NORTHERN PLANNER

It’s to raise money for ChildLine.

Isn’t it good?

This might interest you if you’re in need of a couple of quid. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be embarrassing to lose if you’re a seasoned professional?……….

Think of a design to put on a Dr Martens boot.
Enter it online.
Get your mates to vote for it.
Get voted the winner.
Bag yourself £1000.
Get you boot design made and sold worldwide.

http://www.dmbootdesign.com

BDH/TBWA are looking for a planner. If you want to be a planner at a very good agency that’s not in London,it’s worth thinking about.

"We’re looking for someone with at least 4 yrs experience, but not necessarily with a traditional planning role. They’ll be given loads of opportunity and responsibility – working as the key planning contact on a range of key accounts."

Email Lorna Hawtin, their Planning Director [lorna.hawtin@bdhtbwa.co.uk] with your details if you fancy having a go.

So on we go after a first post which didn’t really say much did it? This is gleanings from Nikki Crumpton’s (Head of Planning Mccan) seminar at the APG Network, along with Russell Davies’ and Dylan William’s at the APG Creative briefing course. Of course I can’t help but stick my own oar in.

And first, I’d like to democratise the whole thing. It tends to be the planner who writes them, but I physically wrote more as a suit. No one has the divine right to write a creative brief.

Here’s my credentials as brief writer: husband, uncle, brother, son, cat owner, driver, wage slave – HUMAN BEING.

Strategy – and therefore briefs are really about how people behave. And we’re all human beings (just about). Richard Huntington often talks about planning from within – how do I think, what would I do? That’s a good start. Being able to put yourself in an audience’s position helps too. But ANYONE CAN DO THEM. They are hard, but the only way to get really good is to do lots of them.

If you’re a suit wanting to get strategic, have a look at the briefs the planners write and see what you’d do different. Do speculative ones for projects you think might happen. In some places, the less meaty ones may be your responsibility – and the briefs no one wants to write are the ones no creatives want to work from. Work hard on making them as good they can be. I learned more from working on the homebuilding briefs no one wanted to do than anything else I think.

And the creatives loved me for simply making them not dull.

I used to practice by looking at finished ads and writing what I thought the briefs might have been, and putting them in front of creatives to see what they thought. Once you can ‘work back’, you’ll find starting from scratch much easier.

Anyway………….

We’re going to divide this into three parts:

1. Why briefs are important.
2. How to go about writing them.
3. How to brief creatives.

Part 1 is worth dwelling on for a second. From an ‘outside the London bubble’ perspective, creative briefs are not as common as they should be. They’re not ingrained in the process. Which is pretty daft. On the other hand, some resent having to do them, which a little silly too.

They are actually great for being profitable and making life easy. They help better work, saving time and helping fairer remuneration.

Better work because it provides a direction for our collective efforts, it also channels creativity. Some would be inclined to say it controls rampant creativity.

On one level I would say yes – without an agreed criteria, there’s no way you can reject a script featuring Tom Jones whipping Princess Leia (and come to think of it why would you?) apart from the old, "I like, I don’t like argument". But it can also FREE up creativity – allowing you to post rationalise something really good that just needs a nudge to be ON brief.

It forces everyone to be analytical, strategic and make decisions BEFORE the first review, There’s nothing more hateful for everyone than deciding what the brief really is after seeing some work.

It also forces you to not give into difficult moments – those, "Will the client buy it?" moments. If it’s on brief, and that’s based a strategy you all buy into, well, if the work’s right, it’s right. It forces admissions that they don’t want to present it since they just don’t think the client will like it. It gets you out of the smoke and mirrors and into THE REAL reason stuff gets in front of the client.

That also saves time since there SHOULD be less of the endless internal rebriefs – and that means saving money too since most agencies judge profits based on how much time has been spent on a job (I’m not saying that’s right, it’s just a fact).

And the more organised you look, the more you and the client judge work from an agreed criteria, the less work SHOULD BE rejected. You work quicker, fall out less and argue over invoices less. Everybody wins.

And finally, you will be helping the creatives if you give them a good brief. There’s nothing more frightening than a blank piece of paper – apart from not knowing where to start, and having to second guess what will happen in the first review. Creatives suffer duff briefs all the time – any effort to make the one you do interesting, and a joy to work from will be greatly appreciated (just don’t expect them to tell you that).

Don’t expect them to work TO the brief precisely either. The brief is the start, no more no less. As John Steel says, "Creatives work from a brief, not to it".

Next up is how to go about writing them.

Marcus Brown is a kind, generous man and I have to publicly thank him for these, equally brilliant, things.

Firstly, he’s done this painting.

Secondly, he’s found Monkey on You Tube. And if you’re of a certain age, you’ll appreciate Twiki from Buck Rogers too (personally I prefered Colonel Deering and those jumpsuits, though Princess Adala was pretty good too).

Thank you Marcus, and chin up.

I heard something interesting on the radio that really caught my imagination. It was about an artist trying to do some work based on the beauty of not knowing everything. I didn’t catch it all, but it reminded about why I like doing what I do, and where I want to go with it.

The conversation centred around science taking us to the very edge of knowledge – the bit where humans have to just accept that nature’s has too much unfathomable grandeur for us to comprehend.

Our physicists can explain what happened to our universe as far back as start of everything, The Big Bang. But when they go further to to that infinitely dense, impossibly small piece of nothing more than space-time (we think), that preceded it they get stuck.

Just like we think that black holes may spew out somewhere else – but we don’t know where and we can’t prove it.

Or the way we’re not sure if we’ll ever go much further understanding how the brain works, since it may well operate through quantum mechanics – something we can’t really get our heads around.

But they keep trying.

I love the way some scientists are forever curious and never stop believing they can go a bit further, push the boundary a little bit more. it reminds me whay I like doing what I do. Even though it’s pretty insignificant next to the stuff scientists get up to.

You see there’s always something new to learn, a new idea to stumble over. Culture always changes, things move on, you can never, ever know it all.

There’s no excuse in our trade for sitting back and going, "That’s it, we’ve cracked it". That’s why I have an instinctive fear of brand models and such.

It makes me wonder where my end is, when will I reach the point I can’t go any further in my work? With any luck it won’t stop at being fairly competent. Only one way to find out I suppose……..and that’s what I want to do. Push right out to the edges and find what’s there. Where will I be?

So I got to see the Howies shop on Thursday. After getting lost on the way to The Breakfast Club (I’ve been there half a dozen times, there really is no excuse), a kindly individual guided me to Carnaby Street.

I like Howies. I like what they stand for as well as the clothes themselves. And it makes life easy to mostly buy their stuff, and just replace things when they wear out. There’s no need to worry about the tyranny of choice every morning when I dress, or when I shop.

So I was looking forward to seing it. It wasn’t a shop really, more Howies in the flesh. You see so many brands that have pretty good ads, but fail miserably at the most important stage – the actual experience. This isn’t one of those cases.

It shows that working on retail can be a joy if you let it. There’s so much room for ideas.

Carnaby Street has a rule that all shops must keep the lights on at night, which is a bit silly when you consider the wasted energy. So they’ve put a light switch outside, that way you can see the shop if you like, but there’s no energy wasted if you don’t.

And any company that has this view on tea is okay in my book.

I met Adrian again, which was a pleasure. He mentioned how their brand is really precious, which is why it makes more sense to sell direct than put it in someone else’s hands.

I also talked to David. He’s a brilliant illustrator (see tea picture) but it’s struggle to get enough work – which is why he’s working in the shop too. Makes me thankful I do something I like AND it pays a living wage. It’s easy to forget that sometimes.

Autumn means the prospect of getting up in the dark. You could argue it makes dragging yourself out of bed a little harder.

Until you consider you’ll be admiring a beautiful sunrise in twenty minutes or so.