was talking to builders and electricians, even creatives in an 'Eh by gum' North England agency are highly unlikely to put themselves in their shoes, not to mention suits and planners!

One last thing, the groups were getting feedback on creative work. Mostly, I'd rather open my veins with a rusty scalpel that test ideas...BUT..........as a planner, sometimes you know some work isn't right.

It may be an amazing idea, but it's not right for the audience, it's not right for the brand, it's just not right. A clear, inspiring brief and briefing is always the start, never the blueprint in my book, so just because it's on/off brief, it doesn't mean it's wrong/right.

Even the greatest powers of persuasion can fail against a creative director that's seeing shiny awards in the mind's eye. It's one of the dark arts, but sometimes, consumer input can do that work for you, maybe killing a route, maybe saving it by some modification, sometimes throwing up something more interesting.

In other words, sometimes it's better to get someone else to talk for you.

Come to think of it, research can be great to use defensively against the risk averse client. Get the right work through research, or kill the wrong work for that matter, prove how pointless making the logo bigger is, how boring their ads are, whatever.

Propositions 1

I thought it was time to get back to some planning craft stuff, it's been a while. Now we've done creative briefing already, but I thought it was worthwhile looking at propositions in more detail.

I think it's important because it's always the part of the brief the creative reads first - to the point where they'll read that, hopefully plow on ahead and only read the rest of your brief when they get stuck, or want to build on their initial ideas. Like it or not, it's the most important part of the creative brief.

It's also the most debated. How it should be written, how long it should be, how simple, how single minded, how open, how closed, ask four people in any agency and you'll probably get five answers.

One thing most will agree on is that there is a part of the brief that focuses all the other information into a simple statement. The role of that statement is the bit where the conflict comes in.

Many cling to what I believe to be an outdated view of advertising, based on 'information processing'. This still dominates most thinking about how ads work. Basically, it assumes we are all rational people, you can predict our behaviour and, as long as you give people the right (usually very rational) message, they'll behave, think, do what we want. The role for creativity and emotion supports the core message by making someone 'like' the advertising, while the advertising is most effective when it gets high attention and people think a lot about what you are saying.

Another way of looking at this is to focus on response rather than 'message'. I think this is a much more credible approach. It's not what advertising 'does' to people that matters, it's how they respond to the advertising. Long gone are the days when you could assume that a person was passive, rational receiver of information, ready to do or think what you say. People make a contribution to how communication is received. Let me explain:

Humans are influenced by subconscious perception, we like people without knowing why, we act on instinct way before we have time to think about it. Decisions are always influenced by feelings. In this sense, communication is continuing process of developing and modifying relationships through behaviour, not just 'words'. There are signals that are responded to without the person knowing, feelings, associations. At the moment of communication, HOW you say it is important as WHAT.

I'm not saying delivering facts or information is wrong. I am saying though, that advertising with no clear 'message' or 'benefit' is always right, in my view, quite rarely.

What I think this means for propositions is, firstly, that they are not the most important bit on the brief, whatever the habits of creatives. Tone and manner matter too - that's hard to get across in words when these things are, of course, intangible. So the briefing and the stimulus you provide really do matter.

Secondly, a simple sentence is good, but a proposition isn't necessarily a simple benefit or USP, it the one thing you need to communicate to reach the objective set for communications. That can be a lot of things.

Whatever you write should be interesting, true and shouldn't be an endline. Sources for it might be:

Product characteristics

Ways of using it

How it is made

Surprising things about who uses it, how they use it

Price characteristics

Product/brand heritage

Direct comparison with competitors

Picking new competitors

Philosophy of the company

They tend to be written as a statement, promise or observation, but should never be just information, it should be information that's relevant. Imagine telling someone your proposition in a pub, would they be interested.

You should already know your strategy, for example make people trust British Airways because of its scale.

So explore the product/brand truths - every year British Airways carries 12 million people

But then follow the argument through - every year BA carries 12 million people...to other people.

Then find the observation that brings all that to life, something that makes it human, emotional relevant and reflects tone of voice a little - BA brings more people together than any other airline.

I guess I mean push it. Whatever fact, benefit or observation you have, find the fact behind the fact, the benefit behind the benefit.

It's fast...it saves you time.......it saves you time......it gives you more time with your family.......it gives your family more time with you.

Polaroid lets you look at pictures just after you've taken them....everyone can look at the picture you've just taken.....polaroid isn't a camera it's social lubrication.

For brand usage - Eating Revels is a risky business

For target audience - Harvey Nichols is heaven for fashion addicts

Benefit - The new VW makes you feel safer than the average small car

Philosophy - Irn Bru is the maverick of soft drinks

Comparison- Umbro don't make leotards, they only make gear for football

Product usage - you either love or hate Marmite

                        Oasis is for people who hate water

Now, we could stop there, if we weren't going on to go about process. In fact, we will, I've run out of time. We'll go on to show how 'task' based propositions free up a different kind of work, a different kind of process and maybe lend themselves to the 'take-out' or 'emotional school of thought' a little better.

Brands = good

To fill the thick silence between people who have only just met there is often the most dreaded question in small talk:

"So what do you do?"

If you work in advertising, this question is to be dreaded. You'll get:

1.The armchair creative geniuses who love to pound you with reasons why they don't make any decent any ads any more ("What was that gorilla all about?"), before unleashing their own gems that will re-write the creative lexicon.

2. The (wrongly) envious, bored jobsworth who refuses to believe you don't enjoy a swanky, overpaid lark for layabouts while coked up to the eyeballs.

3. It's this one I'd like to draw your attention to. The 'no logo' protagonist. You know, the one who believes advertising is an evil capitalist conspiracy, hoodwinking defenseless people into buying things they don't need, that brands are evil and represent everything that is wrong with capitalism. And cannot resist letting you know.

Now, before I go further, I totally agree that capitalism needs to take a long, hard, look at itself. If the mess we're in right now proves anything, it proves that. 

But advertising and 'brands' isn't simply about making people want things they don't need. It's everywhere and it always was. Information to help people make informed decisions has always been important. We wear wedding rings to advertise our unavailability, we wear religious symbols like the cross to communicate our beliefs and let others identify with us, or modify their behaviour. Clothes code all sorts of messages for us, what group we belong to, availability, mood and even rebellion.

Now of course, the easy response to this is that straightforward information isn't the same as artful persuasion intended to make us do things and think things. I say there isn't anything more carefully calculated and well executed as religious propaganda. But then there's personal propaganda too. A push up bra greatly distorts the truth and could be construed as false advertising (yes I know women dress for themselves a lot, but sometimes they really don't).

And what's the difference between a well crafted headline and the witty market stall patter?

Amazingly, within the same breath, there will be depictions of the brand alchemist, a terrifying magician capable of incredible feats of manipulation, followed by assertions that it's mostly an annoying waste of time.

The thing is, it mostly is isn't it. The public doesn't care about advertising, they don't lay awake at night thinking about brands. Nor should they. Most brand communication is annoying, crass and just not very good and doesn't really work.

But some do of course, very well. But we're making far too much stuff, we're buying far too much stuff and there's too much choice, we need a guide through the clutter. Without all this choice, brands and their communications help us navigate on our own terms.

Now we could do away with the choice, but the economy would grind to halt. If there was just one choice for everything, the jobs would disappear very quickly.

Even if we could find a way to just make one of everything and still make sure everyone is fed watered and have all their needs taken care of, I don't believe that's enough. We need novelty, we like choice, we want ways of both belonging and expressing who we are.

Many science fiction films depict humans eating food concentrates -convenient, simple and reliable. But no would want that, food is so much more than fuel. It's tasty, congregation, fun, novelty, surprise, discovery, indulgence. We don't need it to be that way, we WANT it to be.

We don't need sex (how often in your life have you only had sex to reproduce?), telly, more than a few clothes, sport, holidays, reading.

We could just go back in caves and hunt, but that's not fun, it's also bloody hard. Where's the play? Where's the joy?

We need brands and advertising because we NEED the things we DON'T NEED. It's the same joy as finding the perfect black dress, playing your favourite song (we don't need music either) or arriving in a new country for the first time. We need novelty, we need to dream.

Like we need people who are more glamorous than we are, like monarchs and aristocrats in the old days or film stars now, we want a release from the realities, the banality of everyday life, some magic dust spread over the humdrum.

If it's not brands, it would be something else. It still is... religion, sport all pointless, but very necessary releases from the reality of life. Life can never be perfect, so we all need to dream. Brands are a part of that. This. Is. A. Good. Thing.

Final point. Belonging, self expression, play they are all basic human needs. We all need to both discover who we are, express it and belong to communities who share our beliefs and interests. That's prettymuch what brands do for us, they both help us find who we are and demonstrate it.

By the way, don't worry, I don't bore people with this when they ask me what I do, I just try and explain what a planner does. The conversation tends to move on very quickly... 

Account Planning School of the Web results are in

Rob Campbell's posted the results to the Account Planning School of the Web. You should read it because:

The submissions are really good.

The advice from the reboubtable Mr C is useful to all.

Rob's a bald planner like me (but considerably more succesful).

What is your dangerous idea?

The Edge Questionnaire asked in 2006, 'What is your dangerous idea?'. Something dangerous not because it's false, but because it might be true. It was posed to the worlds best thinkers, ergo not to the likes of me. Nevertheless, here's some dangerous ideas, not completely things I've thought of (as if!) but things I think about don't always say in certain company. What are yours? 

1. The world would be better run by women. They have a natural impulse to navigate life through building relationships, empathy and strengthening connections, rather than the male imperative for hierarchy and winning.

2. Fashion is good thing. It isn't a way to con women (or men for that matter) into feeling bad about themselves by spending a fortune on unattainable images, it's a source of profound pleasure and adventure, an escape from the humdrum of everyday life.

3. It just isn't possible for every to eat organic, free range, non-GM pure, fresh locally sourced food. Without mass production and science, even more people would go hungry than now. Either we turn back the clock, going back to much smaller populations living like they did decades ago or we look to strike a correct balance between nature and science.

4. Advertising in a paid for space is still the most effective way to persuade lots of people to become loyal to a brand. Brands are not important enough in our lives to make us want to spend lots of time with them.

5. It's true that old style advertising dinosaurs could learn a thing or two from the digital brigade, but that goes the other way too. 25years ago, ad agencies made a fortune because clients didn't really know what they did. It was easy too thanks to the hegemony of ITV. It's like that now with digital. There are some brilliant practitioners our there, who graft at finding good ideas that will work. Then there are the charlatans that blind others with jargon and get away with murder. For now, others don't quite understand the technicalities of what they do, but when they catch up, things will change.

6. Every agency and client should do a job swap once a year. Both would respect each other more for doing something the other cannot and wouldn't want to. The agency people be refreshed from the short hours, but glad to escape the boredom. The client would come back to the dayjob shattered, glad to escape the relentless pace and chaos, really pissed off at cancelling things at someone else's whim. The agency people would then appreciate that the client has their own internal clients and has to justify everything they do. The client people would be a little more patient, take more care to ask for what they actually want and less inclined to make impossible demands.

Top 10 favourite ads

Considering this blog is at least a little bit about advertising I've just realised how odd it is that I've never posted about favourite ads. I avoid talking about other people's work if I can help it, without knowing the background, who really made the decisions and what the objectives were I don't think it's fair.

Can't resist posting my Top 10. This is as a human being by the way, not a planner, this is just stuff that affected me, that I remembered or I just liked.

1. This Nike tennis ad from the 1980's captured everything a teenager who hated being told to wear white, leave the court when the senior joined up....felt about the whole stuffy air of tennis - I just wanted to play. This ad made me a fan of Nike for life.

2. There's a pattern here, but Levi's Drugstore commercial captured a natural feeling of teenage rebellion, not to mention that fear a teenage boy has of a girl's father who knows perfectly well what you want to do to her. At the time I thought this was so clever. Don't ever try and tell me you cannot do product attribute in an interesting way.

3. Nike Hurt (sorry it's Nike again). This actually made me miss being  a proper athlete, training so hard I threw up, rage at losing races I should have lost, daily agony getting up at dawn. There's an intense joy in pain and failure that is very much a part of real sport and life too to be honest.

4. This Irn Bru ad was so funny at the time -poking fun at virtually every soft drinks ad of the time, imported from America with fake, unnatainable images of a teenage world where dating was easy and you always got the prom Queen. It even managed to keep the long running advertising conceit that Irn Bru made you hard/was for tough people.

5. I hate Tesco's now. I hate their size and their relentless march towards a UK with no wrinkles or bumps. But I loved them back in the 1980's when the Dudley Moore commercials ran. Really funny, witty and every commercial told you something about what they sold you didn't know before all on a premise that he was searching for some free range chickens. I didn't care then though, Mum did the shopping. I just liked them.

6. The Old 'Papa' Nicole Renault Clio commercials were great, but I remember the surprise and delight of Vic and Bob in the final one, I loved them, I loved the Graduate so I loved this.

7. Smash speaks for itself. Genius.

8. More recently, I love everything that Lurpak does. I'm a pretentious foodie who bought Flora now and again, Lurpak made me totally loyal. I knew what they were doing and I still couldn't help it. This Lurpak lighter ad says everthing I believe about healthy eating and fad dieting.

9. This is the best Cinzano ad. Followed a series of Leonard Rossiter constantly spilling his drink over Joan Collin's breasts. This couldn't have been made without casting these two, shows how well celebrities work if you use them right.

10. As an overly ironic, seventies/eighties nostalgic loving grown -up (ish) I'm going to cheat and pick two for number 10. The first is Orange's Darth Vader commercial, simply because it's ironically funny and it has Star Wars in. The second is this Old Spice re-launch - I'm at that grumpy age when I agree you can't do without experience and it's so funny (and I'm old enough to admit that Duran Duran were quite good at times).

This list would be very different if it was based on craft or a great strategy, but since I've loved and remember all of these beyond all reason, I would argue they must have both been pretty good.

What social networking has to do with going on the pull

What follows is stories of blokes trying to attract women. Both come from my time as a student. Both have something to tell us about brands and social networks.

The first concerns me, or the me I was back then. Shy, odd, and wonky (no change today). Fortunately, one of my best friends happened to be a girl who both both funny and cool. We used to go out a lot and I was even invited on girls' nights out.

What a revelation. There was none of the natural one-upmanship that typifies young men, none of the false bravado, you could talk about all sorts of stuff you couldn't with the lads. At that age, girls tend to be far more interesting than boys. A little more grown up, a lot less led by base desires.

Amazingly, there began some success with girls she knew and a little more from strangers. They even came up and talked to me, escaping the horrors of making a first move. The secret? Simple. Girls seeing boys around girls decide your 'endorsed', you must be OK if women in general like your company. You're 'let in'. This was no cunning stratagem devised by a dark mind, just happy accident, Every now and then, nice things happen to shy people. 

The next concerns someone I used to work with at a nightclub, where I earned precious beer money. This dashing fellow was something of a player. Confident, good looking, never short of something to say, he was funny if a little arrogant.

For two weeks, he was given the job of checking on the women's toilets. The girl that usually did it was away. He jumped at the chance, believing this was a goldmine to chat up all the lovelies just waiting to swoon at his unquestionable charm and dark good looks.

After two nights he begged for someone else to do it. His success was less than he had envisaged; not only did suffer zero pulling success, he was soundly abused, verbally and physically. Girls simply hated a bloke in their territory, where they re-applied war paint, swapped gossip and (still don't know why) went to the loo together.

So what's this got to do with brands and social networks? The breath- takingly tenuous link is the laziness, nay, arrogance of brands expecting something for nothing.

There is still an amazing contingent and marketing and creative types that believes it's easy to get people doing marketing for them for free, that the newly web enabled consumer (don't yu hate that word!) is impatiently waiting for them to turn up on Facebook with all sorts of spurious groups, apparently they're all salivating at the prospect of co-creating all sorts of stuff with brands, itching to tell all their friends how shiny and perfect the latest washing powder is.

But just like my colleague in the women's toilets, the breathtaking of trying to infiltrate and interrupt their territory with nothing if value, the hubris of expecting anyone to even pay attention, let alone even bother to get angry gets you nowhere. There is maybe a tiny minority of brands with fans who may do this, but they're incredibly rare.

If you want people to join in, or pass things on,you can't get away from creating something interesting, useful and rewarding. Seed it in the right places by all means, but if you're not creating anything of value, don't expect to generate anything of value. In other words, it doesn't matter if you're creating telly ads or something online, you can't get away with being lazy. Worse than being abused, you'll just get ignored.

Which brings me back to my limited success with student girls. If you make the effort to win genuine acceptance, don't pretend to be something you're not, good things can happen, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. 

Here's to the juniors

There's two juniors planners where I work, Dave (Dave Mortimer younger sibling of Famous Rob) and Martin. I'm not sure I like the term 'junior' planner, your either planner or not, some have done it for a little longer, that's all..but there you go.

Poor Dave get's quite a bit of grief from me. On his paleness, horrific diet, lesbian haircut and interesting taste in cardigans, but to be fair he gives it back in equal measure. He even stole someone's last biscuit and distributed the crumbs all over my chair, a la Gollum.

Martin escapes the bulk of this so called banter, purely down to the face he doesn't sit opposite me. That said, I think I've succeeded in giving him a complex about his newly beardless demeanor, and how it makes him look taller. Aaaaanywaaaayy........

Of course it's nice to have juniors around, they do some of the jobs you hate. Even better, they're great people to talk to about ideas and thorny little problems. If you want a sense check, talk to someone who hasn't learned to be set in their ways yet. They haven't got an axe to grind or developed their own 'schtick' yet.

I've also found I really like mentoring. I use the word cautiously, it suggests arrogantly knowing better and telling others how it is. That really isn't the case. Having to explain things in more detail than youwould otherwise forces you to question your own practices. Relinquishing control a little bit and letting others get on with gradually more and more forces you to organise yourself better. And best of all, they end up teaching you stuff, how not to get set in your ways, how to use Tumblr. They'ev read stuff you haven't come across, met and done things you haven't.

There's also a real joy in passing on the things you've learned. I don't mean planning craft and al that gubbins, more things you've learned from having been around a little longer. Sometimes small, commonsensical things, sometimes things a little bigger. There's that responsibility of judging when to tell, when to suggest and when you should let someone learn from their mistakes.

Best of all, there's the thrill of seeing them flourish, find their stride and 'become' (and the worry that soon you'll be obsolete).

But, above and beyond that, there's the satisfaction of showing them how to make tea properly and always getting a decent mug poured straight from the pot.

That said, Dave gets very shirty when it's a coffee round and he gets left out (he hates coffee).

Harder is better

As you may have noticed, I've much of life has involved sport and swimming in particular. Much of who I am is because of the pain, joy, disappointment, surprise, setbacks, victories, exhilaration and challenge of being a serious athlete.

But it never came easily as a young junior. There were others who didn't have to work at it, they had perfectly natural strokes and didn't have to train very hard. It wasn't fair, but I got a lot of silvers, more bronzes and only a few golds at first, mostly by working harder than boys, yet losing to others who seemed to get there by doing nothing.

But something happened when we became teenagers. We had all sorts of growth funny growth spurts in all sorts of funny places. Boys who had been relative midgets suddenly towered over their peers, those who had been naturally bigger than others found themselves looking at other lads for the first time. We were little hormonal hurricanes.

I was lucky enough to be one of those who suddenly turned into a little teenage mountain. Clothes didn't fit, one arm was stronger than the other, I went from fly half to prop at rugby. I got big.

Almost overnight, my times in the pool got quicker. Demon fast. There is a point in swimming race for juniors when you hit wall, the arms turn to lead, you have no breath left in your lungs and it's a matter if surviving the final few meters. This point got closer and closer to the finish. Suddenly, when it came I was able to look inside, see what was there and find another gear. There's quite like it, thinking there's nothing more to give and discovering more there than you ever dreamed.

Many of the boys who had it easy before didn't know what to do. They'd never suffered losing before, they'd never had to really work for it. They gave up, they didn't know how to fight, had no idea what pushing themselves really meant. There was no patience for training longer and harder, no will. Those of us who were used to struggle never slacked off, even  when the growth spurts evened out a bit we kept on fighting, we didn't know any other way.

You see, sometimes, the worst thing that can happen to you is to be supernaturally gifted. You haven't had the chance to learn from failing, you haven't really found out all that you are. Eventually, someone always comes along more gifted, or more beautiful and you simply don't know how to respond. When it comes down to the wire, you choke never having to really compete before. You find it harder to come back from losing.

I sometimes think planning and creative is like that too. There are some very lucky people for whom ideas come easily. Sorry for aligning creative with planning, but in the end, both are about having ideas. Ideas have never come easy for me, I have to work that little bit harder. I came later to this and in the back of my mind there's always the fear that I don't deserve this job, should have stayed a suit. It's irrational (I hope), but I don't mind, makes me work that little bit harder.

I never fear the blank creative brief or the new project, even when nothing's coming, when it all doesn't make sense yet. I wonder how others, for whom ideas come easily, react when the well suddenly runs dry. It always does you know, no matter who you are, sometimes you get a mental block, you can't get anywhere, nothing comes.

If you're used to having to chip away at the rock to find the vein of gold, you just chip another way, you're used to having to slave to find it. But if you're used to having that gold just magically appear, what do you then?

It's the work stupid

Life isn't always fair, working in an agency is no exception. If you're a suit, it isn't easy to be the one who always does most of the jobs everyone hates. Maybe if you're a planner, it can be frustrating that you don't really make any decisions, you can only influence them.

For most outside the creative department, it can sometimes see a little unfair how they tend to get away with slightly more creative timekeeping, how hard you have to work to convince them to do what you believe to be right, the perennial debates over the size of the logo. Let's face it, in most places creatives tend to venerated and given much more leeway than any other department.

Quite right.

It doesn't matter how sparkling the strategy is, it doesn't matter (in the end) how strong relationships are, or how efficient and on time everything is, the work is everything. Clients buy creative ideas.

You can go a long way with great planners, brilliant suits and the like, but in the end, you live and die by how great the work is. If you want normal work, hire normal people and treat them normally. If you want something special...well you can work the rest out.

But there are two sides to that bargain. To not be treated like everyone else requires doing things everyone else cannot. In other words, the work had better be bloody good. Suits have to earn their right for clients to trust them, planners have to earn their right to be in a room. Creatives need to earn their special treatment with special work.

So by all means, question the brief, throw it out. Do stuff that's off brief. But be ready to give people goosebumps in the creative review. Be absolutely sure it's great enough to defy logic and budgets, that's it simply HAS to be made. That's why creative are treated specially...the quality of their work decides everyone else's fate. 

That is a responsibility, not a God given right.

Insight generator

I've never been complete convert of replaying consumer insight as the basis for communications, sometimes information about a brand, or leading behaviour rather than following, can be far more powerful.

However, you can't escape understanding what the barriers are to people doing what you want. The more you understand what's going on in their real lives, the better. Brands that resolve some sort of conflict tend to do well, more-so if that conflict is something in life rather than a fake brand world.

Like 'Try Something New Today' which helping solve the conflict between wanting to be a great cook and the complexity and expense of buying and preparing food. Guiness has turned a downside of their drink - waiting -  into a ritual that signifies quality.

I'd like to see a beauty brand resolve the dilemma that women can manipulate their looks to manipulate men, creating opportunities that wouldn't be their otherwise.....but while this may make them feel like rebels, resisting the narrow role others would place them in, in the end, they're responding to and using stereotypes created for them by men.

I digress.

You won't get deep understanding of stuff like this in focus groups. You'll only get it by lots of observation and coming at things from a different angle. Finding real life contradictions, dilemmas and behaviours.

Or you can cheat.

If you work in the UK and you want some shortcuts to lots of really good, deep insights about how we behave in the UK (for example, when it comes to clothes, we like fixed uniforms we can rebel against only slightly) have a read of 'Watching the English' by Kate Fox. She's a professional anthropologist and has created a beatifully written reference to every aspect of behaviour.

Indeed, if you're not from here and want to know how ridiculous we are, you should read this too.

Why retails experts are better placed for the future

I grew up doing a lot of retail stuff. Three supermarkets, one purveyor of furniture, beds, white goods...I've done a bit.

Not all of it was pretty, but itwas never dull. Having a certain marketing controller call you a twat on the phone at 7pm for getting the wrong price in a script, only to have him send a crate of wine the next day when he realised he was reading the wrong one, cannot be termed as boring.

You learned fast, you had to. You learned by doing..at one point me and another account manager we're opening 7 new supermarket stores, running the kind of TV shoot that needs four helicopters and making sure around 200 press ads went out every single week without a typo or wrong price. The account director was off on paternity leave at the time.

 

Despite the 'down and dirty' reputation of retail (come on, admit it, you think retail's easy. It's all reactionary, no thinking, just do what you're ordered week in, week out), I think a background in it makes a planner, or anyone else in agency land for that matter, better placed for the future than most.

In retail, you're judged on nothing but results. Not just long term brand measures, quarterly tracking dips and such, you're judged week in, week out on sales and footfall, at the granular level of product lines, regions, even singular product.

There is no where to hide when the results don't come it, you have to be ready for everything. Someone very wise said that the future is about 'always being in beta', and he's damned right. More and more, brands will be about experience, interaction and 'doing'.

But planning for retail has always been like. The US Army has a saying that no plan survives contact with the enemy, well very few retail plans survive the bank holiday footfall figures.

In short, you have to make people DO stuff, not just think or feel.

Bad retailers just react, constantly lurching this way and that, with no long term vision or plan. Woolworths fell apart in my view because they forgot what they existed for. But good retailers have a good, flexible vision, a role in life, they know what they want to do for their customers beyond sell them enough to hit their targets.

But they realise that they will be buffeted by more variables than other business model. Economic shocks hit them first of course, minute changes in buying culture, price sensitivity hit them first. But so does the weather too. They're constantly engaged with a version of 'game theory' with their competitors.

They have to think far beyond simply weaving emotional or cultural meaning into a product. In a world where brands are like a basketball - all the bumps on a brand that help their customers grip them, retailers are exposed more that others. Own label, POP, checkouts, staff culture, car parks, e-commerce, customer services, delivery, vans.....all of it matters, there's far more to get right.

Right now, agencies, their planners and their brands are getting used to having much more flexible ideas that touch different audiences in different ways. They're getting used to terrifying viral nature of the web and reacting quicker, trying lots of little things more often and learning by doing. They're used to having a great vision and always experimenting and learning, moving, chopping and changing within that vision all the time.

That's what planning for retail has always been about. It's about Sainsbury's 'Try something new today' working for a home made gourmet meal and being able to say, "Feed your family for a fiver". It's about Ikea being able to make us "Chuck out our chintz" and also make "Home the most important place in the world" when things are scary.

So that's why someone who's sweated blood (you always do) over retail is best placed for a world where you need both a big vision and the skills to react, develop, change and act very, very quickly.That's what they were already doing.

Being Don Draper for the day

I have one suit and that's it. It's a good one, bought for my wedding. It's cut to be quite fitted, it makes me look taller.

Every now and then it gets trotted out for other people's weddings, christenings and the like, but that's it. But I love wearing it, it's nice to dress up every now and then, pretend to be a grown up, feels special in a way wearing suits every day just don't. That's when they become a uniform.

You certainly won't find me wearing it for work; I'm the quintessential planning cliche, that calculated shambolic look. Pretty soon I'll be too old for the ironic t-shirts and trainers but not right now.

But last week, Claire and I had a particularly important meeting. It mattered, the work was great, we'd worked hard. But sometimes being prepared isn't enough, you need an added boost. So we power dressed, we sarcastically smart.

The suit came out, I came as Don Draper. Claire was a beautiful picture of Madison Avenue perfection.

And I wasn't just dressed as Don Draper, I BECAME him. The meeting went swimmingly, I got back to the agency and simmered with untold depths. It felt great to become someone else for a day (even if I didn't have a three Martini lunch or take advantage of any quivering dames).

That's the thing about dressing up and using clothes to play with your outward identity, it doesn't just alter the outside. To have depths, you must have a surface......what you do to that surface affects what happens underneath. It's primal, it's Darwinian - we've evolved to believe that looks are signifier of fitness, we show the world an image of ourselves we want to project and they respond in kind.

That's why superheroes are alter egos of their normal selves. Bruce Wayne only becomes the Dark Knight when he puts on the mask, Peter Parker is struggling, awkward, shy photographer until he puts on the suit. Superman is even more interesting - his natural state is superhero, his costume is actually human clothes - and he BECOMES a feckless, clumsy oaf.

Disguise is incredibly liberating, it enables you to become different people. In fact scratch that, it lets you disover a part of yourself you didn't know was there. That's why it's a little silly to mock anyone with an interest in clothes and their appearance - what is more liberating and interesting than playing with your identity? What could be more fun?

As David Vreeland puts it, "Fashion must be the intoxicating release from the banality of the world".

There is no point watching 22 men kick an inflated ball around a field, sometimes getting it between two sticks. There's no point spending hours reading hundreds of pages of lies. But football and fiction books provide incredible pleasure, they provide an escape from our mundane lives.

Clothes, shoes, hair and the like are just as pleasurable and even more powerful. It's being allowed to dream for a second, to escape the narrow confines of what life has dealt you and explore. To feel alive, to feel more than you are, or even just acknowledge your potential.

And what is wrong with doing something that makes you really happy? Like Belsen.

Anyway, more to the point, who should I pretend to be next (not GI Jane Andy).

Rob's APSOTW post is up

Rob's Account Planning School of the Web post is up. Not only is it a cracker, there's even some free advice on how to develop thinking about brands. Great stuff. Good luck.

If you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about when I mention "School of the Web" go start here.

School of the Web returns

 

The never un-Birkenstocked, ever wise, Rob Campbell is generously doing the next round of Account Planning School of the Web.

It will be up Wednesday 18th. You should have a go.

Be ready for the bad times

These are dark times, which has brought into sharp focus something I've been observing for a while now. Agency/marketing/planningish blogs rarely discuss the bad times, the dark side of working in an agency for planning types/

Things go wrong. I'll wager that a fair amount of blog authors have have more than fair share of hiccups during their careers. Just like I sometimes fear you could think planning is all blogging and coffee is you just read most posts, you could be lulled into thinking every agency experience is easy going, good natured fun.

Let's be positive for one second. There is nothing quite like the people you meet, the variety of work, the constant challenge, the pride in a job well done. But it's not always like that. Bad things are very likely to happen at some point. Things go wrong. Campaigns will fail,  clients get lost.

This happens on a personal level too, and in most cases, it not entirely your fault. Like much in life, some things will happen that are simply unfair.

A big client will move on, even you'be done their best campaign ever. If you've ever wondered why so many brands are so schizophrenic, it's because most marketers change jobs about every 18 months. The new broom wants to make their mark, everything gets changed, usually the agency as well. Or there's a consolidation exercise and everything gets put into one regional or global agency - which leads to much of the 'beige' creative work we see. At best, simply inoffensive drivel. At worse, the badly dubbed insults that are all too common. Yes, it may go wrong despite excellent work and a great relationship.

But sometimes you can be really good, but the chemistry simply isn't there. It's impossible to click with everyone and sometimes you cannot get along, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes you're both able to admit this and find a way to work together, sometimes your moved.

This can happen with bosses and suits and even colleagues. Even a whole agency culture. It's not them, it's you, but it's also not them, it's you. If your boss leaves, the next one may be completely different in approach, temperament and personality.

You may be smothered by the account team that wants to do everything, leaving you little space to find your voice. There's the suits who can't get their heads around the fact you don't just work on their stuff, who organise key meetings at the last minute when you've something else booked in.

Then there's redundancy. By default, redundancy means it's not your fault but it still hurts - ultimately it means you're now surplus to requirements. All it takes is a few of the, mentioned above, account losses, a relationship with a client you just can't make work, maybe the new boss and suddenly it's the delights of Jeremy Kyle and the empty feeling on Monday morning as the rest of the world returns to their jobs.

Yes, there are lots of things that can happen that are neither particularly good, or down to anything you've done, or not done.

Be ready.

There's no point shaking your fists at the cruel world. Life's unfair, get over it, get on with it.

And be sure there isn't anything you could have done differently, learn from it.

This is really important. Never, ever try and get revenge. Much of the above is NO one's fault, so there's no point. Even if someone has shafted you, this industry is small and just don't know when you'll bump into them, or when they'll bump into someone important to you.Remember, that same size means they'll get found out eventually.

Sorry if all that's a bit depressing. Most things that will happen to you will be amazing, but every now and then they won't. So prepare for them, and be as good as you can possibly be as often as you can.

Finally, make sure you're in agency you love, with people you trust that support you. Don't stay somewhere out of some sort of misguided loyalty if doesn't feel right. Find a place that fits.

Ideas are hard and come when they like, or do they?

There's rigour, hard decisions and lots of hard work required when thinking about strategy but, ultimately, good ideas come from feeling, daydreaming, watching, scribbling, abandoning and retrieving.

It's never completely linear, there are many logical progressions with lots of lateral intuitive jumps and more retracing of steps than most of us like to admit to as well. I guess you could say that ideas are like organisms rather than mechanisms. They grow at their own unique pace and have their own independent free will. 

Of course, this is no bloody help when you have to get a creative brief in, or a presentation deadline. You really don't need someone telling you to actively not think about the problem so it 'emerges'. You have to do your utmost to coax things out.

I really like John Steel's method of keeping a board of post it notes, keeping re-arranging them and looking for connections. I also like mind mapping. Here's another approach which seems pretty quick and generates stuff that's a little more unexpected.

We're all in-built to love stories, so much of how we communicate and socialise is done through stories. What is popular culture if it is not stories. Even a video game is story, you are simply enabled to be part of it. What is a brand if it is not a slowly evolving story?

So try and create the germ of a dramatic story -a series of actions by which your protagonist (the brand, your consumer or even the product/service) brings about changes in their circumstance, lives, nature or the lives of others. Here are six, quick, killer questions that should help:

1. Where? What's the world the story will happen in? Dove's happen's within the beauty industry.

2. When? Choose the historical moment- what's the relationship between past, present and future?

3. Who? What's the nature of the characters? Who's your protagonist? Who's the enemy? On who's side is the protagonist on?

4. What events have shaped their lives and decisions? What events will?

5. Why? What are the characters motivations? This will help us predict what might happen next and how they might respond to different events and company.

6. How does all this feel? What's the genre? Soap opera? Comedy? What's the visual feel? What's the music like? Is it all filmed at night?

I especially find looking at the events our characters are likely to face helpful. It helps crystallize objectives and uncover the context for what where we want to affect. For example, will the event (s) be:

Ceremony

Celebration

Reunion

Chase or pursuit

Recruitment

Seduction

Investigation

A game

Discovery

Holiday

Quest

Argument/reconciliation

Battle

Might help, might not. Have a go if your'e stuck in a rut. It's very useful if you're looking for something to span audiences and media, rather than traditional, reductive advertising.

Trends

Let's be clear, having an insight about how your audience is behaving, what they need,what's really bothering them is priceless. But you won't get that from the statements of the obvious masquerading as 'trends' many will try and feed you.

For example. You can't move right now for sparkling reports telling you people feel a bit helpless, are cutting back and want brands they can trust. Well buy me a dress and call me Judy! You don't say. That's not insight, that's not a 'trend' that's common sense isn't it?

The danger in slaveishly following trends that anyone can buy in, or what it simply happening right now, is that not only will someone else be doing exactly the same, you're in danger of simply replaying back someone's life to them, rather than surprising or delighting them.

My other problem is that a trend, or an insight isn't really one unless it's a true revelation. But even that isn't enough - it has to be relevant to what you need to be doing and it has to be useful. I think a big part of a planner's task is t turn an insight, should there be one, into something that will inspire creatives into producing effective great work. For example, it wasn't enough for Pot Noodle to focus on the way post grads don't quite want to grow up yet, they pushed it to the fact they have understandable, guilt cravings. It wasn't enough for Nike to know that women feel left out of the version of sport that's about stadiums, they pushed it to the level of celebrating the sport lots of women love that never get's recognised - dance.

So there you are. The challenge for me is ignoring the stuff everyone knows and getting some great insight of your own. That means primary research, but also mean simply going out and talking to the people you claim to know everything about.

Shut up junior

Read this quote. It's from a fellow called Julian KYnaston. He runs a big-ish agency outside London:

“We tried to distill down what we felt agencies will be facing in this tough climate and we came up with a one liner, that ‘clients need better strategic advice faster’.

“I have not been a fan of the account manager and account executive role for years. Invariably, when an account executive aspires to be an account manager or an account manager aspires to be an account director there is an inherent compulsion on that journey for those people to make an enthusiastic attempt to offer clients strategic counsel or design critique. While that is fine for the structural growth of the agency I think that we have to be big enough to say that that is an awful lot of pissing around with a clients money.
evolution

“Our simple viewpoint here is that good business does not look like junior people trying to practice their art on a client’s budget. So, part of our evolution will see us remove the titles of account manager and account executive from our structure. In place of those titles we will simply have project managers. Those project managers will sit to the side or the back of the account director and we will see almost a return to the good old fashioned apprenticeships, where the apprentice learns their trade by watching their mentor deal directly with the client... but they do not learn at the expense of the clients.”

This approach to only allow senior account directors to deal at a strategic level with clients certainly appears to answer the one on-going client gripe: “I saw the account director at the pitch, but I’ve not seen them since they won my business,” but what about at a staff level? Is this approach not cutting off promotional opportunities for staff?

Kynaston says: “I suppose you can see the old agency head viewpoint on this. We are breaking down the sustainability of agencies, we are removing promotional and aspirational lines and even more so, we are daring to tinker with a structure that someone, somewhere has deemed effective for a long time. I do not think it is effective. The truth of the matter is that currently account managers and executives get a schooling in winning business and losing a piece of business in six to 12 months. That, to me, is not a great schooling. What we are abdicating here is a change in the account director’s role, a much longer apprenticeship, a much longer time to gain experience and a pegging back of the desire of an individual to hint it might be done a better way, but to watch the account director and learn from them – and one day we may very well have an account director recruit.”

I don't know what you think, but I fundamentally disagree. I'm not trying to say youth is right, I totally believe in learning by doing too. But the thing about the young is they haven't learn to stop questioning, they haven't learned to accept the status quo yet, they're not afraid to ask annoying questions. Quite right they should learn from elders, but quite wrong they should shut up, not have the temerity to think until they've passed some arbitrary rights of passage. If you think young people are wrong, prove it. How do you know you're right if you're not nervous anymore?

Why I plan

Like a lot of planners I know, I never intended to be a planner, it sort of just happened. After graduating and coasting nicely as a personal trainer, I had a vague idea that I wanted to work in an advertising agency. I started out as a suit, failed at that and realised I was better at thinking than doing. But even though I has worked in places with planners, I didn't really know what they did, it sort of crept up on me what they were for, and maybe I should be one.

So the first reason I'm a planner is that it just happened.

The second is that there isn't another job in an agency I'm any good at.

Because, despite the hours, the stress, the low pay next to other professions, you just don't get the same colour, the same culture and the same people.

Because you never stop learning. If you stop moving forward, you're history. Planning's really about culture and people, that never stops developing and changing, so there's always something to learn, even if you're global, executive, emeritis god of planning for the universe.

Because it's always a little scary at the start of a project, wondering what the hell to do. There's nothing more rewarding than the moment you know you've cracked it.

Because you're never done. You can always make it better, you're always wondering if there isn't a better way. That's at once frustrating and liberating.

Because you're part of a global subculture - blogging's great. Planners are really nice, interesting, generous people, blogging has enabled me to rub shoulders with all sorts of planning people and learn from them, even though we've never met.

Because this is the most exciting time to be a planner. Advertising's a mess - there's are dinosaurs who can only talk in single minded propositions and TV ads, but then there are Young Turks who are trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I argue that planners should be at the forefront of sorting this out. It's so liberating to be able to do literally ANYTHING in response to a client brief, but sometimes there's nothing more limiting than limitless choice.

Because I can.

School of the Web, additional entry

The Yorkshire Tea School of the Web project isn't quite finished. Stephanie Kelly's entry got lost somewhere between her inbox and mine. So we're going to take a look at her entry today. This is the very last post before Gareth or Rob pick up the next project.

Stephanie's focused on some rock hard truths about tea drinking. I love the observation that everybody has their own idea of their perfect cup of tea. Anyone who regularly suffers a tea round in the office would recognised this fact.

There's also the idea of a cup of tea as chance to do something everyday for yourself. A little window in a plague of chaos.

Now, I really like the way Stephanie's delivered this. It's simple, to the point, some chunky truths to play with. The imagery is really done well, it builds on her points, brings them to life. Really, really good.

Now, I admire the way Stephanie's looked for a role for tea in people's lives, doing something for you. I like she's expanded it to find a voice that can talk about all sorts of things, really good, culturally significant...all that.

Now if you're the kind of strategist that believes in building a voice with around a cultural truth and owning it, this is great. If Yorkshire Tea was part of a portofolio of brands from a Unilever, Arla Foods or something then, again, great. Lurpak is a great example of this type of brand really finding its voice. I think Dove is another.

My view is that when you have a company with a clear culture already, you should find a way to bring it life, in a manner that's relevant to whoever you think your audience(s) is (are). It's not everyday you find a company with rich heritage and way of doing things, when this happens, thank your lucky stars and work from the brand out.

Like I said, not everyone thinks this way, but as far as I'm concerned, I'd have been focusing on bringing to life some of the great truths they have. So well played Stephanie, it's not fair to re-judge what's gone before, but to make up for the mix-up, you get a copy of Adam Morgan's book too.Please let me have your address.

For what it's worth:

There's a consistent richness and flavour to Yorkshire Tea you don't get with any other tea. It seems to me that comes from a unique richness and flavour baked into the company culture......

There's the obstinate sticking to quality levels that create the distinctive taste, a real family business since 1866 (I'll bet there's some great stories to be had), a real, small team of buyers (rather than made up Kenko characters), the attention to detail that means you have to choose the right blend for the right water.

It all seems to add up to a brand that's about doing things properly or not at all. 

If you take a look at their recruitment pages, there's a commitment to preserving traditional craft skills that seems to echo this.

School of the web results

So. after much delay, finally we have the results for the Yorkshire Tea Account Planning School of the web task. Just in case you can't recall what it was about, read this. If you can't be bothered...

This was a task about tone and manner - the hardest thing to get across to creatives. I wanted to see what you would do with Yorkshire Tea's brand voice and how you would communicate it to a creative team.

Feedback will take two distinct directions. Firstly, your idea, secondly, how you bring it to life.

This is a joint effort between myself and Steve. I wonder if you can tell who wrote what....

Anyway, well done to everyone. This was a hard one, very loose, thinking AND bringing it to life, but since that's a big part of planning to life, something worth doing.

So.................................................

First up is Carlos Camacho and Juan Pablo Carrero, a planning and creative mash-up.

Download brief_tea.ppt

They've taken the angle that tea drinking itself needs to be redefined. They're in a good area of finding something fundamentally human rather than mere category judo. They want to focus on pleasure as fundamental human right..and sipping Yorkshire Tea is tasting pleasure.

Now we like this. We like elevating Yorkshire Tea from the other, everyday, unsung heroes. Tea is one of those everyday masterpieces we take for granted, like paper clips and washing machines. As we're sure they've noted from their research, Yorkshire Tea tends to win in taste tests, it does deserve to be appreciated. So far, so good.

We really like two bits about how it's been brought to life for the creatives. Firstly, there's that piece of writing...."A feeling nobody escapes from and everybody seeks". There's real  meat in that, the idea of something you at once try to resist and constantly want. There's a real tension in this, a real voice, a real truth, a real point of view. We would have made more of this.

At first we liked the wall of images, a really useful illustration of the world you want to create. But then we got confused. We guess much of that comes down to wanting to know what Yorkshire Tea's view of pleasure really is.

We got a strong view that everybody has a right to it, that feels like a call to arms, a strong rallying call to unite a community behind. But the images range from a sensuous, sexy, almost dangerous expression of pleasure, to joyful, to contemplative. It would be good to explore the areas of 'pleasure' Yorkshire Tea should be associated with; those which reflect it's brand values and heritage, and maybe those that don't. This is where it began to fall down. Top marks for the use of imagery, but it seems to confuse what you're talking about rather than solidify.

Maybe you're intending it to be open, to build with a team, but maybe this is a little too open.

Next up is Anjali.

Download apsotw_yorkshire_teaanjali_2.ppt

In his email, he's written that he's certain he's after tea drinkers who want to pay a premium for quality. Bang on considering Yorkshire Tea's premium price. We quickly get to a strong point of view for what Yorkshire Tea will do for them.

They're stressed, no time to think, no time to just be. Yorkshire Tea will bring them satisfaction.

On the idea front, the idea of a little island in the day to enjoy, to make the most of, to not have to think about it really strong. At first it wasn't clear that 'satisfaction' would nail it. There seemed a disconnect between the idea of a mini- antidote to an overstuffed life, which feels very true of our relationship with tea and satisfaction, which suggested to us either rational quality, or something worth striving for.

Then we looked at the slides and got interested in 'satisfaction for free'.  Not sure what it meant, but the shots of the Yorkshire Dales, serenity, someone taking time to smell the roses made a bit more sense. We presume you're saying that Yorkshire Tea is all about taking some time to clear your mind, some me-time. Liked this, it seems evocative and something 'Yorkshire Provenance' could own.

It's just that 'satisfaction' didn't get us there. We guess that shows the weakness of words v images and associations. So great work on Yorkshire Tea's role in it's fans' lives, great delivery of something creatively useful, but we would look for words that convey it a little more.

There is a strong idea in terms of Yorkshire Tea taking you out of the day-to-day to a natural, peaceful place. Take that idea and focus on it, rather than complicate with other ideas of satisfaction. Great stimulus, just be clearer.

  Then we have Andrea

Download fancy_a_cuppa.ppt

The heart of Andrea's thinking is Yorkshire Tea making a typical day a bit better. However that might be as true of any tea brand as Yorkshire Tea. She identifies the facets of the brand essence (the scone recipe, heritage, etc) but seems to believe tit will lack appeal to the (new) audience. We wanted to see you identify what you've got, who your audience is, what they think, feel, do and identify what aspects of the brand 'connect'. For a brand as rich in heritage as Yorkshire Tea there must be something - how can make the brand truth's relevant?

So, potentially some good thinking but maybe needs more development and aligning to the Yorkshire Tea brand.

The stimulus in support of this was inspiring and convincing - although there was possibly too much.   It confused rather than evoked.

And finally we have Noako.

Download yorkshire_tea_final_na.pptx

'A delightful stubbornness' is superb - really different, rich and above all else, true to the brand.

The start of the presentation is equally inspiring - and it continues to make sense...

...so stop there.

A good idea is a good idea - it doesn't need endless explanation and support.

It's rare that you nail an idea with words alone - in this instance you have. Anything else would be bringing it to life, but it feels more like further exploration rather than building on what you have.

The more you explain something the less confident it feels.

So once you've got an idea, stop, interrogate it, keep it simple and ensure it makes complete sense. Don't over-elaborate. This applies to planning in general.

So, lots of great stuff in everybody's stuff. General feedback - stimulus is bloody hard. There's lots of really great stimulus here, but absolute relevance is critical. It needs to solidify your thinking, build on it. Get your core thinking locked down, be confident about it and then work hard to make that interesting, rather than hedging your bets.

SO THE WINNER IS NAOKO WHO WINS 'THE PIRATE INSIDE' BY ADAM MORGAN. Give me your address and I'll get your copy to you. Close run thing, but overall, the thinking was simple, inspiring and something only Yorkshire Tea could own. Those first two slides were so good, there was almost no need to do anything else, there was compression of lots of meaty stuff in those two slides. Well played.

So that's it. Sorry for the delays. Hope the feedback was useful and fair. If you disagree, do let me know. What does anyone else think? 

Always travel with a suit

Had to go to Geneva for a couple of days last week, for something or other. I was quite shocked to find that Mel travel bag was smaller than mine. Poses a big question about my masculinity no?

Always good to go travelling with a suit, you don't have to organise a thing. Mel was like a big sister, herding me in the right direction and feeding me when appropriate.

It's important to stress the big sister thing since the hotel booking was cocked up and we had to share a hotel room. The bathroom co-ordination was meticulous, and yes, there were seperate beds.

We, of course, worked very hard with no time for frivolity. Notice the painting in this airport cafe to give an authentic chalet feel.

School of the web update

All the entries are in, looks like people have worked very hard.

Results and feedback will appear two weeks today (3rd November). Helping on the judging will be Steve Groves, one of the account directors here. Good to get a suit perspective for a change.

Steve takes a dim view of planners - as far as he's concerned, account directors should be able to do strategy, if not they're just bag carriers that are good at making people like them. In his case he has a point, it's very hard to tell Steve something he doesn't know about the clients he works on.

Expect some honest, but constructive, feedback. Naturally we'll be doing the judging over a pot that has been properly warmed.

Keyboards, conventions and conservative ideas companies

The very first patent for a typewriter was given out in the 1860's for QWERTY keyboard. It was specifically designed to make people type slowly, ensuring the commonest letters were scattered around the left hand side to confound the majority of right handers.  thus avoiding keys jamming by being too quickly. It became so entrenched that the computer keyboard layout is pretty much the same.

We tend to think that technological progress follows logical, well thought out directions when things nothing to do with usefulness and purpose influence how things are designed and how they get used.

On the other hand, texting was never designed to be the massive success in messaging it has. Users showed designers its real worth. The best ideas rarely survive contact with the real world.

That's worth thinking about next time you insists that an ad needs to have just one 'verbal message' or look at what advertising to get advertising inspiration.

Agencies are amazingly conservative for 'ideas companies'. Most practices have kind of 'emerged' - we just assume we're doing the right thing.

Here's a last thought - apparently aeronautical engineers have calculated that an aircraft with one wing swept back and the other swept forward would actually be better than conventional bilateral wings. Imagine the faces of passengers getting on that plane..........

Fast (ish) strategy

So I was at the IPA Fast Strategy conference last week. Like others, I had and have my doubts on  the merits of this. The best ideas tend to emerge over time, you need space to not think about something etc.

BUT we, and most certainly I, live in a world where out time is always being squeezed. Like or not, we're all under pressure to work quick more often than we would like.

Anyway, it's always good to go to a do that's going to be attended by planners and here people you admire talk about what they do.

So it's no wonder that possibly the biggest highlight of my day was talking to other attendees. Planners are great.

The plan for the day was a series of speakers talking about how they think quickly.

Adam Morgan, Founder, Eat Big Fish

Rita Clifton, Chairman, Interbrand

Orlando Hooper-Greenhill, Director of Global Planning, JWT

Richard Storey, Chief Strategy Officer, M&C Saatchi

Sarah Bussey, Strategic Planning Consultant, IPA

Jeremy Griffin, Head of News, TimesOnline

And a series of teams were given a Honda brief and three hours to do some thinking before presenting to the delegates.

I'll spare you a blow by blow account and stick to the main points:

1. Don't be too clever by half. The teams that presented the Honda work back hadn't resisted overcomplicating their ideas. Each had a strong core that seemed to be muddied by thinking too much. Except the team that was creative only.
2. Presenting with passion is at least as important as being right. Kate Stanners could convince you anything (and not just because she's fit).
3. Most of the points about being quick seemed to really be about being good. You cannot avoud doing things properly, and cutting corners just makes things longer and harder when the house of cards falls down.
4. Be generous - don't lock yourself in a room mind mapping and worrying, get the team together, make sure it's a team that has both strategists and executors in, and hopefully media too and facilitate conversation. You may have a great thought, but the ability to spot when someone else has is even more precious. And the more conversation, the better chance of someone hitting on something.
5. Be sure you know you're doing strategy and not tactics. Both are valid, but are you really doing strategy?
6. You must develop a natural curiosity - collect as much stimulus as you can, always be looking for interesting stuff, the more stuff you have on the shelf, the easier it is to pick something off it when the time comes.
7. Know when to move. Don't waste time making something shinily perfect, but don't go off half cocked either.
8. Conflict tends to drive brands forward, a brand narrative usually has a brand v something; Honda V Complacency, Lurpak v needless complexity, ghd v what God gave you. Creating a monster for your brand to be St George against can be a great focus. It doesn't, and maybe shouldn't be, something within the category - but find something that will turn your brand enemies into monsters, something big, cultural and compelling. This is a neat trick to turn potentially bloated number one into a challenging brand of the people. Dove has made the beauty industry into a compelling monster, Apple made conformity into a 1984 scale monster, Levis is all youthful rebellion against hyocritical grown up values (I think), The Coke Side of Life makes a monster out of avarice and owning stuff (supposedly).
9. Brand consultatcies talk a good game. That said, Rita Clifton did make a good point about brand strategy - look at the spectrum of what to be about - what you do, how you do it, what what we do does for people, or a big cause and choose which one, and only that one to be about.
10. Don't lose sleep about being brilliant, be right and enable creatives to be brilliant.
11. Find the real blockage, the real barrier and don't believe the excuses people make in research. People claim to have no time for example,  when they actually are greedy about trying to do too much.
12. Admire your audience. If you're target is Sun readers, it's easy for a spoilt agency type to patronise them. Even if you're target is an investment banker, make yourself like them - it's really hard to get under the skin of someone if you can't respect them first.
13. Plan from within - find something you know that's utterly true, but kind of didn't know it, or it just hasn't been talked about it this category. Look at comedy, most things are funny because they're true. Peep Show reminds me that the the things we say and do are rarely the same as the the things we're thinking. Male friends constantly bicker etc.
14. Be careful of 'fat words' that mean everything and nothing at the same time. Quality, trust, care are useless strategic words.
15. Pretend you were in another category - what would you do?
16. Something written down on  pad might not look that goodm write it up, tidy up and you'll be amazed at how much better it can look.
17. Keep your arse on the seat. Don't take lots of coffee breaks, break of to do something else for a bit. Get into a 'flow' state of mind - that wierd trance like state where you 're lost in what you're doing. Most athletes don't remember the game or the race, most artists find it hard to describe how they fo about making art - I suspect most planners find it hard to describe how they 'plan'. I bet it's for this reason.
18. Talk to anyone. I talk too much, I waffle,  I have about three people that let me talk at them and then tell me what I've just said. And somehow it all comes together.
19. Think about removing the enemy's centre of gravity. What is their strength, how will you disarm it? That might be a competitor, it might be a cultural thing.
20. Turn an objective into a challenge. Selling  10,000 hybrid cars is an objective, reducing UK emissions by 5% is challenge, convincing credit crunched family car drivers that a Hybrid is more reliable is a challenge.

Hope all that helps. It was a good day. 

I've bashed this out quick, don't have a go at spelling and stuff.

More planning, less me

You may have seen me get into a little local trouble a short while ago, over a badly written post about different agency departments being, well, different. I was glad when all that blew over....

Then I read this post. Or, to be more specific, the comments. Obviously memories are long, assuming it's to do with that long gone incident. On the other hand, maybe it's nothing to do with that, maybe someone has just decided to be like that based on, well, who knows?

Serves me right I guess, if someone decides to put themselves out there, they can't expect everyone to be nice, and one should learn to not take things personally.

But that's the thing about online stuff, it's still about people. The groups may be bigger, but the meaning of the words we use don't change. Maybe I should learn to not follow the links, but once you've read something, you can't take it back.

Now, I'm not just getting silly over comments on someone else's blog, from some smart arse I've never met. I've been thinking about this ever since 'the incident'.

Suddenly I find myself looking over my shoulder when I'm posting. That means shying away from opinions and the personal, in favour of posts about pure planning craft. Or maybe the reverse, maybe it's time to do something else. I still think someone needs to speak up for rigor and doing things properly, but it's a bit one dimensional if that's it.

Anyway, that's  a long winded way of saying that, for now anyway, you only see posts about planning and not much else. I'll be working out what I want to do. Maybe that's a good thing, there's nothing more boring than someone talking about themselves is there?

Last Thursday night

So it was the Northern at The Northern on Thursday night. Everyone turned up,along with a few new faces.

It was lovely to meet Sarah again, along with Ian who got my old job. Yet again, too little time to talk to everyone, but there you go.

It was particularly nice to see Young Mortimer and Andrea. David's working with me on this and that, less than a year since he spent some time with me on work experience, while Andrea's in her final year of study and on the hunt for work experience and her first job. You could do a lot worse than getting her in.

That's right, the youngsters are coming. Feel comfy in your job? be ready to raise you game.

Being different

I was reviewing some European ads for something or other and noted how many brands claim to be for true individuals. It seems you can't move for genuine one-offs in this continent.

At first glance, it sort of makes sense for these companies to behave like this, a cursory look at the data sees more people in Western Europe agreeing that personal taste is more important than fashion every year. I don't buy this  totally though, it sounds like 'the right answer'. No one would want to  admit being one of the herd thanks to the cultural pressure in the west to be indivuidual.

Anyway. as far as advertising and popular culture are concerned, there is nothing more obvious and common than individuality. Or so it would seem........

I propose it's not who you are that makes you different, it's what you do. There's the old cliche that each human is an original of the species - 0.1% different to everyone else. But reverse that -we're 9.99% identical. Biologocally, most of us really iare not that special. Buying stuff won't do it either, whatever wrapping you give yourself,in the end, you're not that physically different to me.

What makes me different to you is what I've done. I have lived a different life to you. What I've experienced, what I've seen, what I've read, the good bits, the catastrophes - those are the things that make me who I am. And unless someone has experienced all these things in the same order, they'll never be me and I'll never be them.

Now this feels like territory for those brands stuck in bland individuality corner - give them experiences that are truly unique, not 'stuff'.

It's also pertinent for planners. We need to stand out as discipline - creatives and suits need to WANT us there. They got on quite well without us and can still if we're not useful. You need to have experienced lots of stuff they haven't. That means reading, doing and finding more. Of course, time is just an issue, but you'll find a way. Just doing and reading the same as planners in other agencies means you'll always come up with the same stuff. Be a one off through all those things that you've done.   

In their shoes

I think I've mentioned somewhere else that when you play a song you like to someone else you hear it through their ears. It's something to do with mirror neurons firing.

It's a useful trick for practicing presentations, knowing that work is really both right and good and generally avoiding any pitfalls.

It's one thing to rehearse a presentation in your head, it's quite another to do it to someone who has nothing to do with your project. Suddenly you can hear yourself from their point of view, you know which points are too long,too short, too fuzzy and simply not well though out.

Same goes for creative work. I watched someone in my team present some work that's been months in development. Being on the receiving end of someone explaining everything, sitting with clients really made me objective by seeing it all from a totally different point of view. Thankfully it stood up, and we even saw ways of making it better that hadn't been clear before.

So talk to someone, not just when you're stuck, when you are totally sure. There's nothing like having to explain yourself to see where you can make things better,

Back to basics

I did an internal session on creative briefing on Friday. You know -  how how to think about the various bits, top tips for writing one. Only to realise I was benefiting as much from this as anyone else.

A fair chunk of the advice I was giving I don't always follow myself. I should.

That's the good thing about trying to pass on what you've learned, it forces you to look at yourself a little bit harder. Bad habits can start as little chinks, eventually they can becoming gaping chasms.

It''s not that easy describing what you do instinctively, not just creative briefing or thinking about brands.Try describing how walking works, or how to ride a bike. But trying to get to the heart of best practice usually exposes how much you've strayed from the path.

By the way, top practical tips for writing a brief in a rush:

• The quickest way to describe your audience well is to read what they read. Devour their world intensely and it soon comes.
• Don't stare at a blank page, just start. Fill out the section you can, you'll soon find you're writing too much and the excess belongs somewhere else - you're on your way. If you start with target audience, it usually spills over into objective for example.
• Talk to someone. Maybe the creatives you'll be briefing, someone a bit like the target audience, but anyone really. Most ideas come out of conversation. Have a chat.

Hurt, failure and the start being more fun that the end

It's hard to pick a favourite ad, but this commercial from Nike is certainly up there. The 'Hurt' commercial will connect with anyone who's ever been an athlete at any sort of level, and to be honest, anyone who's pushed themselves to anything difficult. There is pain and sacrifice along the way.

And the feeling of loss or failure is far more intense than the moment when you win or succeed. I did this and that as a swimmer, but the things I remember the most are the failures.

I remember having a really bad year, but finally getting it together for the last big final before the Christmas break, only for my goggles to break. I remember getting a final stroke all wrong and coming second by a fingernail on a race I'd been preparing for all year. I remember winning big in America only to be disqualified on a rule I didn't know they'd changed. And I remember training so hard I threw up.

I do remember the successes too, but the thing about wonderful  moments, apart from never being as intense as the pain,is that what you really remember is the build up. That's true of most things. Christmas Day is never as good as getting ready for it. Is there a more intense feeling than preparing for an important date? The possibilities, the desperate wanting it to go right?

After meeting Mrs Northern for the first time I had a week to wait for the next date. I couldn't sleep, could hardly eat, I just couldn't stop thinking about her (the date was pretty good too).

I think that goes for work too. I both love and hate pitches. The feeling of not getting it can be more crushingly intense than the euphoria of winning.

But pitches or projects with clients you have, it's great to see the work appear somewhere, but there's also a feeling of loss, a bit like finishing a great book, a curry you don't want to end or a great film. You realise that getting there was the good bit.

The end is not as fun as the start.

I think that goes for career ambition as well. Account Execs want to get promoted and stop having to write contact reports as soon as they can. Junior planners want to write some bigger briefs and be able to delegate more number crunching. Everyone is in danger of not appreciating the clients they have and going after newer, shinier, sexier ones.

Stop, take a second, live in the moment, take it in and appreciate where you are now. As a junior, you'll never have this freedom again, freedom from pressure, freedom to fail and learn from mistakes.

In the midst of a stressful day, when you need to do everything at once, stop and consider this is what you really love. Most people who leave agency life or take a break miss the pace and the buzz.

Smell the flowers while you can. 

Account planning school of the web - more details

A couple of people have rightly pointed out how/who to submit entries to. Just email them all for me, title the email account planning school of the web. You'll find my email link on the sidebar of this blog.

There's no limit to the amount of slides, but this task is aimed at creatives, and even if it wasn't, taking the time to write less is a good habit to pick up, so practise here.

Northern planning nights return

Once upon a time, a rare species known as 'planner in a Northern agency' began to meet to shoot the breeze and have a couple of drinks. It grew a bit more and thankfully, some non-planning types began to turn up and it simply became a chance to have drinks with some nice people who loosely work in the same game.

It's been ridiculously long since the last one, but we've finally got out act together. Next Northern Planning night is October 2nd, The Northern in Manchester (in the Northern Quarter), from 6.30pm onwards.

I'll be there.

Rob will.

Gemma will.

Ian will.

Simon will.

I'll make sure David is.

Andrea better be.

But the more the merrier, come one, come all.

Working hard and the perils of doing one thing

I was reading Campaign Magazine's ten commandments for graduates last week and two things stood out.

Firstly, don't try and switch to planning after two weeks- account handling will become much more than contact reports and competitor reviews. They're right, it is more than that, but there are two things to add to this. First; don't even think about planning if you think it's less work. It's not - it's as least as hard.

Harder to get into meeting rooms (they can manage perfectly well without planners if they want), harder to squeeze everything in - too few planners, too many clients means you'll always be running uphill, harder to multi-task - one minute you're writing a brief, next you're swimming data, next you're running a workshop.

Also, life as junior planner means you're doing lots of so-called mundane tasks too. Endless TGI runs, preparing stimulus for workshops, swimming in Nielson.... and if you've got into this business thinking it's all long lunches, glamorous shoots, blogging and coffee you're in for shock. It's more colourful, but a doddle it is not.

Second was about keeping doing what you love. The first point makes this hard - where is the time? But as a planner, and person, you really have to find a way to do it.

By default, a planner needs to be interesting. If all you can talk about is advertising, you'll become quite the opposite. And there's lots of pressure in this business - you need an outlet.

And most ideas, most good thinking comes out of the office, when you least expect it. You need to give yourself that chance. Planners are never not working really.

Put another way, planning is about understanding humans, so you need to be one, not an advertising robot. One way or another, you need to find the time. I couldn't function without sport - I need to swim, cycle and stuff like I need to breath. I need to cook, it's relaxing, it's creative, it's making something.

That's my love. What's yours? If you haven't got one, get one (or two!) quick.

Account Planning School of the Web

Righto, it's back.

Looks like the faculty is Rob, Gareth and Northern. I'm doing this round, then Gareth (his last one was a doozy, look forward to it).

Anyway, this task is about tone of voice.

Creatives find planning types useful for two things; getting the work through the client/research and providing useful stimulus.

Getting the work through starts with a good brief that as many people have inputed into as possible - if someone feels they've had a part in developing the work, they're far more likely to support it..but that's not what the task is about.

It's about stimulus. There's all the critical, non-official conversations around the diarised meetings that help you and the creative teams shape the work - as long they'll let you in that back door, which requires them to think you'll be interesting. But the briefing matters too, even more than the brief.

No matter how short, how well written a creative brief is, it is still words. That's not too great for creatives who think in pictures, associations and metaphor. It's even worse for tone and manner, which is the part of the briefing (and brief) that usually gets the least attention, yet it's the most important.

About 95% if human communication is non-verbal, body language, appearance, facial expressions, these are what people react to and subconsciously remember. It's no different with creative work. The core message that arises from the proposition still matters, but it's the delivery that really matters - the brand's body language.

Take Honda. Great ads, built around a brand based on optimism. But that's just a word, the stimulus that informed the creative process was this:

(Sorry to WK from nicking it from your creds). Imagery, associations and sentiments that brought to life what the brand was about.

I work on ghd, where the brand behaviour is everything - words cannot do it justice - but it's critical a creative team know what it is - it produces work like this, this and this.

Great brands tend to be built on a consistent view on the world, culture at large - some sort of long term, core organising vision, something that pulls together any objective you may have, put is flexible enough for virtually anything.

Your task is to develop a vision for Yorkshire Tea, perhaps my favourite brand in the whole wide world - and make it real for a creative team. The only mandatory is that it should be done in powerpoint - as guide...analogy metaphor, pictures, video (pasted in or linked to youtube) are what works with creatives, so try and use them as much as you can. Something you would use in  a creative briefing, but also a reference for development.

Don't worry too much about core Yorkshire Tea short term objectives, or international v UK. Just have a go at creating something interesting, something meaty, something inspiring, something that feels right.

All you need to know for now is that Yorkshire Tea is a premium tea brand sold mainly in the UK. It's priced well above own label, and more than most tea brands. It does well in most taste tests, it's a deeper, richer taste than most tea. As with most premium brands, they have to justify their price point, not least in defence against own label. They are proud of their Yorkshire heritage, owned by Taylors of Harrogate, who also own Betty's probably the best tea shop in the world (based in Harrogate, a quintessential middel class Yorshire town).

This is a hard one, and it's very open, but I think it's worth having a go- increasingly, as consumers segment, brands are going to have to be interesting enough to earn attention, rather than forcing things the other way. Developing the voice will be core planning skill amongst the billions of others.

Deadline for entries is October 15th 11.59pm (GMT). Good luck, Any questions, put it in the comments and I'll answer as we go along.

And while the judges haven't been appointed yet, it won't just be me.

Free trials, brand ideas and communications ideas

Now and again people offer me free stuff to trial, in the hope I'll blog about it. I usually say no because I don't want to be under pressure to write something, and I'd feel bad about cutting something to ribbons if it wasn't any good. Also, I'm sort of bemused that anyone would think I have some sort of influence.

But I did accept trialling Papershow for a few weeks. Basically, you can connect a pen to your computer by USB and turn it into a whiteboard. I thought I might find it useful in workshops to scribble notes, and I did, but the real value was creating powerpoint slides that were a little more interesting. And it worked a treat.

Like this slide. And in fact, while we're here, lets talk about this slide a bit.

 

Think about Just Do It - built around self motivation, empowerment and hero worship, this single call to arms, to get off your arse and make things happen has informed twenty years of advertising. I know I've got my order of events wrong, but that's not the point. At some point they needed to crack tennis, re-engage with athletes who thought they'd lost their sporting edge,engage with women etc. The big brand voice enabled them to address their challenges and keep that all important consistent voice.

I'm not going to have a go at Brand Onions and stuff, it should be self explanatory by now, but look those charts again. See that big arrow in the middle? The thing that holds all those little ideas together?

It has an intent, a direction, a goal, and endgame. Nike didn't know what they would have to do in the next twenty years, just like I don't know what I'll be doing in my fifties, I bet you don't know what you'll be up to in twenty years time either. That's the thing about plans, they rarely work out.

In the 80's the US army used to plan everything to death. Every single eventually was planned for, nothing was left to chance. Problem was, they found that every single engagement has one thing in common - nothing went to plan. And the rigidity of orders and planning meant that no one could use their initiative, adapt to the situation and make it work.

The general even had a saying for it, "No plan survives contact with the enemy". So over a number of years, they adapted their planning, with more emphasis on the end result. Everything is about the intent now, that's the guide, the thing everyone works to. And being enables to adapt, gets them their.

I think brands are like that - the vision, manifesto is critical, but it shouldn't handcuff what you need to do for right now, it should enrich it and hold all those 'right now' into a much bigger 'one day'.

Hope that makes sense. Just wanted to share. 

Fitting in, templates and getting a planning job

Someone was kind enough to ask my thoughts on what to say if you want your first planning job and, in the the interview, you're asked about process, insights coming from anywhere and proprietary tools. I thought I'd share my answers (I've added some bits in since my initial reply).

"My view on templates is that if the agency has one, use it, it's easier for you in the long run. Plus, models and templates have a place - they frame your thinking. Like the Disruption model my agency works with - thinking the conventions and how you might break is a useful place to start, but isn't much good without insight into the audience, or knowing what the objective should be. The trick is to make sure you have a good idea, not just one that fits the box.

Try and still think about the usual stuff - brand, audience, market, culture, objective, and I mean think hard. Write things down, do manifestos, mind mapping, all that. When something good eventually comes, if it doesn't fit your 'model' post rationalise it to hell to fit. If something is really good, it should be able to take everything you throw at it.

As for getting consumer insight, it's true that ideas come at anytime. That said, you can't beat going out amongst the people you're targeting and hopefully talking to some of them in the context of your subject matter. Talk to footballers before a match, talk to women about make-up when they're getting ready. Talk to gamers while they're playing. If you haven't got time, read what they read, watch what they watch. Look at some of their videos on Youtube. Read their blogs, Facebook groups etc.

When it comes to the interview, find out as much as you can about how the agency works, and tailor your 'approach' to that. Be yourself, but no one wants a loose cannon. People want someone who can both fit in and add to what they already have. Think about your planning heroes - how you might nick their best stuff and leave the bits you don't like.

You simply can't avoid rigour and process, but my view is that you should never do anything for the sake of it though, approach everything with the idea of learning something new, generating ideas.

It's true that ideas come from anywhere, but they won't unless you've done the work and banged your head against a brick wall first.

Hope this helps."

Complex colour

Sometimes the most simple things can be fascinating if you look hard enough, in fact if you just scratch underneath the surface a little. That's one of the arts of planning for me, there's no excuse for a dull creative brief, whatever the category. Or the obvious, first stuff thought stuff either. There's always another layer to peel if you ask the right questions.

I've been doing some work on colour and quickly found out how little I know.

I began by asking why color affects us, inspired by a film on BBC where Colin Jackson found out how much his athletic ability was nature v nurture, I wanted to look at why color has such an effect on us. And some is physiological, some bred by culture.

The physiological stuff is down to wavelengths of light. Take red, it's got he broadest wavelength and physically takes the most energy for the brain to process it, that's why it jumps out at you, actually raises your pulse, makes you feel hot. So if you want t get a raise, wear red, if you want to lose all your money, gamble in a red room. Researchers actually found that people have more arguments in  red rooms - culturally, it's passion, strength and danger, but that all comes from the way it affects you physically. A cup of tea will actually appear hotter in a red mug.

Blue on the other hand is positive relaxing color, thanks to having the smallest wavelength. It physically lowers the pulse, so it calming, makes you feel cooler. But then culture has made navy blue seem authoritative and conservative.

But on the other hand, while yellow is a happy colour, it's symbolism with the sun means it subconsciously stands for renewal, reinvention, constant motion.

Green has a nature/nurture contradiction. While we talk of being 'green with envy', people who like green tend to be friendly and generous. One is intrinsic, one is a tradition we absorb by osmosis.

And on it goes. I won't get into shades and colour combinations, we'll be here forever.  Don't know why I'm telling you, I just found it interesting.

Brand storytelling

Before I go on, brand essences, visions, positionings, onions, ladders and God knows what have their place. Sometimes you need a box full of ticks to give you a common frame of reference with clients, especially at board level. There, I've said. But you'll find it hard to get something interesting enough for today's mediascape if you stop there.

That goes for tone of voice too. This is an old rant, but the embers are still warm. More than once, I've been furnished with a hallowed huge tone of voice document from some brand consultancy,expected use it to inform the verbal and non-verbal bits of creative work. In other words, take the useless thing the ones a galaxy away from the creative did and make it relevant for the poor sods who have to actually execute something.

Now, to the bit I want to talk about. If you haven't read Faris' thesis on transmedia thinking, you should. If you still can't be bothered (shame on you) simply consider that brand communication needs to be both complex and coherent accross a myriad of media, for a myriad of audience groups, who will mould the story in their own way, and talk to different people about in in different levels. That's life I'm afraid.

And don't scoff, that's how  popular culture is going. The Star Wars films my have ended, but there's a cartoon spin off coming this summer, and the next ''game' is actually another prequel instalment in its own right, with a conclusion that turns the series on its head. Of course, you can stick with the films if you like, or maybe read a couple of books, or you may have read some of the comics as a kid - engage as much as you like. Not to mention the compexity of Lost, The Dr Who spin off series' or even how you'll neverf truly get Donnie Darko without some time on the website.

It's not as hard or incoherent as it looks. George Lucas has a back story for Star Wars long before he wrote the first script. Jk Rowling had a core Potter timeline in place well before the first book. Tolkien created language and mythology for his world long before he wrote the Hobbit...depth, history....back story.

That's starts with a film pitch quality for brands...something concise, but rich enough for lots of sub-plots (evolving tactical objectives), character arcs (different reaons to enage for different fans) and spin offs (brand extensions). Like Buffy's 'horror in high school' the X-Files 'paranormal FBI departement, the Bourne films 'Crack assassin with amnesia' and of course, the great Heroes 'People with superpowers but not in comic book land'.

Write a back story first, look for the story arc, then look to compress it. As long as you know it's generous enough for lots of episodes/chapters, it makes planning for brands at once consistent and liberating. It becomes, "Where should the story go now, based on what we know we need to achieve".

It's only one way of doing it, but it seems to help me. Have a go, see what you think.

 

For the doers

Like I've said before, we're all good at something and we should respect and celebrate that, or in another way, those that do things we can't, or don't want to. When I worked on Morrisons I had to spend some time working a checkout and failed miserably, checkout people make it look very, very, easy. There's a world tiddly winks champion, and good for him, he's spent thousands of hours getting that good.

This goes for agencies, where the culture seems to celebrate the big names, the thinkers and the ideas people. On one hand, take away the junior suits who organise the meetings for other people who have to be cajoled, bullied and coaxed into meeting rooms, who do the contact reports and oil the whole client relationship where it really matters, the bread and butter day to day. A background as a suit make's me quite organised for a planner, but I pale next my ghd team, they love the jobs I hate and make it look so easy.

Think about the real doers, traffic, the studio, the buildings manager, production, TV department...accounts who make sure we're payed, dreaded HR who sort out pensions for us. No none talks about them, says thanks, or says hi enough.They should, without them we'd fall apart.

When you start in an agency, make sure you get to know the junior suits, creatives and clients really well, they're the ones that make things happen. But if you really want to know how a place works, if you really want to get things done, make friends with the real doers..traffic, productions, buildings managers and, of course, the receptionists and PA's. These (usually girls) know EVERYTHING, and can do lots of little things for you..the battle for rooms, the battle for their masters'/mistress' time, and lots of supposedly little things that matter a great deal.

Here's to the doers...ideas are nothing without them to see them through.

You cannot paper over cracks in thinking

When I used to swim I was lucky to have a coach who forced us to refine constantly refine our strokes. it felt like being trapped in a mind clamp of boredom,  I just wanted to pelt up and down the pool...he had us doing endless drills, not to mention repeating tumble turns and the use of arm paddles that melted your muscles like warm Nutella. But he did me a big favour. One that applies to planning as well as swimming.

I won races against bigger and stronger boys in the last few metres as their strokes fell apart. While strength and energy glossed over the, sometimes miniscule, flaws at the start, those little wrinkles in technique became too much. Strategy is a bit like that you know.

Maybe you've written a brief that sings, full of drama and inspiration, there's just a little nagging doubt,something just isn't quite right. There's the creative review where the work leaves you buzzing, but at the core, something doesn't feel quite right, it's nothing major, it'll be fine, it's interesting enough to gloss over that anyway.

But like the boys with the slightly flawed strokes, the further you go, the louder those quiet little cracks sing. 

Hopefully someone in the team will bring this up, but to be honest, you're the planner, it's your job to make sure the thinking's water tight.

Now imagine you've let it lie. You're doing concept testing, the client's there, whole team's there, and it unravels. Or it gets to presentation to the board, and they rip your client to shreds.

And who will get the kicking? You will. You're the strategist, you should have pointed it out.

A little patience at the level of the brief, or a little bit of unpopularity when you play the logic card at the review really is worth it in the end.