Most Planners ...

Working Paper No. 4

Most planners ...

I’ll get straight to the point here.

Most planning, and most planners, are a complete waste of time.

Their hours are billable, but their contribution - well it tends to be negligible.

Ask a creative about it, if you dare. They’ll tell you that most of the briefs that cross their desks are bland, boring, limp, lacking and late. They’ll then add that most of the briefings that they’re forced into are mandatory exercises in listening to the blindingly obvious dressed up as direction

So, how do you avoid being “most planners”?

Start by looking to save time.

There’s not an agency in the world where a creative hasn’t asked an account team “How long have you had this brief?”

The implication is that the account team have been squandering precious time converting the client brief into the agency template - thus giving less time for the people who make things to do their jobs.

It’s never a useful conversation, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not often true.

So let’s be useful, by being time savers.

If you’re given a week to write a brief, then that brief should land in a place that would have taken the creative teams longer than a week to get to. It should close down the dead ends that would have filled the first review and should have opened up ideas that would have taken creative teams lots of time to get to.

If it doesn’t, then all you’ve done is burned hours that could have been spent doing the real work.

Job one - exhaust the obvious

Exhaust the obvious, explore the dead ends, discount all of the logical, rational arguments and throw all of  “the data leads you to only one conclusion” routes onto the pyre of “plausible but predictable.”

Every first thought, obvious way in, lazy shortcut and cut ’n’ paste cliche should have be identified, examined and thrown out - the real job being to find a start point that the teams down the road working on a similar brand in the same category aren’t starting from.

You’ll often hear that planning is simplifying. It’s more than that. Planning is discarding the familiar in search of a fresh take, a fresh angle, a new approach to a problem that the usual answers haven’t put a dent in.

If the teams aren’t given a fresh starting point, you’re asking them to do too much.

A word of warning : - New to you does not mean original

Getting to something interesting, fast is not an excuse to resort to Google Planning.

Google Planning is all too prevalent, given that planners have little time, few resources and less experience than they should given the rate that they’re being billed at.

Here’s how Google Planning often goes

 “Instant Noodles you say. Let me google that.

Well according to my research here, they’re convenient, cheap, need no clean up, contain less shit than you’d imagine and are a staple of student dorms everywhere.

That’s five potential routes.

Which is most surprising?

Well I didn’t know they weren’t totally shit. There’s the brief.”

At this point the Google Planner will hop off to a Facebook planning forum where they can wank on about their insight, add a post our two on imposter syndrome and some comments on threads about NFTs and Brand Purpose.

What they’ve done is mistaken what seemed novel to them with something of interest to anyone. Ooops.

How do you know whether you’re a Google Planner? Here’s a hint.

“Interesting hides in the strangest of places.”

My planners have found new angles on problems in the traffic of Mexico City, in the beauty regimes of Indonesian soap stars, the upsell tactics of Nevada brothels, the dating habits of the Bangkok Kathoey community, in chemo wards, at pop up dinner parties and in the nervous anticipation of jumping from a plane or attending their first munch.

You won’t always get to look for answers in new places, but if you don’t have an “the answer was in the strangest place” story, I’ll wager you’re not a very good planner (yet)

Sidebar

Once you have an idea, a new starting point, do it justice. Write the brief in the most attention grabbing language you can. It’s competing for creative attention. It has a better shot if it’s beautifully written.

Forgettable brief
“Our client is looking to eliminate three aspects of the beauty business - animal testing, over-use of plastic and communication that tells women they aren’t beautiful enough in order to sell beauty to them”

Better brief
“We take the ugliness out of the beauty”

Which segues into Job Two

Job Two - Steal Time

No creative team that you speak to only has one brief on their desk.

Your job, as a planner, is to ensure that yours is the one that they’re thinking about. That it’s the one that leaves the office with them at night, that wakes them up at 3am, that’s on the wall when they arrive at work.

Your job as a planner is to steal all of the time and all of the attention that you can for your brief.

Which means that it isn’t enough that your brief is relevant, or right or urgent. What matters is that it’s arresting, attention stealing and challenging.

So, how do you get to a brief that has enough bite to penetrate the agency’s cynical indifference?

Well there are a thousand ways, but here’s my favourite.

Start with an honest conversation and an unspoken truth.

If you want to get there fast, acknowledge the truth

Planners have permission to tell the truth.

That’s not news, I know. Planning started as a way of bringing the truth into a room filled with too much cigar smoke and idle speculation. It brought in the voice of the customer as a way to prick the bubble of an agency / client relationship that had too often drifted from reality.

Planning was allowed to say “That’s not actually true Nigel, a Vacuum cleaner isn’t her dream anniversary present. Even if it is a Hoover.”

Truth is so rarely acknowledged these days, that it often feels like a revelation.

Bubble pricking truths can unlock briefs, so try it. Say what everyone in the room knows and has accepted won’t ever be acknowledged. Say it out loud, and see where it takes you.

It’s the best tip I have.

The real problem here is the fact that when someone is told they have cancer they assume that getting what they’re due from this insurance company is going to be “a fight”

Women don’t like you because you spent 25 years making 200 ads showing women draped over the hood of the car, before you made one with her behind the wheel

The truth is that the world thinks that your magic was buried with your founder.

The problem you have with the depiction of women in your ads is directly related to the way you treat women in your business.

Objectively you have the worst product on the shelf. You’re a vegetable sauce devoid of vegetables.

If you can find the courage acknowledge the unspoken truth in the room,  get your client to recognise the bigger issue, to raise the uncomfortable issues... then you’re more than half way to having a brief that the creative teams won’t be able to escape.

Because you’re giving them a real problem to solve, rather than a bullshit “reason to buy” - and problems are always interesting.

Okay we’re at least 500 words past tl;dr, so I’ll end this rant with a plea

Suck the marrow out of the bones of the advertising industry .

But I want to leave with a plea that you be selfish.

Your time in this industry is short.

None of us attend retirement parties.

People don’t retire from advertising, they are disappeared 30 years before their retirement date. As WPP’s Mark Read put it “if you look at our people — the average age of someone who works at WPP is less than 30. They don’t hark back to the 1980s, luckily.”

The pay off for this short lifespan is the permission to get out there and do interesting things. To make interesting things. To gather the skills, the stories and the reputation that will carry you for the twenty or thirty working years you have in front of you after your agency consigns you to the bin of expensive irrelevance.

Suck the marrow out of the bones of that opportunity.

Burn short, burn bright, fight not to waste your limited time on mediocrity. Do the work and make work that you love.