NORTHERN PLANNER

Had to go to Geneva for a couple of days last week, for something or other. I was quite shocked to find that Mel travel bag was smaller than mine. Poses a big question about my masculinity no?

Always good to go travelling with a suit, you don’t have to organise a thing. Mel was like a big sister, herding me in the right direction and feeding me when appropriate.

It’s important to stress the big sister thing since the hotel booking was cocked up and we had to share a hotel room. The bathroom co-ordination was meticulous, and yes, there were seperate beds.

We, of course, worked very hard with no time for frivolity. Notice the painting in this airport cafe to give an authentic chalet feel.

All the entries are in, looks like people have worked very hard.

Results and feedback will appear two weeks today (3rd November). Helping on the judging will be Steve Groves, one of the account directors here. Good to get a suit perspective for a change.

Steve takes a dim view of planners – as far as he’s concerned, account directors should be able to do strategy, if not they’re just bag carriers that are good at making people like them. In his case he has a point, it’s very hard to tell Steve something he doesn’t know about the clients he works on.

Expect some honest, but constructive, feedback. Naturally we’ll be doing the judging over a pot that has been properly warmed.

The very first patent for a typewriter was given out in the 1860’s for QWERTY keyboard. It was specifically designed to make people type slowly, ensuring the commonest letters were scattered around the left hand side to confound the majority of right handers.  thus avoiding keys jamming by being too quickly. It became so entrenched that the computer keyboard layout is pretty much the same.

We tend to think that technological progress follows logical, well thought out directions when things nothing to do with usefulness and purpose influence how things are designed and how they get used.

On the other hand, texting was never designed to be the massive success in messaging it has. Users showed designers its real worth. The best ideas rarely survive contact with the real world.

That’s worth thinking about next time you insists that an ad needs to have just one ‘verbal message’ or look at what advertising to get advertising inspiration.

Agencies are amazingly conservative for ‘ideas companies’. Most practices have kind of ’emerged’ – we just assume we’re doing the right thing.

Here’s a last thought – apparently aeronautical engineers have calculated that an aircraft with one wing swept back and the other swept forward would actually be better than conventional bilateral wings. Imagine the faces of passengers getting on that plane……….

So I was at the IPA Fast Strategy conference last week. Like others, I had and have my doubts on  the merits of this. The best ideas tend to emerge over time, you need space to not think about something etc.

BUT we, and most certainly I, live in a world where out time is always being squeezed. Like or not, we’re all under pressure to work quick more often than we would like.

Anyway, it’s always good to go to a do that’s going to be attended by planners and here people you admire talk about what they do.

So it’s no wonder that possibly the biggest highlight of my day was talking to other attendees. Planners are great.

The plan for the day was a series of speakers talking about how they think quickly.

Adam Morgan, Founder, Eat Big Fish

Rita Clifton, Chairman, Interbrand

Orlando Hooper-Greenhill, Director of Global Planning, JWT

Richard Storey, Chief Strategy Officer, M&C Saatchi

Sarah Bussey, Strategic Planning Consultant, IPA

Jeremy Griffin, Head of News, TimesOnline

And a series of teams were given a Honda brief and three hours to do some thinking before presenting to the delegates.

I’ll spare you a blow by blow account and stick to the main points:

1. Don’t be too clever by half. The teams that presented the Honda work back hadn’t resisted overcomplicating their ideas. Each had a strong core that seemed to be muddied by thinking too much. Except the team that was creative only.
2. Presenting with passion is at least as important as being right. Kate Stanners could convince you anything (and not just because she’s fit).
3. Most of the points about being quick seemed to really be about being good. You cannot avoud doing things properly, and cutting corners just makes things longer and harder when the house of cards falls down.
4. Be generous – don’t lock yourself in a room mind mapping and worrying, get the team together, make sure it’s a team that has both strategists and executors in, and hopefully media too and facilitate conversation. You may have a great thought, but the ability to spot when someone else has is even more precious. And the more conversation, the better chance of someone hitting on something.
5. Be sure you know you’re doing strategy and not tactics. Both are valid, but are you really doing strategy?
6. You must develop a natural curiosity – collect as much stimulus as you can, always be looking for interesting stuff, the more stuff you have on the shelf, the easier it is to pick something off it when the time comes.
7. Know when to move. Don’t waste time making something shinily perfect, but don’t go off half cocked either.
8. Conflict tends to drive brands forward, a brand narrative usually has a brand v something; Honda V Complacency, Lurpak v needless complexity, ghd v what God gave you. Creating a monster for your brand to be St George against can be a great focus. It doesn’t, and maybe shouldn’t be, something within the category – but find something that will turn your brand enemies into monsters, something big, cultural and compelling. This is a neat trick to turn potentially bloated number one into a challenging brand of the people. Dove has made the beauty industry into a compelling monster, Apple made conformity into a 1984 scale monster, Levis is all youthful rebellion against hyocritical grown up values (I think), The Coke Side of Life makes a monster out of avarice and owning stuff (supposedly).
9. Brand consultatcies talk a good game. That said, Rita Clifton did make a good point about brand strategy – look at the spectrum of what to be about – what you do, how you do it, what what we do does for people, or a big cause and choose which one, and only that one to be about.
10. Don’t lose sleep about being brilliant, be right and enable creatives to be brilliant.
11. Find the real blockage, the real barrier and don’t believe the excuses people make in research. People claim to have no time for example,  when they actually are greedy about trying to do too much.
12. Admire your audience. If you’re target is Sun readers, it’s easy for a spoilt agency type to patronise them. Even if you’re target is an investment banker, make yourself like them – it’s really hard to get under the skin of someone if you can’t respect them first.
13. Plan from within – find something you know that’s utterly true, but kind of didn’t know it, or it just hasn’t been talked about it this category. Look at comedy, most things are funny because they’re true. Peep Show reminds me that the the things we say and do are rarely the same as the the things we’re thinking. Male friends constantly bicker etc.
14. Be careful of ‘fat words’ that mean everything and nothing at the same time. Quality, trust, care are useless strategic words.
15. Pretend you were in another category – what would you do?
16. Something written down on  pad might not look that goodm write it up, tidy up and you’ll be amazed at how much better it can look.
17. Keep your arse on the seat. Don’t take lots of coffee breaks, break of to do something else for a bit. Get into a ‘flow’ state of mind – that wierd trance like state where you ‘re lost in what you’re doing. Most athletes don’t remember the game or the race, most artists find it hard to describe how they fo about making art – I suspect most planners find it hard to describe how they ‘plan’. I bet it’s for this reason.
18. Talk to anyone. I talk too much, I waffle,  I have about three people that let me talk at them and then tell me what I’ve just said. And somehow it all comes together.
19. Think about removing the enemy’s centre of gravity. What is their strength, how will you disarm it? That might be a competitor, it might be a cultural thing.
20. Turn an objective into a challenge. Selling  10,000 hybrid cars is an objective, reducing UK emissions by 5% is challenge, convincing credit crunched family car drivers that a Hybrid is more reliable is a challenge.

Hope all that helps. It was a good day. 

I’ve bashed this out quick, don’t have a go at spelling and stuff.

You may have seen me get into a little local trouble a short while ago, over a badly written post about different agency departments being, well, different. I was glad when all that blew over….

Then I read this post. Or, to be more specific, the comments. Obviously memories are long, assuming it’s to do with that long gone incident. On the other hand, maybe it’s nothing to do with that, maybe someone has just decided to be like that based on, well, who knows?

Serves me right I guess, if someone decides to put themselves out there, they can’t expect everyone to be nice, and one should learn to not take things personally.

But that’s the thing about online stuff, it’s still about people. The groups may be bigger, but the meaning of the words we use don’t change. Maybe I should learn to not follow the links, but once you’ve read something, you can’t take it back.

Now, I’m not just getting silly over comments on someone else’s blog, from some smart arse I’ve never met. I’ve been thinking about this ever since ‘the incident’.

Suddenly I find myself looking over my shoulder when I’m posting. That means shying away from opinions and the personal, in favour of posts about pure planning craft. Or maybe the reverse, maybe it’s time to do something else. I still think someone needs to speak up for rigor and doing things properly, but it’s a bit one dimensional if that’s it.

Anyway, that’s  a long winded way of saying that, for now anyway, you only see posts about planning and not much else. I’ll be working out what I want to do. Maybe that’s a good thing, there’s nothing more boring than someone talking about themselves is there?