NORTHERN PLANNER

What kind of planner are you? Brand planner? Engagement planner? Digital planner? Content planner? I'm not sure which one I am and to be honest when I started out (which wasn't that long ago) I was just an account planner. The only other kind of planner out there was a media planner.

I still think I'm just an account planner – which means most of what I do is develop brand ideas – very long term strategy –  and communications ideas, which basically means what do this year, this quarter and this week. Sometimes I've been lucky enough to get involved in NPD and stuff, which is happening more as it become part of marketing rather than marketing making sense something another department made, but that's another story.

By and large, I help create ideas rather than where the idea need to go. More and more, that's been ideas BEFORE deciding where to show up,rather than 'the answer's advertising, what's the question?' But transmedia planning isn't a theory, it's a reality. Ideas as narrative etc become essential but you can't escape having to bake in ideas about engagement into the creative process and vice versa.

In my opinion, no planner can do both the creative planning and the engagement – they might have the talent but no one has the sheer time and mental space to do both really well. From my point of view, I need to work with someone who can do the engagement bit as soon as possible.

So if there's a engagement planner to work with, work as a team from the start. The best work from the APG awards this last year were as much about context and the right place to show up as they were about creative execution. What drove the case study for Axe's Wake Up Call was the realisation that young males use their phone as an alarm clock, which provided a great place to show up in the morning routine – where usage of Axe was low, for example. What drove Nokia's 'Someone else's phone' idea was the two observations that for young people a phone is an integral is their keys and they live their lives through them.

Most of us are not lucky enough to have engagement planners to work with, but there will be media planners your client uses. Collaborate as soon as possible. They may want to do more obvious, traditional stuff, but less and less these days. They have all sorts of data you won't have – work with them and develop joint ideas rather than 'the creative bit and the media bit'. And from my point of view, media agencies are trying to do creative. Most of it is laughable, but watch out nevertheless.

So, call yourself what you like, but really you either do planning for creative ideas or for engagement ideas.Which one do you want to be? Whichever that might be, learn to love the other side that does what you cannot.