NORTHERN PLANNER

I realised the other week how much my job doesn't consist of talking about advertising. By advertising, I of course don't mean the old fashioned 'above the line' thing, just ways of making people want the thing your selling. But whatever you want to call it, planners don't do a right lot of it next to all the other things.

'All the other things' will vary, depending where you work of course, but amidst commissioning, managing or doing research – groups, quant, ethnography, TGI runs, desk research etc etc, analyzing data, preparing and running workshops, strategy presentations and a whole lot more, writing creative briefs and doing creative briefings, attending creative reviews and tracking meetings don't make up the bulk of our time.

I suspect most of us like talking about the actual work though, I know I do. So, to vent that particular spleen, I'm going to do more of that here.

Not in that dreadful, self serving way they doing in Campaign Review. A trick to get better at thinking about strategy for new work is to look at stuff that's been made and 'work backwards'. Try and think about what the strategy was, what the brief might have been. It worked for me back in the day and seems to be useful in training bits and bobs.

So I'm going to do a bit of that, look at stuff I find interesting (not necessarily like) and write about what I think they're trying to do and why. Hopefully that will be a bit constructive. Hopefully, if anyone thinks I'm wrong, they'll quickly set me straight.