NORTHERN PLANNER

You may have heard the phrase 'marginal gains'.

It's something folks in cycling use a lot, where you micro manage the detail, so lots of little changes add up to a whole lot of difference.

It's kind of like Pointillism of you like your metaphors – where the school of painting led by Pisarro etc created a style of painting where the imagery is created by painstakingly building up a series of dots (centuries before pixels).

I had this kind of thing going on when I was swimming, you would not believe the difference pointing your hand down, keeping it nice and stiff, makes when your hand enters the water on the freestyle stroke.

But it can work in reverse. I've had all sorts of problems in my knee after cycling thousands of miles with seat set forward about 10 mm too far. No impact over a few miles, but over the time, a little has become lot and the resulting left glute weakness (in relation to the right) has caused all sorts of problems. 10 mm, that's all.

Now, I'll talk to you about a little discussion I had with a creative over a press ad a few years back. I wouldn't back down over three minor points with the headline and the copy. Because it didn't make watertight sense.

The response I got was, "But people don't analyse ads the way we do, it doesn't matter". I was a bit shocked, as I have grown up with good creatives who pick up work, tear it to bits and shake it around until nothing loose falls out.

But anyway, he actually proved my point. People don't spend time with ads, if they don't feel right, they won't bother to work out why, they'll move on.

But I let it go. It was the first developed execution in a campaign. When they tried to work up the other scamps, they got into all sorts of mess, those little loose threads became gaping holes.

This is why best in class comms planning is essential. It's not good having amazing big ideas, if you haven't worked out what you need to do to bring them to life – the barriers to making it work, the key things that need to happen. Look at this to see what I mean http://www.slideshare.net/juliancole/what-is-comms-planning

It's why another way to get good ideas is to have lots of observations about things, then look for the links and try and recombine them. Ideas are really recombinations  of existing stuff. Big flashes of insight are hard, but hard work is actually easier.

I'm saying that big ideas are fine, but we should celebrate the people who make them actually work and make sure everything is watertight before we go too far.

Otherwise a little hole can become a gaping chasm.

I guess I'm saying the big ideas people are essential, but so are the details folk that br