NORTHERN PLANNER

I’m not sure we’re going to cover everything, but I’m doing my best. Next on the list is integration.

Now to be honest, it’s nothing new. If you work in the UK and not in London, it’s sort of second nature. In fact, it’s not really new there either. It’s just that every generation thinks it’s discovered it, like music.

That said, plenty of people will be used to working in the single minded, reductionist process that forms traditional advertising – or at least advertising led. That’s not going to last much longer thanks to the new web enabled, marketing savvy consumer emerging. Much of the talk you’ll see in Campaign are the death rattles of the traditional ad agencies looking for a way to survive.

But honestly, it’s not that hard. Instead of doing the ads and shoehorning the rest of the stuff in, or at best working like this:

You want to be working like this:

Get a really good idea first, then decide where to put it. Put together a team of who are good in their respective fields and work together – and that includes the media people. And this is where the planner really comes in – your the person who can pull all this together, have your brain in lots of camps and make the team work. It may be that once you have a good idea, it’s then briefed out to specialist executors- especially if the team is a team of different agencies, that’s up to you, but the idea you have needs to flexible and rich enough to work in lots of different media. That’s very different to a single minded proposition.

Adliterate calls them generous ideas, and that’s a good a name as any. Think of them as tasks or call to action:

Make the reliability of the Civic desirable rather than dull

Make beards uncool

Yorkie will turn its heritage as the truck drivers chocolate into a celebration of modern blokiness

DFS will re-educate people who choose sofas for style rather than comfort

Ikea will defend their customers from the style police telling them what to like

Persil will enable children to play as hard as they want

…….You get the idea. Much richer, more flexible than the traditional proposition. A useful test would be seeing if you can get an idea for a poster, DM, website, TV and maybe even some staff blogs from it. If you can’t, why should anyone else?

Of course that’s not easy, and different people will get there in different ways. Here’s one way of framing your thinking. Here are seven key questions to try to answer:

And consider that different disciplines will have different ways of briefing:

And maybe digital briefing should be a bit more about the user journey and the experience you want people to have……..

And like most strategy, the ideas will come from a pivotal observation that marries the brand, the audience and the market. Much of that is covered here.

It means getting some rich insight from your audience, or a meaty problem that your client needs to solve from themselves. Find a rich, core need to focus on. Something that fills a gap in their life, as opposed to a product sized hole. Look at the market at the same time and make sure no one is filling this gap – it will make your idea disruptive, it will make it lead, it will make it interesting. Rob Campbell talks about looking at real people’s emotional logic of the category.

And a good way to get there is laddering. Quite simply, keep asking why, Like this:

Or this:

That gets you to something meaty and interesting. But a word of warning – don’t slavishly play back an insight to your audience unless there’s a way to connect it to your brand and what it does/could do for people. It needs to be usable. You don’t want creatives or partner agencies saying, "Wow, that’s a great discovery, but how the hell are we supposed to use that?".

And don’t forget, there may be more than one audience. Take UK television licensing and students. Students need their own television license, but not enough know and get hit with fines. The year before the kid goes, parents sort things out for them and have lots of influence, so it makes sense to target them. But once the child is there, Mum and Dad get ignored and you have to target them direct. The maximum effect will be from doing both campaigns simultaneously.

Once you’ve got your idea, it doesn’t stop there. You and the team have to decide the most appropriate places to put your work. And let the media planning giants do all that opportunities to see stuff, you can do something far more useful. Give the kind of people your looking for a digital camera for day and get them to a diary of what they were doing. Look for relevant events and frames of mind.

Where and when can you best connect?

What, and when are the key events relevant to what you want to achieve?

Who and where are the editor brands?

When is awareness important? When is involvement the key?

Is there a mood or association we can tap into?

What’s the decision making process? Where does out strategy fit in?

What’s the web of influence?

And that’s just about it. Like I said, I don’t think it’s any harder than being a specialist, it takes some practice to think in a slightly different way but that’s it. In the end, I find it comes down to connecting the real lives around the category to a truth about the brand and the market.

Something long term, something rich. Imagine you’re pitching for a TV series instead of a campaign. Like Heroes is what would happen is people got superpowers in the real world, not comic book land, or Buffy is horror meets high school drama. That kind of thing.

Hope this is useful.