NORTHERN PLANNER

Don't believe the hype.

No one knows what they're doing in this industry. That Global CEO who looks like they have got their shit together? Not a clue. Not a scooby.

Seriously, the more senior you get, the better you get at making folks believe you know what you're doing.

Just like the bigger and more venerable the agency, or even client, the more skilled they've become at inventing rules and practices to make it look easy and predictable.

It's not. Advertising and marketing are just parts of the wider discipline of business and economics. Now you find me an economist who looks like they know what they're doing.

Read Why Things Fail if you don't believe me.

Most brand launches fail.

Most ad campaigns are, at best solid. Most don't get entered into IPA Effectiveness Awards. And yet the IPA Databank is venerated as some kind of list of Golden Rules. Simply, it's another way to look like we all know what we're doing.

The great Paul Feldwick wrote a book on how advertising works. The conclusion? Sometimes it works in one way, sometimes it works another way.

That's why, for an industry built on ideas and new thinking, we're horribly conservative. No one wants the apple cart upset, you know, look like the rules and guidelines are great, when everyone works in chaos and then makes it fit the accepted wisdom.

You might think this is dispiriting.

You shouldn't.

Byron Sharpe kind of helps, but even there. the data often looks to fit the argument. The great disruption is beginning to turn into accepted received wisdom………we all need a story to sell after all.

So yes, TV is dead, or it isn't. Programmatic is not to trusted, or it is. Young people hate advertising, until they do. Media agencies are going to be extinct when robots take over.

The reality right now is people know what's going on less than ever.

Which means every person working in this industry has the chance to invent the future. In fact, no they don't. They have the chance to do what the hell they like.

The role of planning folk was never be the voice of the consumer really, it certainly isn't now there are more kinds of planners then there are grains of sand in the Sahara Desert. It was, and is, to get the best ideas out of others and make those ideas palatable and seem predictable to client partners.

Because, Back to that Why Things Fail book. The best chance of avoiding extinction is to continually innovate – but as a rule, perhaps you should ignore that too!

In other words we're all planners now.Who's have thought that?