NORTHERN PLANNER

Let's be honest, not everyone thinks there is a point to planners, strategists or whatever the job titles is these days.

Even in 'good' organisations, client or agency, there are suits, clients and creatives, media buyers and so on, all thinking they don't anyone else to so own the strategy bit.

Sometimes they have a point. The best creatives are brilliant planners, are the best suits and even clients.

Of course, in less good organisations, some don't see the point of strategy full stop but we'll agree to let that one go shall we.

Now some would say that strategy types are the ones who 'own the consumer' or 'target audience'. That was never true and still isn't, the research guys would claim this, the client head of insight would claim this.

Others would say it's about helping agencies doe their best work, which usually means post rationalising creative work or some sort of media plan, or content idea. It means helping the agency get award winning work through.

That isn't doing your job either. Of course, there is the data from the IPA that award winning work is more effective, but that's from a small base of case studies with the right econometrics, with a provable ROI effect that the client was happy to share. Agencies don't enter IPA awards unless it's effective work that is also coming with a story that will impress the judges.

Some might say it's keeping the client interested with new things to think about while making the agency output easy to buy. New things are unfamiliar, they're hard to sign off confidently, but this really harks back to the last point. And strategists can be trojan horses for novelty and fadism getting into client meetings if you're not careful. 

So what's the point?

I think it's about cutting through the bullshit and provoking everyone to do the right thing for the client business, rather than what their biases tell them to do.

There is no one else with the scope, or the skill, to look at consumer research, cultural trends, the creative process, the client business culture, the agency culture, the actual task for communications, the dogma of best practise………and chip away through all the extraneous rubbish to what the actual problem is, the best approach that solves is and then help shape the solution.

And no one else who can do it quicker….because you read and absorb more stuff than anyone else and constantly train yourself to be objective and practice challenging the subjectivity and bias of other while leaving them smiling.

No one else who doesn't get swept away by a brilliant creative idea that isn't actually relevant to the problem. In case you wonder what I mean, loads of folks use the Byron Sharpe assertion, that brands needs to be distinctive not differentiated, as an excuse for rampant shock and awe advertising, while conveniently forgetting that every piece of work needs to remove reasons not to buy and ensure that the brand is remembered in buying situations. They build awareness (maybe and usually prompted) rather than SALIENCE. That's why so many people talk about 'that great ad' but forget what brand it was for. 

Or takes a tracking study seriously.

Or allows data to be the answer to everything.

The marriage if logic. emotion, common sense and humility you might say.

Everyone else has a specific job and to quote Mark Twain, give someone a hammer and all he sees is a nail. Your job is to help everyone see beyond what they do and make them all bigger than the sum of their parts.

Less a planner and more of a shaper, but shaper is a worse job title than planner I guess.

Anyway.

 

 

 

Fall for the latest thing. I know I’ve said don’t read advertising books, but I would say it’s worth reading Paul Feldwick’s ‘The Anatomy of Humbug’. Mostly because he doesn’t really tell you how advertising works, rather it depends on the brief and the client. But also because he shows that most, so called, leaps forward in advertising thinking, are really different riffs on the same stuff that came before. So don’t think that ‘rational product messaging’ is wrong, nor subliminal communications, or even brand led advertising, all are right, all are wrong. I like his analysis of Byron Sharpe’s thinking as ‘do lots of publicity’ which I guess means put PR at the heart of you thinking, but I think he misses the point. He ably argues that ‘showmanship’ that bit of magic is possibly the best way to give yourself a good chance of advertising in all its forms to work, but that’s kind of Byron Sharpe too – don’t bother to differentiate, just be distinctive and get noticed.

Even stuff like native is just an ‘advertorial’ which is kind of how advertising began. Just as ad funded programmes and content are not new, the reason soap operas got their names was that soap brands funded programming that lots of people would watch weekly.

Quote books or respected sources all the time at clients. They’re either read How Brands Grow by now or they don’t want to, you don’t look clever by reading a book, you add value by applying good thinking to client’s specific problems, then claiming it for your own. Take ‘reach the whole market’. Any idiot can reach the whole market, even with moderate budgets, it’s just it will be on really bad TV programme, display ads everyone ignores on awful platforms and other stuff that delivers big numbers but has the same impact as trying to knock out a heavy weight boxer with a feather.

Quote industry research as gospel. This goes for the IPA databank as well. The data is generalised and from a ludicrously biased and small sample. It’s funny how the same strategy folks who like to dismiss research love to quote the IPA, mostly because it fits with what they want the client to buy, while research involving real people tends to spoil the argument.

WARC are at it, with analysis of their prize entries. An even smaller sample of people who entered and post rationalised their work to try and win.

Look, I’ve written award winning papers, I’ve delivered case studies to clients. I can’t remember one I’ve done that didn’t either bend the truth, leave out data that didn’t support the argument or at least pretend the process was simple and linear. When mostly, myself and the team stumbled upon the core thinking after lots of false starts, the first presentation was in-conclusive and the final approved plan wasn’t a very different version of what was originally intended.

Expect anyone to work to a brief. Creatives, media planners, content strategists, media owners. All want to put their stamp on the work. In almost every case, a good brief should major on a great objective or task, rocket fuel for the people you are briefing to get to a great solution. It should rarely be the solution itself, especially slaving over a proposition that’s a brand line in disguise. The first instinct of any creative team will be to ignore it at all costs.

I suggest an exception might be media owners here, they have a habit of trying to ‘do the strategy’ and create work that’s nothing to do with the brief, perhaps here, you should get them to follow a constricting brief exactly. My own view is that you need them to buy into what you need, which means the usual trick for them (and indeed everyone) of making think it’s all their idea. The amount of value they will throw if they believe in the project can be staggering.

You are surrounded by experts, you should hope and, to be honest, expect, the final output will make your brief look very ‘first page’ and shaky. Which it will be.

Think Powerpoint is the point. Now, I’m not saying don’t do slides, unfortunately clients expect it in many cases. But do try and avoid them unless you really are making a presentation. But don’t do slides until you have a story with a maximum of three key points. If it’s all building into three key things you want people to remember, you’re on track. It’s worth approaching from the standpoint that for every slide you create a kitten gets shot (unless you hate cats, a fairy then). That said, ignore people who simply count the number of slides and tell you it’s too many, when they haven’t seen you actually present – it’s how they support what you SAY that should be how they’re judged, the deck is not what matters, it’s what YOU deliver as a whole.

I’ve written 200 page decks for a half hour presentation where every slide was a picture. I’ve delivered two -page decks for a three hour meeting.

And if you have a boss who just looks at the slide headlines, run away from your organisation fast. If that individual writes them forward, run even faster.

Don't forget, we're all in advertising unless we're on the client side, it's just cool to call it something else these days.

 

1. Only read marketing and brand stuff. If you only look at industry stuff, which is what everyone else tends to do, you’ll make the same kind of work as everyone else, which, again is what everyone else tends to do. It’s good to know this, but read as much about EVERYTHING as you can, great thinking tends to connect two things in a way no one else, re-combination if you like.

2. Not get to grips about the boring bits of your client’s business. In fact, let me correct that, there is no boring stuff. The more naïve folks on the twitterweb might go on here about solving business problems rather than marketing problems.

They are right, but the reality is that most clients don’t want you to solve business problems, that is there job – the good ones would rather talk    about business objectives, but they are few and far between. I don’t mean the majority are bad clients, but there’s too much experience and baggage from years of media agencies only wanting to talk about media, creative agencies fetishizing the ‘brand’, PR folks talking about fluff and so on. If you want clients to talk to you about their business, talk to them about it first.

Read the annual reports, build relationships with the non-marketing folks, and in general, respond to marketing led briefs with marketing led solutions, on the face of it, but evidence your work with business reasons, not just consumer and brand reasons.

3. Blame clients for your, and the industry’s shortcomings. It’s not entirely the fault of clients they are all going for short term digital stuff they can tick, when ad and media agencies were perfectly happy for so long to join in with the tracking conspiracy….if the activity shifts tracking scores it has worked, no matter how people have actually behaved.

Or even worse, pretends IPA Awards really showcase effective campaigns and provide a bank of data to help others do better – rather than a vault of case studies that happened to use econometrics, that the client would sign off on and that would provide a ‘story’ to the industry.

There are three ways to deliver additional payback for a marketing budget – innovation, deals to get the media for less and then the stuff between…basically knowing what you’re doing, working to the right objective, finding the right audience, creative assets that build on what people already recognise about the brand, Fame strategy etc etc.

4. Take research and data at face value. Most research is done badly and analysed even worse. Sometimes it’s not of course, but the good stuff, even focus groups can useful if conducted in the right context – for example doing football research at a football ground – and with the right objectives. Just as big data can be good if you know what you’re looking for and you know how it was collected – for example, even a sample size of million from social media is usually hopeless for understanding what most people really do, because no one shows what they’re really like on social, unless you have male friends who post how much porn they’re watching.

Listen to your boss. Seriously, it’s a flaw of human nature that we only see and appreciate facts and experiences that fit with our world view and our opinions.

In other words, we all hate being wrong and miss out on amazing feedback and ideas that challenge what already think or know. In a work situation, the higher the stakes, the more stress and more likely views and ‘knowledge’ is unshakeable. There is nothing higher stakes in an agency than running it, you are seen be their because of your experience and judgement, therefore, most bosses will be keen to give advice, asked for or not and usually it will be wrong, based on their experience and inferior knowledge of the project…and it’s harder to change their mind.

So avoid sharing work with very senior bosses and if you have no choice, involve them early, be sneaky and ‘help’ them have the ideas you want and when you shoe them something different later on, if it is, help them believe it was their ideas all along. Same with senior clients, tissue sessions are great if you do them early enough. It’s not their fault though, if you manage not to get fired for disagreeing with your boss and eventually get their job, or move to client side, you’ll do just the same, because you’re human.

5. Not listen to your boss or the people around you. Perversely, you need listen to feedback and advice as much as possible, even your boss. Your boss might just be on to something now and again, although it’s more likely that your wider team and agency partners will (if they’re the kind of people who want to be nice and good rather than ‘win).

The best ideas are rarely the flashes of insight, and even great ideas end very different to how they started out. Dyson wasn’t the only one to think of the bagless vacuum cleaner, it’s just that he was the only one to keep working on it to make it fit for the market. So don’t sit waiting for ideas to come, start working and open if your work to as much feedback as possible (apart from your boss) and kicking and screaming, the good stuff will emerge, phoenix like from the ashes of your very bad start.

Which also means don’t be precious about good ideas when they arrive, open them up to feedback, it’s the constant ‘tested to perfection’ mentality that creates standout ideas and work. It’s also why agencies that fetishise the brief, creative, media or otherwise, or clients who reject responses that are not on-brief are like runners cutting off one leg, they’re missing the chance for truly standout work -and as for dinosaur organisations that still bow and scrape to the creatives, or the TV department, or clients who never question the sophistry of brand consultancies..well you know what happened to the dinosaurs.

1. Assume you are not in advertising. It doesn't matter if you work in PR, digital marketing, content (ha ha), sponsorship or even 'native' you are in advertising, you are making every effort to get someone's product or service in front of people, to change their relationship with that product. You may be a goalkeeper, centre forward, midfield, sweeper or even manager, but you are still in football.
2. Assume you are an artist, a philosopher, anthropologist, comedian, behavioural psychologist or Stephen Speilberg. Depending on your job title, you might be a little of some of these, but the difference is, your job is to use these practices to sell things. it d
3. It doesn't matter if your five minute slow motion film of dancing mermaids recalls Fellini at his finest moment, if it doesn't get your client closer to a commercial result, you've wasted your client's money.
4. Rely on a process. There is a conspiracy among most large agencies of a variety of specialisms that a proprietary process will reliably produce outstanding work. All processes are variations on what everyone else does and only serve to make all the work variations on the theme too. It's about hard work, having an open mind and chipping away.
5. Believe you're better than the competition. Most agencies go to clients with the same sort of strategy and idea (see above). The trick is to make them want to buy yours because it feels different, or because they like you more.
6. Believe clients like you behaving like a dick. Some of the very best agencies still believe clients like them to be cool. Which is mostly true, since clients work in  proper offices doing a proper job, without pink cows in receptions and concrete tables. But, some of those agencies , who create brilliant work, believe being cool means being objectionable. Some clients will accept hateful treatment if the work delivers results, but will fire you as soon as you mess up  -and eventually you will. Lasting relationships are built on great work, but also mutual respect and even affection, even in these procurement led days, when you mess up, clients liking you means you get forgiven, for a while at least. It's the same working with other agencies, as soon as you make a mistake, if you've been horrific, they'll be happy to stab you in the back.
7. Not being nice. See point 6, but this applies to you personally and the people you work with and the people you work for. We've all worked with and for people who can work the system without being any good, or people who are good but treat the people around them like dirt. We've all worked in places where bullying, sexism and presenteeism are rife. These people eventually get found out. Once again, the job is too hard not to make a mistake, that's when you need people who have got your back, if not, expect a sharp knife between the shoulder blades. It's a small business, people talk, makes sure they say nice things. 

 

Someone asked me recently if I know anything about how to do research. Which was funny, because when I started out learning to be a planner (I still call myself that) one of the first things I learned was how to get to grips with the research tools we had back then.

Datasets like TGI (no touchpoints then), the specifics of quant research and how to manage, pre-testing (know thine enemy) but also conduct your own qual research. I could still get away with moderating focus groups now, although I hope you, like me, would rather carry out primary research that’s a little more useful.

A little while back, experienced planning folks use to bemoan new young turks joining agencies and getting to grips with idea creation and executional tweaking rather than understanding how to manage research. It’s fair to say we had loads of folks with brilliant opinions with little to back them up.

Of course, then came digital strategists, media folks doing content strategy and now, in our present day, an ocean teaming with Big Data. To the point where I’m seeing, perversely, a huge bunch of planning and strategy folks with lots of evidence and no opinion.

Sorry, opinion is a dreadful word, I mean instinct. In fact instinct is wrong too, thanks to our behavioural bias our instincts have shit for brains. I mean judgement.

Let’s think about this. What is research these days?

We still have plenty of organisations using traditional qual and quant, with planning types staying well away. Planners were invented to not just defend agencies from the tyranny of bad research, but to use research to make better work. It seems that we’ve gone back to letting research dictate again.

Even more challenging, we’re mobilising against Big Data, trying to own that, but also being totally subservient to it also. And not questioning nearly enough.

It’s fair to say that people now leave digital trails suggesting what they do, what they like and what they think. But people are not reliable digitally, not just in focus groups.

Take social mentions, sentiment and generally platform behaviour. No one is communicating what they really think, they’re communicating what they think is the version of themselves people want to hear.

There are few pictures of Mums about to have a nervous breakdown because their baby won’t stop crying, but millions of shots of little Mummy with her angelic little angel having the time of their life.

The most common words wives post about their husbands tend to overwhelmingly positive. But google data shows the most common words associated with searched around husbands are words like ‘mean’.

But even google searches, one of the few places where people don’t fib, are not reliable. They are short term behavioural signals and they don’t capture totally what influences people.

In other words, relying just on big data might well tell you what people do, it might tell you what influences them, but it rarely tells you  both at the same time and it’s mostly short term. Just like a decent planning knows how to question and shape more traditional research, the best approach to big data is to ask what it’s not telling you.

Imagination, originality and, well magic is what still builds brands, even the digital ones- Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Google? They’re all investing in emotional brand advertising.

Imagination beings me to Netflix, data led entertainment. Take the wildly successful House of Cards – built from data that lots of people like political drama and Kevin Spacey. I enjoyed Stranger Things, but you can see the calculating data behind it, the love of content from the 80’s, Speilberg tropes, Goonies, ET et al plus Twin Peaks. Like a really good covers band, familiar, much loved riffs put together into something that doesn’t fire the imagination like any of the originals did – that 20% of magic.

Programmed entertainment can be really good, like to scarily life like sex robots they’re developing, will never quite match the real thing.

So what does modern research look like?

Like it always has. You can’t beat going out to meet real people in the actual environment you are trying to influence.

It’s just we have more tools. 

Sometimes, that can mean ‘meeting them’ online too.

But sometimes SatNAv gets you lost and without a decent sense of direction or ability to read maps, you're pretty fucked. 

It means being clear if you want to find out what they do or what influences them – how you find these things out will be different.

It means getting to grips with a world of more tools and people using and delivering them that are not planners.

Basically, like when planners were first invented, it’s about using research to inform your judgement and great better, evidence- based solutions.

Not media and creative you can tick.