Northern Planner

Humanity is your superpower

These trainers have been re-released and I got them in a flash.

To you they look like a pair of 90s tennis shoes with too much pink.

To me, they are being 15 and rebelling against the ridiculous rules, complacency and 'does your face fit' mentality if British tennis clubs in the 1990s. 

 

This is my favourite ad ever. Not because it's good or bad. It simply spoke to me at a critical point in my life.

(out of interest, this is what gets missed when we debate the commercial sense in targeting young people. If you can become part of them working out who they are, you have a chance of staying with them for life. Unless you can find moments of transition and change - I venture Porsche should relentlessly target men and women who have the year 9 in their birthday - we re-evaluate EVERYTHING at the start of each new decade. I'd love someone like Porsche to target the partner of a car enthusiast and tell them a sports car is better than an affair!)

Nike didn't just build amazing ads and stuff back in the day, they built layers and layers of meaning, getting to the real of truth of sport for most people.

In tennis, globally, the establishment ruled and players like Agassi and McEnroe were anything but that - and teenagers like me bloody loved it.

Now Nike has moved on to build new meaning by tapping into the new young belief in equality -another cultural flashpoint in the deep truth that sport is the ultimate leveller. 

Most sport is really pretending to something your not - or letting a part of you out that is usually buried come out.

When I was a pretty good swimmer, racing all over the world, I may have been a clumsy, shy awkward teenager, but in the pool, I could feel my strength and power and the sheer joy of doing something most people couldn't do. I gave me confidence that began to carry over into my real life. 

When I played tennis, I competed in local matches, but it was all fantasy, I lived for the few moments I could make a running passing shot and feel like Agassi - and the feeling of being a rebel in a world of constriction. I didn't matter if I lost matches, I lived for few moments when the fantasy became real. 

When I cycle now, I ride very, very fast and put myself through all sorts if pain, because I want the feeling I used to get from swimming. To escape and feel something in a jaded world - it still brings confidence in the real world for a person who is still shy and doesn't really know what he's doing. 

Of course there is tension in this, I feel something far more profound when I allow myself to forget the world and spend time with my children - but most parents won't admit that being able to love your kids to the fullest, means being able to express other parts of who you are too. 

Nike got stuff like this in the 80s and 90s, while Adidas just made ads. 

In other words, they found their very human voice and found a way to move people.

This is what gets lost in How Brands Grow. It's fair to say that most people can't describe the brands they buy - but I can't describe why I love Joni Mitchell, and I hate Queen. Not really. It's how they make me feel, and we remember how we feel a lot longer that what we are told.

Nike's work cut deep. Adidas doesn't feel right. Never will. 

Because emotion and body language evolved millions of years earlier than speech - and always wins.

That's why culture always beats marketing. Culture is life. Marketing is commerce. 

I'm saying that Nike simply managed to be more human and got the HUMAN truth of the role of sport in our lives. 

It's that easy and that hard. 

What the difference between McEnroe and Federer can teach people in agencies

I watched a BBC documentary on John McEnroe. I quite liked it, since I love tennis and I grew in a time when tennis players were as big as rock stars. Connors, Borg, Becker, Agassi and so on.

It has quite a lot to say about agencies and people in them to be honest. About the supposed truth that you can't have brilliant people who are easy to work with. 

Because at the heart of the story was the tension between McEnroe's outrageous talent and his unpredictable temperament.

When he was great, he was stellar, when he was bad be was awful - and sometimes he destroyed himself in games he was winning.

Agassi and Becker are other examples of this. Players who, when on song, their tennis was like poetry.

But their talent was such, they should have won far more than they did.

Some say without waywardness let loose, they would never have won at all, and certainly not in the magical way they did.

And let's be honest, we remember these players, while mostly never talking about Lendl or Sampras.

But I don't accept accept it has to be one or the other.

Step forward Federer, Nadal, Borg. Legends, who let their racket do the talking. It's just that when their rackets spoke, it was Proust or Hemingway (or in Nadal's case, something more brutal)

And you may not know that Federer and Borg were badly behaved, temperamental young players who learned to channel, focus, their emotions into playing.

It was at this moment they started winning. 

There's a deep truth in psychology that rarely gets discussed. Anger is a good thing, it delivers energy to help you fix what's creating the problem. Not by venting on someone, or throwing yourself into a furious run or whatever, because the problem will only come back. 

Anger is great to fuel you dealing with a problem, changing things. Using the rage for positive action. 

You can see where I'm going with this can't you?

Letting 'characters' in agencies rule the roost.

Making it OK for outrageous talent to treat others like dirt.

Excusing agencies who are sporadically amazing for their duds. 

By all means, celebrate the bonkers brilliance of the agencies that tend to make the headlines.

Or the kind if work that get's into Campaign.

But you know you just did really well at Cannes this year? AMV. An agency who manage to be big, solid and totally brilliant. Founded by nice men who believed a company could be great at it's work while being great to work there.

They will dealt with the same stuff the rest of us do. Bad briefs, budgets getting cut, client's not buying great work. The fact your in service industry and your fate is the whim of others.

It's no use being brilliant some of the time.

No amount of talent excuses anyone being a dick.

Put another way, the problem with supernovas is that they burn out very quickly - and when they explode, destroy all around them.

 

 

 

The best planners are invisible - but indispensable

You know that quote from The Usual Suspects? The greatest trick the devil pulled off was convincing the world he didn't exist?

It's also one of the greatest skills of strategy types. Few creatives will work with your thinking, certainly not your ideas, if you're going to take credit for them. 

It's the same with clients to a certain degree. They love having planners around, for extra advice, stimulus and stuff. But they then need to pass your thinking off as your own. 

It takes a genuine removal of ego on your part and years of practise, to the point where people struggle to work out what you do, they just know that when you're around everything works better.

In other words, great strategy types are like waiters, or kettles. You only notice then when they're not doing their job well.

I'm convinced it's why we have the conversation over and over again, about the role for planners and strategy types in agencies and client relationships.

We've done too good a job at getting our thinking through by making people believe it was their idea.

Of course, this presents a problem that goes to the heart of good FMCG brands too. If you become too good at getting people to use you without thinking too hard about it, that habit is easy for shiny new folks to disrupt.

For a great shampoo brand, it's easy to lose share to someone else with a new sciency promise, or maybe in this day and age, an aromatherapy wellbeing fragrance thing (I do think that Herbal Essences are missing a trick building on their 'orgasm in a shower' base to more, wholesome, experiences that go deeper than hair). 

For a strategist, there is the threat of management consultancies, brand consultancies or some big data whiz. Or even the account directors actually thinking they can do the job, rather than looking like they can thanks to your generosity. 

Which means, like brands, you have to tread a fine line between helping people not to think too hard.

While constantly, well, refreshing memory structures (to quote good old Byron Sharpe). Getting folks excited about what you do, showing some leg now and again.

ANNNNNND 'removing reasons not to buy'. Doing data better than the data folks, but with intelligence rather than cleverness for example. Simplifying the guff around Alexa into an actionable pros and cons for clients. 

I'm saying that while you need resolve the tension between the need to be invisible and not taken for granted. The greatest trick you can pull is being modestly indispensable in the areas worrying your agency and client the most.

Prepare and present an e-commerce strategy to your FMCG client before Amazon does.

Help agency build expertise in marketing to people over 40, while the market chases Gen Z who don't have any money.

You get the idea.