Most of the planners I work with either want to be the client (‘I wanna be the brand manager on this’) or want to hide behind the voice of a third and fourth parties (‘research says that consumers don’t want to hear that’). And both attitudes drive me mental.
So here, for those who care, are the six things that I’d demand of a department were anyone brave enough to hand one over to me.
1) Planners should be experts in advertising
They should know how it works, be able to map and model it, to diagram it and they should be perceptive enough to abandon all of those things when they see magic rather than logic
2) Planners should know what people care about
And know what they could be made to care about – and what they’re going to care about next
3) Planners should be Babelfish
Able to talk to anyone, knowledgably and at the other person’s level – and then be able to translate what they learned when they talk to the next person. There’s no point in having an idea if you can’t express it
4) Planners should have a point of view
Their own point of view, not a 3rd party point of view or a cocktail party point of view. Planners shouldn’t be afraid to start sentences with “I think…” or “I believe”
5) Planners should be masters of the hook up
They should be clued into popular culture, they should know what’s happening, who’s making it happen and how to rope those people in to help.
6) Planners should make a difference to the work
They should be judged on the quality of the work not the cleverness of the plan. A planner whose thoughts live only in powerpoint is a planner that’s adding nothing.
Okay – so it’s all very simple, obvious stuff. But simple and obvious is what’s missing from most planning departments.
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