NORTHERN PLANNER

I hate Mondays. They start slowly for me and rev up as the day goes on. Thanks to a badly argued article in this month’s Adline, today is different.

If you work in a UK agency outside of London you’ll have heard of Adline. If you don’t, it’s the trade magazine for agencies that never get in Campaign Magazine because they’re outside London.

  There was an article this month on ‘integration’. Sue Little of McCan Erickson was describing it as a ‘new trend’. Hello? We’re way past this are we not? There I thought agency folk had ‘got the integration thing’  ages ago. I just assumed they were busy worrying about co-creation, branded content and the whole ‘Is TV dying?’ thing.

Outside of London, clients tend to be wee bit smaller and expect you to do more than just one thing as a matter of course, so what’s the big deal. Shouldn’t this be second nature now?

The bit that really got me going was the way she talked about encouraging specialists to understand other disciplines more. Why?

If someone lives and breathes direct, PR or SEO, why dilute their skills? If we end up with a world of generalists, we’ll be okay at lots of stuff and great at nothing. What matters is someone, not everyone, at the core to make sure that the briefs the specialists get works as part of a wider whole. I think I’m talking about planners.

Sure, they’ll be specialist planners still; advertising planners, DM planners and stuff, but more and more, planners will be the generalists at the heart of campaign planning. If people like Sue Little don’t cotton on to this soon, there will be no need to worry about re-training specialists, clients will have their own in-house planning function after giving up waiting for agencies to sort themselves out.