Okay, after looking things to work on BEFORE the presentation, time to consider what might happen DURING. It does get a bit mixed up though, since most of how it will go on the day depends on what happens before it. To start with, it’s paid off when I’ve found out as much about the…

There’s so much great advice out there on this subject, I wondered if it was really worth doing anything on this. If I were you, I’d look at Russell’s bits here and here if you haven’t already. So yes, there’s lots of brilliant stuff about how to go about making a presentation GREAT – but…

Confidence is very overated in my view. I saw a good example of this in the space of two days – in two very different presentations. The first was from an obviously nervous young lady. She stammered a lot, went bright pink whenever she spoke and even broke into a sweat. But she was brilliant.…

So you’ve written a good brief. Good, but unfortunately not great. The thing is, creatives remember great briefings, but they rarely remember the brief. The conversation is everything. The brief becomes a point of reference and nothing more. There’s loads of spiel about the the creative brief being the Holy Grail – the part that…

Following on from this and this, how do you write a creative brief? Plannerspheres got a good page on this by the way. Firstly, let’s get one thing straight. Most agencies have their own proprietary briefing document, with it’s own little twist, like BBH’s ‘brand DNA’ or the way JWT doesn’t have a proposition section,…

Okay, back to that to do list. On writing great briefs and doing great briefings. It’s focused on advertising led briefing – a bit unfashionable, but since it’d how most agencies still do it. and this is about basics, it’s a good place to start. We’ll move on to design and integrated ‘idea briefs’ later.…

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you know something’s the right thing to do, it doesn’t matter how compelling the evidence is, you have to show how it’s worked for something else. It’s a bit like that silly rule some clients have about only shortlisting agencies with experience in their category. It’s the ultimate planning…

I heard a great fact about expertise on Radio 4’s Front Row last night. Apparently, no matter how much talent you have, it takes 10,000 hours of practice and learning before you become a world class expert. Athletes, musicians, trapeze artists, philosophers – planners even. That’s why reading things like Adliterate, Scamp, Russell, Gareth, Rob…

Back to that list. Now in many cases, the agency will be chosen for you by the client. but not always. When it’s your job to hire the agency it’s not easy. There are LOTs, mostly competent, with similar costs. But they do vary. The best work with you as team, they listen to what…