NORTHERN PLANNER

CONFUSED AS YOU ARE

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  • There can be amazingness in every moment if you look hard enough

    As funky pancake demonstrates

    I'm increasingly in awe of the heroism you find in everyday life, from the crushingly ordinary guitar band, long since given up on a career in music still playing pubs out of sheer love, to the checkout girl who never fails to smile.

    I love all that stuff about objects and what they really mean to us.

    Somehow all the stuff is more precious to me than ever, in an increasingly knowing, ironic, transient and throw away world. Not least with a little boy who is growing up too fast.

    So I'm quite taken by the idea of making more moments really count. Adding a little ceremony to ordinary stuff, a pause in the usual hurtle through the day. Searing lumps of more memory into your mind and others too.

    We only remember the extra ordinary stuff – very good or bad, so why not make more stuff a little out of the ordinary too? So you're not just left with, lets be honest, super edited collection of photos or Facebook doodas, but proper memories.

    Little gestures and rituals – obviously making tea in the pot everyday, but there's other stuff too. I know a family that has a singsong after their evening meal, don't laugh Mr and Mrs Hipster, if you can bring yourself to do something uncool, it's a lot of fun. There's having a winter BBQ instead of just grilling food inside – get wrapped up warm with mugs of mulled wine and it's a joy. Dressing for dinner, at home on a Wednesday night, just because. Writing a proper letter with proper pen and ink, rather than an email or bloody poke on Facebook. That kind of stuff.

    Anyway, moving on

     

     

  • Christ this is good

    http://www.youtube.com/e/SKL254Y_jtc
     

    Where do you start?

    Smack on for how Americans are feeling right now? Smashing the usual luxury car convetions so a considerer doesn't feel bad about splashing out? Making me like Eminem for the first time ever? A compelling piece of film I'll remember long after the other Superbowl stuff because it's not an en event, it makes me feel something?

    All of the above and more. Makes you want to sell your sould and work for Wiedens. Beautiful planning, even more beautiful work. Well done, well done, well done.

  • VW does Star Wars

    I love this. It makes me feel warm as a Dad. It reminds me of those days as a little boy, endlessly roleplaying the Star Wars films with the toys and figures, my little mates, making up our own plots, arguing over who got to be Han Solo etc.

    http://www.youtube.com/e/R55e-uHQna0
     

    Reminds me that sometimes, the brief can just be, "Can we just have some great work please? Just try and make the little things thoughtful Dad's do to make their kids happy fun and exciting – you might want to tap into their fond memories of childhood and the role their Dad's in this' – but it's up to you".

  • Hard work

    Don't get me wrong, I like hard working people, or at least the ones that show a commitment and  passion. If there's one thing that typifies successful planners, they seem to work harder than most people.

    But I don't think that necessarily means consistent long hours – that's for another kind of hard worker -the martyr who does 'lots of work' and 'produces lots of stuff' without thinking if what they're doing is actually any good. And more worryingly, there are agencies and agency bosses who think the only people worth anything are the ones who stay until 10pm every day.

    I don't want to incite agency uprisings or anything, and I know all about massive workloads, and sometimes they days have to be long, but ask yourself, are you working 24/7 because it produces better results or because you think it's expected?

    Here are five myths about hard work worth pondering:

    1. Long hours are always a good thing…stress accounts for 14% of sick leave per year. That isn't very productive

    2. Long hours are always rewarded…bollocks it is. You show me one agency that pays overtime. For every jobsworth who's face fits, there's the poor bastard doing real work who always gets overlooked

    3. People always know who is 'working hard' and who isn't….they don't. They don't always know you worked the weekend, they didn't see you come in early, they don't know what time you left. Long hours tend to vary by team – if they knew exactly by how much wouldn't they try and even it up?

    4. Hard work is always admired….sometimes people think you're just disorganised or slow. In a planner, being chained to your desk all day makes you worse in the long term – you need to get out meeting real people and hoovering up interesting stuff. You need to 'not think' which usually when the best stuff clicks in your head.

    5. Hard work makes clients happier….no it doesn't. Masses of hours on the timesheets leads to fee renegotiations which they, of course hate. They only care about the quality of your work. Of course, there are some that expect you to be available 24/7 which is to be lamented, but having your phone switched on for occasional late night chats and stuff isn't the same as being at your desk at 10pm.

    There's a world of difference between working hard and being seen to work hard. One gets results, on gets you an ulcer. I guess much of this is driven by crap agencies selling a process to clients rather than ideas to appear 'professional' and show clients we're serious people like them.

    We're not like them, we take our jobs seriously, but we do the stuff they can't – pretending to be like them only ends up in them figuring out they may as well do it themselves………

  • Pants – Object 4

    I've been spoiled recently, manging to dodge staying away from home too much. So I'm out of practice at the kind of military precision required to pack for a couple of days away in 10 minutes – you know, big project, finishing in the small hours, getting up at the crack of dawn, that kind of thing.

    So it was with a mixture of woeful acceptance and tired frustration how I took the news I'd forgotten to pack underwear and socks. 

    Now I'm a simple fellow and can make do with all sorts of hardships, I've even been known to drink tea from a machine. But I can't do a two day workshop in the same socks and pants.

    So what were the options at 1am in Windsor? Just the one, Tesco 24 hour. But this pointles story doesn't reach a happy resolution.

    Shower gel and deodorant…tick (forgot them too). Decent socks…tick. Pants? The only ones Tesco had in my size were these…

    Pants 
    It was bad enough to be lurking around the health and beauty along with underwear sections of Tesco in the small hours with my long suffering account director (he had to pay, I'd forgotten my wallet too).

    But to shell out for these monstrosities was hard to take. I swear I performed a little less well thanks to the knowledge I was wearing these mini deck chairs.

    Mrs Northern thought they were hilarious, but you know what? I'm becoming quite fond of them now, what do you think?

    Anyway, yet another example of the crushing absent mindedness and comedy of errors that is my life. Ask to me write your briefs and tell you new stuff about how housewives eat biscuits, don't ever ask me to pack for you, or anything that requires organisation in 'real life'.

  • Object 5 Kia Rio

    Kia-model-Kia_Rio_Hatchback 

    For a little while I owned a second hand Alfa Romeo. It was a wonderfully frustrating little bastard – lovely drive, sexy etc, but you knew it's reliability was as trustworthy as a National Enquirer headline. Alfa owners say that's part if the experience but I was never one for masochism.

    To be honest, I never felt comfortable in it. They say you need to see yourself in a car and we never really fit. This was all va va voom, brash self confidence, sexy curves and intense passion. I'm just an odd looking bloke, with a slight stammer, no hair and worrying obsession with tea.

    I guess it's a bit like buying the kind of suit a suave, sophisticated player would wear, only to look in the mirror and seeing a crushingly ordinary person looking slightly more daft than usual.

    So I got rid of it and bought a second hand Kia Rio (the one in the picture isn't THE one but looks identical). To be honest, there was an ulterior motive, I needed cash for something or other and quick, but it wasn't a struggle to make the swap, quite the opposite.

    I owned that car for four years, I did 100,000 miles in  it, with virtually no problems. It took me over the Pennines to Manchester every day. It never let me down. But more than that, I loved what people said about it.

    So many people couldn't understand why I wasn't embarrased owning this clunky, Korean monstrosity. Many laughed, it became something of an in-joke. But I didn't mind that, in fact I loved it.

    On one level, that car represented me beginning to care a lot less about what the things I owned said about me, and being far more bothered about what I did. If people judge me by how I look, or by owning the right labels, symbols or whatever else, I say balls to them.

    Put another way, that car is about becoming comfortable in your own skin and coming to terms with who you are rather twhat others want or what you've deluded yourself into.

    That's important for surviving in this industry, especially as a planner. A big ego gets in the way.

    On a more general level, I don't care where you've worked, what you've done and who you know. I have no interest in what people wear, only what they can do and what they're interested in.

    It's better to ignore what the cognoscenti will think about your work, only what the client thinks and not even that really…..the people you're trying to sell things to. That's why I go into orbit when people slag off Try Something New Today as not that creatively exciting. Bollocks, it does the job it's supposed to do and then some. It's genuinely useful to the people it's aimed at and cares about what they care about. I say that's good and if some git in skinny jeans and converse doesn't get that, well good, there's more space for people who want to be good rather than cool.

    Anyway, eventually the Kia died and had to be replaced by a Honda Civic. I love that car too, but not in the way I loved my little, modest, shambolic Kia.

  • What I’ve learned from cooking

    I'm not bad at cooking, I'm not amazing either. Most of my stuff never looks particularly beautiful, but I know how to make things taste good.

    Wooden-spoon 

    And that doesn't really come from recipe books, it doesn't come from being dictated to by Gordon Ramsay, it certainly doesn't come from following crap rules like never adding cheese to shell-fish based pasta dishes. It comes, first and foremost from knowing yourself and what you love, along with an understanding what will delight other people.

    It reqires the honest graft of trial and error, developing your own shtick, growing and instinct for food -  what works for you and what doesn't. 

    You have to master the simple stuff and then move to more challenging things, following recipes at first, then developing your own twists and turns. All the time askng yourself what you like, what you don't, how to make this better, what others thought, what things you've done before will go together.

    In other words, work hard at the basics genty try new things and gradually find your voice, always with instinct, intuition and your senses, not just 'craft and rules'.

    It takes confidence to follow your own tastes, but it's only then when you really start to cook, when you can make things you can truly call your own.

    And you can taste the difference, people can tell when you've enjoyed making something, when you've made the effort.

    That's the magic ingredient and it's often missing from restaurant food, the sense that someone cares about how much you enjoy eating the food, rather than how impressive it looks or how trendy the location is. I guess that's why I tend to prefer little, more down to earth places when we go out.

    So what I've learned from cooking are not bad guidelines for living, come to think of it, they're not bad for being a planner.

    At the beginning, know you know nothing. Hoover up every scrap of guidance and information, work hard at the basics, don't run before you can crawl.

    Every meal starts with good ingredients, you can augment this with craft, creativity and added variety, but you can't but quality back in if you don't start with it.

    But never lose your own individality, never forget you own instincts. Once you get proficient and you know the rules, start bending them, find your own voice, first augment tried and tested recipes more to your liking, eventually you'll have developed the intincts to conjure your own magic. You'll know what flavours go, you'll know what textures work, you'll be able to put all sorts of stuff together in new and interesting ways.

    So respect people with more experience, but only so much, once you get your confidence, value input but only treat it as such, it's what works for you that counts.

    But never lose sight of the fact that a proper cook loves making others happy. There are times to cook for you and times to cook for others. Make the effort to know what turns them on, and cook for that, rather than what some over important famous idiot thinks, your audience doesn't care and neither should you.

    So never go for show and coolness over fundamental joy and enjoyment.

    Never pretend you know everything. There is always something else to taste, something else to try, another way of doingt things. The world is too big, with too many ingredients and people for you to ever have covered everything, but if you always try to do just that, it wil make you a better cook, a better person and, I guess a better planner.

    And finally, enjoy it. Don't make it a chore or harder than it has to be. Your food will taste better that way, and so will the other things you do.

     

  • Object 4 Bamboo pen and tablet

    So this is next on the list.

    Bamboo

    In case you don't know, you can a pen instead of a mouse, a pad and software to stick your handwriting on documents and stuff.

    Like this

    It's not earth shattering, but after suffering death by powerpoint a zillion times I refuse to put others through it and this looks a little more interesting, along with forcing me to to write in simple headlines. Which, in turn, forces you to write the narrative for a presentation first rather than just write blurb.

    On a deeper level, it satisfies a need to not do everything in the sodding corporate template, which in turn is about wanting to be a little more free. I've never been one to just fit in, my slight rebellious streak has made things a little difficult at times.

    Anyway, I've always hankered after doing artier things. As I once mentioned, I loved doing art and was stopped in my tracks my a disagreeable teacher. I can't shake the need to express myself though, probably never will. I guess that's one of the reasons for this blog, and why I'm not bothered about the fact no one reads it anymore, that's not what it's for (and it's not very arty).

  • Assume the worst

    Susannah York died last week.

    SusannahYorkD221 
    She was a something of an icon in the 1960's with roles in important films like They Shoot Horses Don't they? and A Man for All Seasons (one of my favourite plays incidentally).

    She'd be mortified to know that what I best remember her for is Superman.

    Supernan 
    But it came out when I was growing up, first film Dad took me to see it, just the two of us. Happy memories.

    Maybe she wouldn't be bothered, maybe she's proud of it. I know that Alec Guinness hated Star Wars and the fact that most people ending up thinking of him as Obi Wan Kenobi, rather than the distinguished, talented actor he was with a phenomenal output.

    And what's true of actors is true of companies that make stuff and agencies that do creative work. People don't just judge you for your best stuff, what you're most proud of, they judge you by ALL the things you do and all the things you've done. Like:

    Brands with great ads but crap brand experience.

    Agencies that only put challenging award winners on their reel conveniently forgetting the less interesting stuff from their biggest paying clients.

    Agency people who will say,"But when I worked at Mother", "When I won an APG", "When I worked on Nike". No one cares, they want to know what you're going to do now.

    You're only as good as you're worse piece of work, you're not as good as you think you are you're as good as others think you, it's not what you did, it's what you've done.

    Like Susannah York, you can't assume that people only know you for best stuff, plan for the fact they might know you for the worst.

  • Missing Manchester

    Work related stuff pulled me over the pennines to Manchester for the first time since I left TBWA.

    Manc 
    Despite the fact it was, predictably, raining, I realised I quite missed it. There's an wry, upbeat realism you don't get anywhere else, especially Yorkshire that basks in it's plain-speaking dourness a little too much at times.

    But then the drive home was the usual bumper-to- bumper, gridlocked nightmare. Let me tell you, it was so bad I had to stop and get a Greggs steak bake to compensate. It was either that or turn to the Manchester branch of The Church of Scientology. I reckon I'd make a great Thetan. I wander if Zenu makes tea in the pot?

    Scientology