NORTHERN PLANNER

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  • Adrian

    It was really nice in the pub after Interesting to meet some people. You all know who you are, but I’m just going to talk about Adrian Gunn Wilson right now.

    He manfully ignored the fact he spoke first and taught us all how to chop a log. He works for Howies and his talk really embodied their philisophy.

    Since I’m a fan I couldn’t help bring this up  when we chatted in the pub. And you know what? His face lit up and couldn’t stop talking about it – it wasn’t talking about his job, it was just what he DID.

    I was telling him how nice the girls were on the phone and he promised to tell them. They need it, since they’re nice, they take nasty phonecall to heart. That’s the downside of being charming and friendly, but they won’t change.

    What I found particularly inspiring was the no compromise commitment to his (and their beliefs). They want to get big, they don’t want to be a niche brand – it’s only when you get big that you get to influence people, that you get to preach to more then the converted. It reminded me why number ones matter – they have power to shape and influence us all. Scale can be a good thing if it’s used wisely. It takes conviction and it looks like they have that in spades.

  • Quantitative Research 1

    Don’t fall asleep! This is the bit of the planning basics when we start to talk about quant. It’s something you can’t avoid as planner, but as far as I’m concerned, if you treat numbers right, they can be you’re friend.

    Numbers

    This is not a quant masterclass by the way, it’s some useful starts. No more no less.

    First up, here are some initial principles……

    Starting with WHEN to use it.The accepted way to do research is to start with lots of qualitative, in depth, discursive research. Once you’ve learned something you can use, you use quant to prove what you think you know, with a big sample answering the same questions. This is fine, but you can do a lot more than that. For a start, it MAY be useful to do more quant up front if you have the kind of client that deals only in fact. That doesn’t mean you leave out innovation or inspiration, you just have to know how to use the numbers.

    Quant is useful because it helps you get closer to clients – numbers are their key performance measure, so getting to grips with the discipline allows you to join in the debate. If you’re REALLY going to show you know their business and customers, it’s useful to do it through stats.

    But it’s pretty useful anyway. Here are the ways it can be used:

    FRAMING THE PROBLEM. It’s really useful for showing you what the communications TASK is. For example, Skoda wasn’t selling enough cars, despite the fact people seemed to like the brand. They found that they were getting on people’s initial consideration lists, but the numbers were showing they were not following through to the final shortlist and purchase. The numbers framed the problem – AND the solution. The task was to show why the cars were good AS WELL as the brand

    Data is the ONLY way to prove your campaign has been effective. This comes back to the the very real need for you and your clients to know you really are affecting profits… and you won’t win an effectiveness award with focus groups.

    Now unless you’re very lucky, you’re not likely to have a quant research in-house, it may be the case that you have the type of c lient who does their research independent of the agency, or you might have the sole responsibility of organising a research company to do the job. In all cases, you need to have input into the research brief and you need to understand the methodology they’ll use.

    Like any brief, what you get out is directly related to what you put in. The innovation starts here. If the research is your responsibility, that speaks for itself, but if the client has hired someone, you’ll want to have input into the brief. Not only because you want to make sure there’s something worthwhile coming out the other end, but also it’s down to the fact that independently hired research companies make conclusions and recommendations. That’s a chance to cut planning out of the process. You don’t want that, so have input from the start, get them uncovering what YOU think is important. Otherwise you’ll end up with very expensive, very useless information, or you’ll have the strategy done for you.

    So make the researcher your friend. I can’t recommend this enough. And if you have the choice of who to hire, pick someone who’s used to working with agencies – you need someone who knows where research end and planning starts.

    (Don’t forget much of this is from a smaller agency Up North perspective, other experiences may be different. If that’s the case please add your point of view in the comments)

    Now none of these ‘basics posts’ can make MAKE any good at planning (assuming they make any sense in the first place), so you won’t become a quant wizard over night, that needs learning by doing. But we’re going to cover the basics of:

    1. How to go about developing a questionnaire and methodology to develop a new strategic direction.

    2. How to go about quantitative pre-testing.

    3. How to go about testing effectiveness.

    It will be from the perspective of a planner working with a research agency, and while it may involve some of the things you’d like to do the least, you can’t avoid this cropping up, so you may as well grasp the nettle.

    First bit next week.

  • Interesting thoughts

    Or at least thoughts on Interesting.

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    I wont’ go on about the speakers individually, since other people are doing it far better than I could, and the videos will be up soon anyway. Everyone told me something new, and while it wasn’t officially a day about work, having my head that full of new stuff is the best possible thing I can do for my job, whatever the day was officially for.

    I learned that being ‘good at presentations’ doesn’t matter as much as being interested in what you’re talking about, and being yourself.

    I learned that the British don’t have to be ironic and diffident, sometimes they can be enthusiastic and sharing, and maybe that’sthis little island (and beyond) at it’s best.

    I learned that it’s easy to forget how brilliant people that organise things are – from the people that make a computer link to a projector properly, to the ones that make hot water for tea appear as if by magic.

    And I also learned that you have to force yourself to do things once in a while. Talking in front a few clients about work isn’t easy, but going up in front of 300 peers is quite something else. I didn’t want to doit , but it was fun when it actually happened, and it sort of went ok.

  • PSFK 3

    I’m kicking myself right now, as I seem to have misplaced my notes. So I’ll muddle through this last bit and hope parts 1 and 2 make up for it.

    First up after lunch was Jeremy Ettinghausen on how Penguin innovated their traditional brand for a digital age. I really liked this talk, especially the way Penguin understood the problem wasn’t reading being out of date, it was the way the industry presented itself. In the end, I think he was saying that it’s all about great content delivered on your customers’ terms.

    Dan Hon from Mind Candy was next. His talk about gaming was one of the highlights of the day. He opened my eyes to not only what’s possible technology wise, but how bespoke experiential games can become a really useful part of a brand experience.

    Ian Tate was maybe THE highlight of the day. He spoke on why digital agencies are better than advertising. This was largely tongue in cheek of course, but not only was it fun, engaging and entertaining, it drove the message home that while old agencies are maybe better at the art of communication, digital agencies are getting to grips with things they haven’t thought of, they can move quicker, adapt better and maybe it’s simply more interesting.

    I’m ashamed to say I went out for coffee for the Can planners be the new creatives? session. I know the people speaking know better than me, but personally it’s such a dud question. Planners do what they’re best at, creatives do what they do well too. You either work in place that works on positive conflict, or somewhere that encourages you to work together. More planner want to work with creatives than the other way around, and curiously, it’s the planners (or some of them) who seem less conservative than creatives. In the end, people should do what they’re good at and they’ll always be a blur.

    Hugh McLeod showed us how a wine brand can harness the social aspect of web 2.0

    Martin Cole gave us some food for thought on Visual Business. His argument was that humans have always used images to navigate around their world – and the rise of the city and Web 2.0 actually means we’re becoming more visual. So we should use the fact that we’re really good at visual stuff more – it’s the one thing clients who are getting OK at agencies do can never replicate.

    The in was Russell, George Parker, Stan Stainaker and Johnny Vulkan to discuss the future role of the marketing industry. I took two things out. First, and this was shown all day by the small, nimble companies that had spoken – big agencies, and maybe big companies find it really hard to do anything new. The people doing the most interesting stuff tend to be small, and don’t specialise in advertising.

    Second, and inevitably it’s a Russell quote, "It’s not as if most agencies were ever any good". In other words, they enjoyed a brief spell when advertising agencies sat at the top table, but they got away with murder – and now they’re getting found out. If you work hard, do your stuff well, you’ll be alright. Amen to that.

    It was a lovely, useful day. As I mentioned before, I think  I learned that there’s lots of interesting stuff going on, big it’s more likely to be smaller, less advertising focused people doing it. I also learned that it’s easy to make something look hard by overcomplicating it and giving it funny names – but that’s the Northerner in me.

  • Thinking out loud

    Another of those scary things the future is bringing may well be human telepathy. In Germany, Hans Peter Salzmann has been given a brainwave monitoring device that allows him to type out messages using nothing but the power of thought.

    Now it might be nice to actually have a quiet coach on the train that’s quiet, but imagine a world where we know what each other is thinking. What would it be like if people could see you’re thoughts before you’ve put them through a social filter?

    Diplomacy and maybe even lies are the glue that holds social relationships together (I don’t think you’re bum looks big in that dress my dear), imagine a world where they are impossible. Are our skins thick enough?

  • More things I like

    Rufus Wainwright’s Making Movies of Myself. The song’s good, but I like the interesting image he conjures about people unable to avoid creating scenes.

    If I made a movie about myslef it would have to be a Clouseau film. My lamentable clumsiness is legendary, and at least as catastrophic.. And my cat’s called Kato…

  • Things I like

    I like Deathly by Aimee Mann. For starters, it’s a great song, but I like it even more because this track is the inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia – one of my favourite films (but if course THE favourite is The Empire Strikes Back).

    By the way, Anderson also did Boogie Nights which contains my favourite film scene ever…

    Magnolia 

    Back to Magnolia…It clocks in at over three hours, but it goes very quickly as it tells the story of overlapping broken lives in Los Angeles. Anderson lets each individual story breath while letting them intersect in all sorts of unexpected ways. This may be heresy, but I think it’s better than Short Cuts, and a million times better than the inferior Crash.

    I love the pace of the film, the way it builds up to at least three crescendo’s, I like the way he shows grace and courage in even the weakest and most fallible of us, but most of all, I like the way he asks us to consider coincidence v fate, along with and the necessity of love, and being able to give it.

    The acting is great too. Most surprisingly with Tom Cruise playing a sex guru(respect the cock).

    Magnolia06

    He starts out as a cocksure macho type, but soon we see the hints of a pained past, the facade begins to subtly crack until we see a lonely, lost young man at his father’s death bed, a man who rejected him, whom he last taught himself to hate, begging him not to go away. It’s a beautifully restrained performance, amazing for HIM, and really gets to grips with the mysterious distance between fathers and their sons.

    Frank

    But back to Aimee Mann. Anderson loved ‘Deathly’ too. Most of all, he was intrigued with the line, "Now that I’ve met you, would you agree to never seeing other again". It’s the core of the song, the idea that someone can be so damaged, that they don’t even know how to accept kindness. From this he created a young, female cocaine addict, who has been abused by her father and sleeps with men for drug money. From there he created the lonely cop who eventually convinces her to let him love her, then her father who is also a famous game show host – and the TV company is owned by Cruise’s dying father.

    And so it goes, working outwards from the central inspiration. It’s a beautiful film, building to an epiphany where they all sing Mann’s Wise Up before they all reach a conclusion of sorts – some hopeful some with the possibility that they’ll be able to bear what may come now.

    Knowing where the film comes from doesn’t make it any better, but it’s nice seeing where people get their ideas.

  • Roast Mushrooms with tagliatelli

    This recipe is just ridiculously easy.

    You need:

    A decent size punnet of open cup mushrooms

    TBLSP on butter

    I clove crushed garlic

    teaspoon dried tarragon

    5 nests of tagliatelli

    Pr-heat the oven to 200 degrees

    Roughly chop the mushrooms – but not too small. But the butter in a bowl with the garic and tarragon, mix well until smooth.

    Put the mushrooms in a baking tray, smear all over with the butter mixture. Pop in the oven. It will take fifteen minutes for the mushrooms to roast and go all juicy.

    While that’s cooking, get a big pan, fill half full with water and bring to the boil. Then chuck the pasta in and cook until it’s soft with just  a little bit of bite – that should be around fifteen minutes from start to finish. Drain the pasta, put it back in the pan, empty the contents of the baking tray into it and toss well – on the heat for 30 seconds or so.

    If you’re feeling saucy, it’s worth adding a dollop if cream at this stage.

    Done. Bloody tasty, sod all washing up.

  • Happiness is…….

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  • My (not so) Interesting talk

    Slide1

    It was a talk about my one saving grace. That’s not public speaking, it’s swimming.

    Slide3

    This is me on my first swimming trip to Germany. I was a shy wonky, awkward child. Hideously clumsy, not very good at sport, and pretty sickly. I was one of those kids that always had a bad chest, my Mum used tyo have to bash me on the back to get the snot out. A doctor suggested I take up swimming to sort my chest out, and amazingly, I was quite good at it. Next thing I know I’m training six hours a day and swimming all over the world. Finally I’d found a place where I didn’t look stupid.

    Slide4

    I’m still shy. awkward and wonky, and I still swim. I don’t race anyone now, but since I can’t change who I am, I’ll never be good at anything but swimming, so I still do it – for the pure joy of doing something well. In everyday life, I’m Inspector Clouseau, in water I’m Fred Astaire.

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    You see I’m just made that way, I can’t help it – and the things that make me a good swimmer, also make me a physical idiot on dry land.

    1. Long armspan means you take far less strokes – you get there quicker. But long gangly arms get in the way when you’re not swimming.
    2. Long torso and short legs – most people with long bodies have long legs. Having little short legs on the end instead gives you a stronger propellor to push you along. But it also gives you an awkward centre of gravity and makes you VERY un-coordinated out of the pool.
    3. Lots of slow twitch muscle means you can convert carbohydrate into energy, using oxygen, that much better. This gives you more endurance, and there’s less build up of lactic acid in the muscle – that’s what usually gives you that burning feeling in the muscle, and makes it feel sore. But lots of slow twitch muscle gives you slow reactions in normal life- you’re body is always behind what it sees.
    4. Flexible joints mean you can put you’re body in more extreme shapes – leading to a more efficient stroke. But it leads to an ungainly gangliness too.
    5. A strong core helps the body withstand the whiplash from all that kicking and bending. It helps you twist and turn. But it also pushes that centre of gravity down, making you totter around when you walk.
    6. Being a bloody minded Northerner helps in general though – it teaches you to go on when you don’t think you can.

    Slide11

    This is Edward Wynn, in the process of setting world record for the fastest tiddlywinks mile. He can’t help what he’s good at either. You see we’re all great some things, and not so good at others. We can’t help what those things are, which is what makes us all do different, and so interesting. I think we should celebrate that more.

    It said above the stage ‘to thine own self be true’, that’s really what the talk was about.

    Oh, and I liked Mark’s comment afterwards that I was really saying, "What makes you good also makes you useless".