NORTHERN PLANNER

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?

So it was the Northern at The Northern on Thursday night. Everyone turned up,along with a few new faces.

It was lovely to meet Sarah again, along with Ian who got my old job. Yet again, too little time to talk to everyone, but there you go.

It was particularly nice to see Young Mortimer and Andrea. David’s working with me on this and that, less than a year since he spent some time with me on work experience, while Andrea’s in her final year of study and on the hunt for work experience and her first job. You could do a lot worse than getting her in.

That’s right, the youngsters are coming. Feel comfy in your job? be ready to raise you game.

I was reviewing some European ads for something or other and noted how many brands claim to be for true individuals. It seems you can’t move for genuine one-offs in this continent.

At first glance, it sort of makes sense for these companies to behave like this, a cursory look at the data sees more people in Western Europe agreeing that personal taste is more important than fashion every year. I don’t buy this  totally though, it sounds like ‘the right answer’. No one would want to  admit being one of the herd thanks to the cultural pressure in the west to be indivuidual.

Anyway. as far as advertising and popular culture are concerned, there is nothing more obvious and common than individuality. Or so it would seem……..

I propose it’s not who you are that makes you different, it’s what you do. There’s the old cliche that each human is an original of the species – 0.1% different to everyone else. But reverse that -we’re 9.99% identical. Biologocally, most of us really iare not that special. Buying stuff won’t do it either, whatever wrapping you give yourself,in the end, you’re not that physically different to me.

What makes me different to you is what I’ve done. I have lived a different life to you. What I’ve experienced, what I’ve seen, what I’ve read, the good bits, the catastrophes – those are the things that make me who I am. And unless someone has experienced all these things in the same order, they’ll never be me and I’ll never be them.

Now this feels like territory for those brands stuck in bland individuality corner – give them experiences that are truly unique, not ‘stuff’.

It’s also pertinent for planners. We need to stand out as discipline – creatives and suits need to WANT us there. They got on quite well without us and can still if we’re not useful. You need to have experienced lots of stuff they haven’t. That means reading, doing and finding more. Of course, time is just an issue, but you’ll find a way. Just doing and reading the same as planners in other agencies means you’ll always come up with the same stuff. Be a one off through all those things that you’ve done.   

I think I’ve mentioned somewhere else that when you play a song you like to someone else you hear it through their ears. It’s something to do with mirror neurons firing.

It’s a useful trick for practicing presentations, knowing that work is really both right and good and generally avoiding any pitfalls.

It’s one thing to rehearse a presentation in your head, it’s quite another to do it to someone who has nothing to do with your project. Suddenly you can hear yourself from their point of view, you know which points are too long,too short, too fuzzy and simply not well though out.

Same goes for creative work. I watched someone in my team present some work that’s been months in development. Being on the receiving end of someone explaining everything, sitting with clients really made me objective by seeing it all from a totally different point of view. Thankfully it stood up, and we even saw ways of making it better that hadn’t been clear before.

So talk to someone, not just when you’re stuck, when you are totally sure. There’s nothing like having to explain yourself to see where you can make things better,

I did an internal session on creative briefing on Friday. You know –  how how to think about the various bits, top tips for writing one. Only to realise I was benefiting as much from this as anyone else.

A fair chunk of the advice I was giving I don’t always follow myself. I should.

That’s the good thing about trying to pass on what you’ve learned, it forces you to look at yourself a little bit harder. Bad habits can start as little chinks, eventually they can becoming gaping chasms.

It”s not that easy describing what you do instinctively, not just creative briefing or thinking about brands.Try describing how walking works, or how to ride a bike. But trying to get to the heart of best practice usually exposes how much you’ve strayed from the path.

By the way, top practical tips for writing a brief in a rush:

• The quickest way to describe your audience well is to read what they read. Devour their world intensely and it soon comes.
• Don’t stare at a blank page, just start. Fill out the section you can, you’ll soon find you’re writing too much and the excess belongs somewhere else – you’re on your way. If you start with target audience, it usually spills over into objective for example.
• Talk to someone. Maybe the creatives you’ll be briefing, someone a bit like the target audience, but anyone really. Most ideas come out of conversation. Have a chat.

It’s hard to pick a favourite ad, but this commercial from Nike is certainly up there. The ‘Hurt’ commercial will connect with anyone who’s ever been an athlete at any sort of level, and to be honest, anyone who’s pushed themselves to anything difficult. There is pain and sacrifice along the way.

And the feeling of loss or failure is far more intense than the moment when you win or succeed. I did this and that as a swimmer, but the things I remember the most are the failures.

I remember having a really bad year, but finally getting it together for the last big final before the Christmas break, only for my goggles to break. I remember getting a final stroke all wrong and coming second by a fingernail on a race I’d been preparing for all year. I remember winning big in America only to be disqualified on a rule I didn’t know they’d changed. And I remember training so hard I threw up.

I do remember the successes too, but the thing about wonderful  moments, apart from never being as intense as the pain,is that what you really remember is the build up. That’s true of most things. Christmas Day is never as good as getting ready for it. Is there a more intense feeling than preparing for an important date? The possibilities, the desperate wanting it to go right?

After meeting Mrs Northern for the first time I had a week to wait for the next date. I couldn’t sleep, could hardly eat, I just couldn’t stop thinking about her (the date was pretty good too).

I think that goes for work too. I both love and hate pitches. The feeling of not getting it can be more crushingly intense than the euphoria of winning.

But pitches or projects with clients you have, it’s great to see the work appear somewhere, but there’s also a feeling of loss, a bit like finishing a great book, a curry you don’t want to end or a great film. You realise that getting there was the good bit.

The end is not as fun as the start.

I think that goes for career ambition as well. Account Execs want to get promoted and stop having to write contact reports as soon as they can. Junior planners want to write some bigger briefs and be able to delegate more number crunching. Everyone is in danger of not appreciating the clients they have and going after newer, shinier, sexier ones.

Stop, take a second, live in the moment, take it in and appreciate where you are now. As a junior, you’ll never have this freedom again, freedom from pressure, freedom to fail and learn from mistakes.

In the midst of a stressful day, when you need to do everything at once, stop and consider this is what you really love. Most people who leave agency life or take a break miss the pace and the buzz.

Smell the flowers while you can. 

A couple of people have rightly pointed out how/who to submit entries to. Just email them all for me, title the email account planning school of the web. You’ll find my email link on the sidebar of this blog.

There’s no limit to the amount of slides, but this task is aimed at creatives, and even if it wasn’t, taking the time to write less is a good habit to pick up, so practise here.