NORTHERN PLANNER

One of the difference between new work and old work is that I won't be lead agency planner all the time, which was mostly the case before. Sometimes I will, sometimes I'll be part of an inter agency team, doing mostly the digital bit.

That means two things, which, come to think of it, stand for planning full stop. It's rare that an agency and it's planners work in isolation these days – even if you're leading comms planning, you're going to have to be generous to other client agencies and work together.

That means you have to both think big and think small. Sometimes you're thinking about the whole brand and having big ideas to pull everything else along, while other times you're thinking about how to execute someone else's big idea, or co-creating it with other planners.

That means being flexible and it also means there is no such thing as totally Generalist OR Specialist. It doesn't matter what you do, you need a knowledge and appreciation of how everything works.

One of the accusations I'd level at most digital specialists is that they don't know enough about how brands work, what the brand their working on is about or what their audience is interested in, or does.

On the other hand, too many traditional, lead planners have great ideas for advertising, but fail to consider how it would work elsewhere.

How you go about all this depends on how you thinks brands work, and the brand you work on- build brands built from lots of little ideas that pull in a general direction, or you can search for the big idea. Either way, you need to be generous to others and appreciate what they do.

So, top skill for digital people, but planners in general is leave out the intellectual posturing, surrender a bit of control and just get on with working together. And that IS commercial – you may lose a little share of budget, or adapt your own work to fit the collective etc, but that's better than clients losing patience and either firing the ones who refuse to play ball, or consolidating everything to get things done quicker.