NORTHERN PLANNER

I quite like that Vodafone line,it certainly applies to one or two accounts I’ve worked in in the past.

If you’ve ever worked on a housebuilding account, you’ll probably be glad you don’t anymore. Same work, week in week out, same old dull site visits, just change the price on that ad this week and so on. I did it a few years ago as an account manager, but you know what? It wasn’t half bad. Like most retail stuff, or small briefs, you need to take the opportunities when they come. Here’s why I’m glad I worked on a homebuilder.

1. Speed

You learn speed. Homebuilding works from week to week, changes happen at drop of a hat. You learn to be adaptable, and you learn to work very quickly. We did TV, DM, websites radio, the lot. I’ve never worked on such a mix of media in so little time. or learned as much.

2 CV

There’s at least one new ad a week to develop. You can either recycle what you’ve done elsewhere, or you can work hard at finding something new for a creative brief. Doing this week in week out is very,very hard, but it’s wonderful practise if you’ve any leanings to being a planner one day, with loads of great thinking to talk about when you’re ready to do something else.

3. Strategy

Every housing developement is different, but most are marketed the same. You cannot get away from location and price, but there is always something –  better for schools, there may be a history to the area, sometimes it’s the kind of people who will live there. Below is a rough of something that ran in Manchester, amidst loads of amazingly shot, stylish ads, it was aimed at under 25’s and it worked a treat. We could have just done a normal location ad..

4. Inventiveness

Art direction rules and copy styles tend to be very rigid, so you can make all the ads accross all the developments consistent. Working within narrow guidelines is far more challenging than a blank canvas.

5. Craft

Learning some craft.  You get to work very closely with the studio and art directors, usually both in front of a mac while the papers scream down the phone for copy. It’s great to get a feel for art direction and how macs work.

6. Relationships

The studio is your lifeline (which is often forgotten), you find out what makes them tick very quickly. As for creatives, they dread homebuilding briefs. If you can get them interested in this, selling briefs in later life will be a doddle. They’ll also love you for trying and let you into their world (bribery works too though).

            

7. Being useful

Client meetings are not easy. There’s the sales team, the media agency and the PR people. You learn to only talk if you’ve something useful to say, and you learn to suggest, not state. Useful for a planner who’s only there to be useful.

8. Campaign planning

More and more, developers have to sell houses without a showhome. You can either roll with all this and change from week to week, or you can develop a plan for each site, based around key events, like showhome preview, introductory prices and even drumming awarnessin the local gymn. Wonderful practise for channel planning and doing what’s right for right now.

So there you go. If you’re on one of these, chin up and take you chances when they come.

The Future Foundation has found that in Europe, luxury is no longer reserved for the selected few. A certain level of material wealth is within the reach of more people (half of the UK think they can afford to splash out), so luxury is less about flashy names and more about ‘me time’.

Instead of an obsession with with names and ‘labels’, we frown more on self indulgence. Instead of massing more stuff, we want to try new things and share more experiences with friends and family.

Luxury brands are becoming less about quality and more about quality of life. Like a bottle of wine becoming more about sensuous pleasure and less about the exclusivity of the vineyard. But luxury brands wrapping  more experiences around what they sell presents and opportunity for those that don’t.

‘No frills’ brands like TK Max, Primark, Lidl  and Easy Jet have benefited from offering the same result for less money – by eschewing all the added extras.  Not many have an agenda setting reputation though, most are just ‘there’. Maybe they could stand for spending less on ‘stuff’ and doing all the things you want with the people you want.

Imagine an airline that wants you to spend less on in flight and more on a romantic dinner on holiday, or a clothes discounter that wants you to be able to have that little black dress and be able to go out and show it off more. What do you think, can no frills brands be about living your life on your own terms? About doing the things you never seem to get around to doing?

Went to a wedding at the weekend. The evening do was fancy dress, I’m the pathetic Baywatch character in the middle.

Her indoors was the quickest draw in the west.

The smaller Dark Lord of the Sith beat the bigger one in a lightsabre duel.

Thankfully The Jedi were on hand to protect us from the sore loser – although he’s attempting to cut off Harry’s Potter’s cheek here.

Once opon a time I used to swim competitively and I thought I was pretty good. One summer I was in America and this smug kid from Wisconsin not only beat me without really drawing much breath, he had time to wave.

It reminds me of then story of Mozart and Salieri. Salieri was a very good composer but he wassimply in awe of Mozart. He also despised him and his foul mouthed, feckless, infantile behaviour. It seemed a cruel joke that Mozart was the genius, while he was just very good. Espescially when only someone as good as Salieri could grasp the full extent of Mozart’s greatness-ergo be so savagely wounded by it.

So when I took at look at Helen’s Comfortable Disorientation blog I began to wonder why I even bother posting. Take this post for example about the lack of love letters men write. Not only did it spur me to write one for Mrs Hovells, it made me think of all the things I take for granted. Many blogs make you think, not many make you think about your own life.

I bet she’s really nice to meet too. Damn.

Books about design, advertising etc are probably not the best places to find something new, since you’ll only end up doing the same as everyone else. Isn’t more useful to find stuff that has nothing to do with it? Like this piece of graffiti.

I have no idea what this means, but it strikes me as a great logo in search of a brand- just got to find one that fits. Russell has made the point that post rationalisation can be a good thing, I wonder what the design brief for this would look like.

Here’s a film we’ve done for ChildLine to celebrate their 20th Birthday. I’ve never been a fan of spoof’s but it seemed to work for this.

Even if you hate it, I’d be grateful if you could spread the word – it’s for charity after all.

Scott from my office is very good at his PR job, but in spite of this his blog is great. 

Just been uploading pictures from our holiday at the end of last month- it seems like an eternity ago now.  We had ten days staying with my Mum and Dad in St Ives – basically drinking, eating and sleeping.

Is there anything better than a deckchair by a warm sunny beach?…….

… with tea from your very own Leeds United mug.

There was the odd the shower but you’ve got to admire the optimism of British people on holiday.

But the sun was out for most of the time, producing evenings like this.

Gentle plagiarism..

‘Seagull deterrent’…

The waves got wild and very big on Porthmeor Beach and the surfers made the most of it – running down the hill as if they couldn’t stand to lose a single minute of surfing. Imagine loving something that much.

Mum and Dad had a plumber in to sort out their new shower, he didn’t live up to his name.

Apparently, there’s a record numbers of young males joining feminist organisations. Observers find it hard to agree exactly why, but I wonder if it’s a reflection of less inclination for young men to follow (in some quarters) traditional male stereotypes.

I was listening to ‘If I was your girlfried’ by Prince the other day.The song describes a man frustrated at being unable to be as close to his partner as she is to other women. While he has to hide his feelings and is unable to get close to other people, she doesn’t let him and turns to her best friend for emotional comfort.

Is this like this for young men? Maybe they are seeing the lives women have and want to join in. I wonder if it’s the expectations of other males stopping them, or the very women they want to be closer to not letting them in? Lads magazines are declining in the UK – is that a symptom of this?

Over the M62 for Wednesday’s pitch. A joy as usual. It’s as if someone was doing everything possible to keep  Yorkshire from Lancashire. Probably a good thing.