NORTHERN PLANNER

I quite like that Vodafone line,it certainly applies to one or two accounts I’ve worked in in the past.

If you’ve ever worked on a housebuilding account, you’ll probably be glad you don’t anymore. Same work, week in week out, same old dull site visits, just change the price on that ad this week and so on. I did it a few years ago as an account manager, but you know what? It wasn’t half bad. Like most retail stuff, or small briefs, you need to take the opportunities when they come. Here’s why I’m glad I worked on a homebuilder.

1. Speed

You learn speed. Homebuilding works from week to week, changes happen at drop of a hat. You learn to be adaptable, and you learn to work very quickly. We did TV, DM, websites radio, the lot. I’ve never worked on such a mix of media in so little time. or learned as much.

2 CV

There’s at least one new ad a week to develop. You can either recycle what you’ve done elsewhere, or you can work hard at finding something new for a creative brief. Doing this week in week out is very,very hard, but it’s wonderful practise if you’ve any leanings to being a planner one day, with loads of great thinking to talk about when you’re ready to do something else.

3. Strategy

Every housing developement is different, but most are marketed the same. You cannot get away from location and price, but there is always something –  better for schools, there may be a history to the area, sometimes it’s the kind of people who will live there. Below is a rough of something that ran in Manchester, amidst loads of amazingly shot, stylish ads, it was aimed at under 25’s and it worked a treat. We could have just done a normal location ad..

4. Inventiveness

Art direction rules and copy styles tend to be very rigid, so you can make all the ads accross all the developments consistent. Working within narrow guidelines is far more challenging than a blank canvas.

5. Craft

Learning some craft.  You get to work very closely with the studio and art directors, usually both in front of a mac while the papers scream down the phone for copy. It’s great to get a feel for art direction and how macs work.

6. Relationships

The studio is your lifeline (which is often forgotten), you find out what makes them tick very quickly. As for creatives, they dread homebuilding briefs. If you can get them interested in this, selling briefs in later life will be a doddle. They’ll also love you for trying and let you into their world (bribery works too though).

7. Being useful

Client meetings are not easy. There’s the sales team, the media agency and the PR people. You learn to only talk if you’ve something useful to say, and you learn to suggest, not state. Useful for a planner who’s only there to be useful.

8. Campaign planning

More and more, developers have to sell houses without a showhome. You can either roll with all this and change from week to week, or you can develop a plan for each site, based around key events, like showhome preview, introductory prices and even drumming awarnessin the local gymn. Wonderful practise for channel planning and doing what’s right for right now.

So there you go. If you’re on one of these, chin up and take you chances when they come.