NORTHERN PLANNER

Peer beneath the hyped up claims and overcooked proprietary processes of creative agencies and you soon discover they are all variations of the same thing – creative thinking that generates business success. Of course that's mostly about creative work, but at their best, agencies supply creative thinking that goes much deeper into the business, into NPD and distribution for example.

Look at that phrase again….creative thinking that generates business success. Put crudely, you'll find that the 'creative thinking' bit is the creative department and the 'generating business success' is planning. Naturally it's more blurred than that, a big chunk of creative thinking needs to be done way before it's condensed into a creative brief, and not just by planners, but you get the point.

But look at the amount of people agencies employ who actually DO that. In any agency I've worked at, and 90% of those I've worked with, account handlers outnumber the creative department by at least two to one and the planners by at least twenty to one.

In other words, agencies may claim they exist to create business transforming creative ideas, but in reality, most of the people at best enforce a linear, methodical production line, or at worse 'get the client the work they want'. Yet a read of this book will quickly dispel the myth that great ideas come from a production line process, or specialists working in silos, while we've all met suits who do their best to put a stopper on any idea that's beyond the first page as they try and second guess the client.

Put simply, most creative agencies have a system that is best suited to churn out average work and gets in the way of the extraordinary stuff that can cut through the clutter of popular culture or indeed, the client culture.

I'm not saying 'kill the suit' of course. Without someone to bring sanity to bedlam, deal with those client situations and keep and eye on the budget, nothing would get done or no one would make any money from it. But there needs to be a re balance between the people who contribute to making stuff and those who make sure they're making stuff.

That's why I find Mother so interesting for example, where there are no suits, but traffic gets stuff done, strategy make stuff work and creative makes stuff great – and all have client facing responsibility.

One of the most enjoyable and interesting times I had was working in direct partnership witj a creative, why not follow this model, and maybe add a technologist in this digital age? Or even a comms planner?

More so than ever, agencies need to focus on business building IDEAS, not 'selling a process'. Let's hope more and more re-organise to make this happen.