NORTHERN PLANNER

You may know I love cycling, I’m a MAMIL (middle aged man in lycra)

To the eternal dismay of the people I live with, I also watch it

Tell you what, it’s in a bit of a golden age

After years of the likes of Team Sky grinding other teams down

With one boring strategy.

Death Star teams winning through a repeated formula

There’s a new breed of racer now who wins with panache

You don’t know what they’ll do next

They can win in all sorts of situations

And the old-style big teams can’t beat them because they can only win one way

To misquote Princess Leia

The more they tighten their grip, the more races slip through their fingers

It’s like that for brands and agencies now

The more they tighten their grip, the more buyers slip through their fingers

Now it’s getting harder and bludgeon folks with pre-tested TV

We need more acts, less ads to avoid being filtered out

As PR content, experience and digital become core, not an afterthought

Brands need an in-house writer’s room more than an in house studio

The dinosaurs look at the likes of Liquid Death

And think, yeah, it’s easy when you’re a challenger

Yet the only thing more obvious than agencies quoting Bryon Sharpe

Is quoting Nike, who’ve worked this way for years

It’s why you should take the likes of the IPA databank with a pinch of salt

It’s aggregates average – and follows the agenda of ‘ads not acts’.

When there's never been a better time to find your voice, tell your story

Let the Death Star organisations still build marketing plans like it was the 80s

Let behemoth agencies develop crafted messaged no one cares about

Be one of the rebel strategists

In world where the Empire is trying to tighten its grip

All-rounders as good at PR as they are at broadcast

Good enough at performance AND brand to not need to reinforce a divide

With creative ideas ‘creatives’ hiding behind a mac can’t have

Media ideas media folks obsessed with reach and frequency miss

Less bothered about long term v short term

Obsessed with removing what’s in the way for clients

I’ve seen a lot of brands (bland) agencies

Still with a weird sense of lead agency entitlement

Who look down on the ‘not above the line’ folks

Trying to develop digital first, social work like they do 30 second commercials

They are easy to upstage, by simply just starting with real life, not just data

Real culture, not the second-hand stuff in social listening

Talking to real people, not AI

You don’t have to be an ethnographer, just a human

Able to have ideas people would actually thank you for making

Caring about real people, not personas

So, if you’re not an all-round planner, get some broader skills quick

Get more interesting work by being interested

Be more Rebel, less Empire