NORTHERN PLANNER

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.