NORTHERN PLANNER

The Edge Questionnaire asked in 2006, 'What is your dangerous idea?'. Something dangerous not because it's false, but because it might be true. It was posed to the worlds best thinkers, ergo not to the likes of me. Nevertheless, here's some dangerous ideas, not completely things I've thought of (as if!) but things I think about don't always say in certain company. What are yours? 

1. The world would be better run by women. They have a natural impulse to navigate life through building relationships, empathy and strengthening connections, rather than the male imperative for hierarchy and winning.

2. Fashion is good thing. It isn't a way to con women (or men for that matter) into feeling bad about themselves by spending a fortune on unattainable images, it's a source of profound pleasure and adventure, an escape from the humdrum of everyday life.

3. It just isn't possible for every to eat organic, free range, non-GM pure, fresh locally sourced food. Without mass production and science, even more people would go hungry than now. Either we turn back the clock, going back to much smaller populations living like they did decades ago or we look to strike a correct balance between nature and science.

4. Advertising in a paid for space is still the most effective way to persuade lots of people to become loyal to a brand. Brands are not important enough in our lives to make us want to spend lots of time with them.

5. It's true that old style advertising dinosaurs could learn a thing or two from the digital brigade, but that goes the other way too. 25years ago, ad agencies made a fortune because clients didn't really know what they did. It was easy too thanks to the hegemony of ITV. It's like that now with digital. There are some brilliant practitioners our there, who graft at finding good ideas that will work. Then there are the charlatans that blind others with jargon and get away with murder. For now, others don't quite understand the technicalities of what they do, but when they catch up, things will change.

6. Every agency and client should do a job swap once a year. Both would respect each other more for doing something the other cannot and wouldn't want to. The agency people be refreshed from the short hours, but glad to escape the boredom. The client would come back to the dayjob shattered, glad to escape the relentless pace and chaos, really pissed off at cancelling things at someone else's whim. The agency people would then appreciate that the client has their own internal clients and has to justify everything they do. The client people would be a little more patient, take more care to ask for what they actually want and less inclined to make impossible demands.