NORTHERN PLANNER

I saw a film where a bunch of brand loyalists were made to do without their favourite packaged brand for a couple of weeks.

They were given and unbranded replacement and moaned for the whole two weeks about how it wasn't as good.

Only to find they had actually been using their favourite brand without the packaging.

That's the power of brands. It's the belief in them as much as the actual quality.

So if you want to really understand the role of anything in people's lives, do some research where you take it away from them and get them to talk about what it's like.

Like when a office goes mad because the milk isn't delivered – it's the tea and coffee they go mental about missing.

When a car breaks down, it's having to suffer other people on public transport they hate (very British disease this one).

Take Heinz ketchup away and bacon sandwich becomes a waste of calories.

Etc

Anyway

1. It's nothing like in the text books or the case studies. Most ideas and projects are dragged kicking and screaming into the world through hard work, trial and error and coming back from rejection with something better. 
2. No one really cares about the creative brief. At its worse, it's first stage thinking from one person (the planner) that everyone then enjoys ripping to shreds. At its worse, its the client brief written down in order to get to the first review when the real strategy will hopefully emerge. At its best, its summary of first stage conversations everyone has had and direction towards something even better
3. You'll have to do lots of workshops because the suits are scared of selling ideas to the client, so want them to get involved in having them. Or you'll have to do them because no one in your agency will listen to a word you say, so you need to get them to discover what you already know for themselves. The suits will judge the success of the client workshop by the quality of the stimulation, not the quality of the ideas, so you'll be working late night creating pen portraits and competitor slides that look amazing even though they tell folks nothing new.
4. You'll spend entire meetings where the account director will answer strategy based questions the client has asked before you can respond, then ask you what you think. 
5. You'll learn at least half of what you need to know from great creative types who could do your job if they weren't doing something more interesting, rather than your boss who's main job is getting you to follow the process.
6. If you do the same TGI run for any client audience and interpret it compelling enough, no one will be able to tell the difference.

You'll come up against strategists in other agencies who can fill whole hours saying nothing of value, you'll be quietly chortling with glee and how daft they're making themselves look, only for the client to say it's brilliant, makes total sense and give then a standing ovation. A little like this: 

Hopefully, you can spend most if your time being brilliantly simple. Every now and again, you'll need to make the simple look brilliant. Live with it. 
8. No one knows what they're doing. When I started, it was hard enough when everyone pretended they knew how advertising works. Now, with social, native, programmatic, content, dark social, partnerships and Big Data no one even knows what advertising is. The trick is look like you do, without believing you do.

9. This industry is tiny. People will always show up again sometime. You can't afford to alienate any one. Even the people who really deserve it. And if you start in the wrong kind of agency, that could be everyone.

10. Not everything Byron Sharpe is automatically right. As it was for Seth Godin. As it was for Rosser Reeves. As with most brands, people buy what they think everyone else does, not what it best. If you want to make a client think, don't quote How Brands Grow (they have either read it or discarded it because it opposed their cherished world view too much), challenge it. 

11. No one buys facts, they buy what they want to buy. Don't believe any kind of evidence will persuade a client (or a target audience) your job is to make them want to believe your evidence. Emotional advertising sells harder (although try telling that to certain retail clients) so does emotional presentations. Move them. 

So I start a new job today.

You'd think my first day as a strategy director at a new place would be vastly different to the first time I walked into work as an account exec, but not that much.

It's fair to say that back then I was excited as it was the first time I had work emails, while everyone was  talking about the new website department.

Oh and we checked films and chromalins back then.

But to be honest the first day is always the same, for me at least.

The fear of the unknown, not to mention lots of people you don't know yet.

Getting the IT to work (which was fine this time by the way).

Believing you'll never remember everyone's names.

Wondering how you'll get you head around client business.

Seeing a culture emerging, but not the undercurrents that slowly reveal themselves.

The slow but unwavering mission to get everyone to drink proper tea and coffee. 

Remembering to say little and listen loads.

If you have time, it's worth listening to the Revisionist History podcast. Every episode re-interprets a historic event and finds new evidence or focuses on something previously overlooked. 

Now, look at that keyboard on your computer or phone, the one with the QWERTY structure. It's like that because it's not the best structure for fast typing, it's pretty much the least effective option. Because when they designed the original mechanical typewriters, if folks typed too fast, they wold break the machine's mechanism. So they designed the keyboard to SLOW them down. It's simply survived because no one questioned it and eventually, we all became so used to it changing it would be simply too difficult.

History is written by the winners, who always want to put the best spin on why they are there, and create even more success. Or sometimes gloss over the uncomfortable truth about where success came from.

Which is why you should never believe most of the case studies in advertising and marketing. No one really knows if anything is going to be a wild success, it's fair to say that there's some solid performances that do the job but are not the be and end all….and most of these follow some sort of pattern. But then then there is the 95% of campaigns that achieve nothing (which is why tracking studies are so important, even if they have little commercial impact, one can fall back on claimed brand impact). Created by the same organisations sometimes.

Losing the opportunity to learn from failure. Pretending we know what will create incredible success. When we don't really. 

Just as most new brands fail, yet all sorts of organisations have tried and tested rules to 'guarantee success'. 

Based on the stuff that worked, rather than being honest and learning from what brands failed.

Which flies in the face of how most great leaps forward in any discipline really happen. One step forward, two steps back, failure after failure showing what works by what doesn't work. Dyson wasn't the only one who thought of the bagless vacume cleaner, he was just the only one who stuck with developing prototype after prototype until he found one that worked.

Darwin's theory of evolution was only published when he realised Wallace had the same idea. They both had the same 'insight' because they were building on the success and failure of many, many great minds that came before them. 

So next time you want to hire an agency if you're a CMO, ask them what their worst work was and what they learned from it.

Which is a good policy for hiring people come to think of it.

And don't bother with most case studies and certainly don't copy them, as any new formula for success, even if there was such a thing, won't be a formula for long, as everyone will be copying it too. 

Or if you wan to flip it, Fox were so sure Star Wars would flop, they let George Lucas have the merchandising rights. We all all know what happened next.