Planning - Planners & The Plan

Great Planners Are Schizo

great planners are schizo from Heidi Hackemer

This is a very timely presentation on planners and schizophrenia.

Helge Tennø

When the marketing becomes the product

View more documents from Helge Tennø.

A short while ago in my favourite nightclub anywhere in the world which I wrote my next post under (with you tomorrow), a young couple from Italy got talking to me while I smoked a cigarette outside on the stairway.

The girl asked me what I do. Well there was a time when being a planner was too hard to sound-bite without sounding pompous, but I was fortunate enough on this occasion, to have the company of a writer who implied he wrote copy to keep his head above water, and  the girlfriend who worked in advertising as a creative. They were from Milan and so I remembered I'd been there two years ago for the global creative review that JWT takes very seriously and which still takes place I think each quarter. More on that over here if you're interested.

We talked briefly about where was hip and hot, and we had one of those deliciously violent agreements that rapidly settled on South American and specifically Argentinia and Brazil as serving up some of the hottest advertising on the planet. Second choice was that Scandinavia was totally on top of its game, to which I added that it's my belief that the Scandinavians are consistently and coherently pumping out some of the best planning thinking on the globe right now and thus validating the planning discipline.

Arguably this part of Europe is now ahead of London, and New York (with the exception of Lee Maschemeyer and Faris) and in some ways,  as is the Scandinavian tradition, is ostensibly chipping away at reconciling what I recently like to call The Grand Theory.

This is the one planners are (I feel) morally obliged to attempt to pull together the unavoidable yet disparate ends of both wealth creation and sustainable consumption i.e. doing the right thing the right way at the right time with the right people, because surely that is the only challenge worth applying our collectives mind to; The unexamined life not worth living and all that?

Let's be candid. The creative community's core skills and output shouldn't be burdened with this Sisyphean task AND the need to recognise the importance and value of awards in our business and more importantly peoples appreciation of communication well thought through. Our account people are, (and should) be too busy getting on with keeping our collective shit together doing the grown up stuff like running our clients business and keeping them happy.

I was thinking specifically of Helge Tenne from Norway, when I talked about the Scandinavian (Arctic?) circle with the Italians, but I could just as easily talk about both the creative and intellectual coherency eminating from Sweden and Finland too.

In any case (don't I just go on?) this latest  presentation is a great example of the quality of thinking I'm excited about, and which points towards a much more responsible and less opportunistic role for marketing communications in the future, although that isn't the purpose of Helge's presenation specifically.

And if any of that sounds like rubbish (which it probably is) then I urge you to take a tangential tour to this podcast with one of my favourite thinkers Doug Rushkoff and listen to the raw authenticity of the radio medium uncut and sprinkled with idiosyncratic thought-points worth pausing over two if not three times. 

Excellent media in action.

Right. As you were.

Communication Efficacy

Developing your own planning style

View more presentations from adliterate.

My planning mentor would have just distilled that title down to 'Efficacy', which is the what we planners do. But in any case Richard Huntington of Saatchi & Saatchi has put a presentation up that he did at the IPA called "Developing your own style" which is the school of planning that I learned at HHCL & Partners where Richard and I both worked, nearly a decade ago. Richard also includes some words from Guy Murphy the Global Planning Director for JWT and one of the reasons why I joined JWT and would fear them in any big pitch. Guy is easily the best multinational network planner I've had the luxury of spending time with when I worked for JWT in London before heading out to Beijing.


Often it's not what Guy says. It's what he doesn't say that commands most respect and is to my mind genius clever from the perspective of garruolous planners like myself. Less is more and all that.


Anyway enough of my waffle. Take a couple of minutes to see how powerful the right combination of words can be from some of the best in the business. And as someone who has lived and worked in more countries than most as a planner I think I can seperate the politically savvy but creatively mediocre beasts from the best in class cats.

Darkie

ybboey

It was on my first trip to Burma in 2001 that I knew something was going on in a global cultural sense that I should try to understand. I was traveling light from one military checkpoint state to another when I saw the only sign of dissent in the whole country. It was a gang of youths dressed in cheap baseball hats and basketball vests playing of all things the unmistakable genre of Rap in Burmese. They were doing no harm but for sure they were saying things suck in Burma, and that's a fact because in Burma they really do.

I guess the reason for my incomprehension was that I didn't 'get' Hip Hop or Rap. I thought it was the lowest common denominator of music to dance to. Anyone could do it. A couple of gang gestures, a bobbing head and some Yo Yo exhortation meant that anyone was down with the bad asses. But it wasn't working for me. I couldn't see why people loved it so much and would frequently walk out of clubs in protest, as I always do if the music is rubbish.

Then I got some education.

Some years on from that Burma trip I was with some friends and invited to hang out in a bar on Royal City Avenue (RCA) in Bangkok called Hip Hop. The crowd were an unpretentious and friendly bunch and the music was really rather good when the DJ dropped a Diana Ross Hip Hop mix that blew me away and I knew what the problem was. I'd been listening to bad Hip Hop for all those years.

A conversation with a very smart DJ friend of mine helped also to clarify that Hip Hop was a culture, a movement and not just a genre of music and so now I have no problem hitting a bar for Hip Hop, but like all my music tastes I'm just a bit fussy about what I expose my ears too and need something that makes me think as well as feel.

Well yesterday I came across yet another brilliant Smashing Telly recommendation called The Hip Hop Years. The Origin of Hip Hop. Its on another level and sucked me in for the full 2 hours and 20 minutes 7 seconds. Its completely delicious and to ignore this fine documentary is probably on a par with ignoring the impact that Rock & Roll and Punk had on popular culture. Hip Hop is constantly reinventing, has embraced all genres of music from death metal to classical and brings young people together from the South Bronx to Burma.

But the reason for this post is that I've noticed something while globe trotting and parachute planning in a few countries. I've never come across an African or Afro Caribbean planner. There are plenty of great Indian marketing folk that I've worked with, but I'm starting to get the feeling that planning is predominantly a middle class, Indy music loving, Caucasian pursuit and that is most definitely not a good thing. As I've made clear elsewhere homogeneous advertising is made in homogeneous agencies. As far as I know only two three London planners have expressed an interest in the world's largest and fastest growing music genre and it leaves me asking a difficult question. Are we OK in advertising when it comes to rebranding a toothpaste from Darkie to Darlie but failing abysmally when it comes to black culture? Because if so, we are not representing.

Educate yourself and watch this seminal video.

Insider News

Picture by holyfucking shit

I've long been a fan of Mohammed Iqbal of O&M Bangalore. Not just because he's bright and writes really interesting papers such as the origin (and resiliance) of aphorisms or the long tail of brand communication, but because there's nothing more exciting than when an agency hires some top thinking talent outside of Europe or the States for rapidly growing markets.

Well, more than this, Iq has just posted a vertical Google search engine for all the blogs on the plannersphere which means that I can now find those posts that I failed to bookmark. I've already checked it out and it worked a treat for some posts I was hunting down about Nicolas Taleb's Black Swan. Well done and thank you Iq for doing something really useful. Go check it out, add your blog if you're not listed and make time to read his blog archives too!