whizdumb

Moving on, moving in

Time to shake things up a bit.  After four years here in the fine city of Denver, we've decided to make a change and move to New York. 

I'm going to miss a lot of people here in Denver.  I've had a fantastic experience at Integer; it's a great place to work with a strong culture and fine people.  I still think it's the best kept secret in the agency world (but becoming less secret all the time).

And I'll miss Coffee Mornings.  But we've got a new host for the coffees: Monique Elwell, a planner-type over at McClain Finlon.  Monique's energy and gift for gab have always served coffees well, and we're really excited to have her step up as host.  Coffee Mornings will continue as usual on the first and third Friday of each month.  Monique will keep the reminders and updates coming. And as always, to join the email list for details on the coffees write to coffeemorningsdenver@gmail.com. 

And Melissa Wilhelm of Sprout Strategy has offered to be the Denver point person for Planning For Good. Another piece of great news as PFG grows. 

For me the time has come for a new challenge, an opportunity to experience and contribute from a different perspective.  So over the last few months I've got to meet a lot of interesting people and agencies in New York, and I'm excited to have found a home in the planning group at R/GA.  My new job starts on Tax Day.

More details on this to come.  But in the meantime take a look at something R/GA launched in Europe for Nokia called the Urbanista Diaries.  I'm pretty biased now but still, it seems a great example of how the future of the marketing campaign might look.  From an R/GA release:

Urbanista Diaries is an extensive three-phase campaign that engages bloggers, journalists, and everyday people in ways that highlight the benefits of the Nokia N82. While the technology for this project is currently in beta, Nokia is partnering with several top media sites such as Wallpaper, Lonely Planet, National Geographic, and CNN to document major world events in real time. Reporters are given a Nokia N82 to snap photos, which easily get uploaded to the Internet and positioned on a stylized map-thus allowing people to follow their stories around the world.

More to come as soon when I unpack my computer late next week or so.  I think it's in box 63 or something.  Crap.

Goodbye 2007, Goodbye Planner 1.0

Time for the New Year post.  A tidy wrap-up of eight significant things for 2008.  I thought I'd avoid adding to the slew of top-10 ads of the year and the like.  Instead I'd like to focus on planning and where I see things going.

I've been a planner now for nearly a decade but this last year has seemed so different from previous years. I feel the role of the traditional agency planner is irreversibly altered.  Why?

1. Millennial talent
Like a lot of other fields, the influx of new talent is coming from Millennials - the twentysomethings who have been steeped in technology their whole lives.  And as planners, they are bringing the same sentiment to work everyday.  Their comfort with design and technology means they don't have to unlearn many bad habits; they haven't become jaded or beaten by spending years cranking out :30's.  They are people like Daniel, Courtney and Erin, among the new breed of planning voices.  They are curious, broadly talented, less inhibited, and they blog about it all. (Incidentally, I've never met Daniel, Courtney or Erin.  But isn't that just a greater testament to the changes afoot?)

If you'd like to read more check out Daniel's compilation of Advertising's Young Minds: The top 27 blogs of people under 27. 

2. Open-source exchange
This was truly the year of the planning blogs.  As I write this there are 138 planning blogs listed on Plannersphere and the list seems to be growing by the week.  Planners are melding open-source thinking with technology and it's making us all smarter.  And the open planner mentality is growing slowly but steadily.  I think the planner's approach to the web will move from simple sharing of ideas (blogging) to greater collaboration on problems and idea-strengthening (forums like plannersphere and Planning for Good). We're realizing that sharing wisdom and ideas - everything short of proprietary client knowledge - can only strengthen our discipline and ourselves.

3. Doing stuff
As a group we're damn good at chewing over things.  We provide context, analyze, research, ask big questions and so on.  But this year we took strides to connect differently.  Coffee Mornings grew around the world thanks to nudges by a slew of planners and likemind, which currently has over 40 coffee events attended by 2,000 people a month around the world (Anomaly pays for the coffee). 

And the guys over at Planning For Good started something truly wonderful by putting some structure around a simple idea: As long as planners are getting together over coffee and online, why not solve some problems at the same time?  The result has been fantastic with three high profile PFG assignments in the last 5 months and a year-end event with GOOD magazine.

4. Underwear-changing dialogue
While I only attended the Account Planning Conference last year, reading about the Polygamous Marriage and experiencing the dialogue at APG, it seems that the yearly gathering of planners has moved from navel-gazing to pants-wetting (as a result of both gleeful change and fear of being irrelevant). 

There is a sobering realization that the traditional planning-in-agency model is broken and new insight & strategy models are developing.

5. Outsourcing execution
A surgical separation of the ideators and the executors.  Lowe, Leo Burnett, Saatchi, McCann, Ogilvy and Grey are starting to do it by experimenting with places like The Department of Doing. 

Scott Goodson at Strawberry Frog has made a strong case for its importance, arguing that agencies can't define their true value until they decide what business they're in: the idea business or the execution business.   

The shift in outsourcing execution has implications for planning. Because when creatives don't have to spend 80% of their jobs executing ideas they can spend more time with planners exploring new ones.

6. New agency models
Emerging and established nontraditional shops like Naked, Anomaly, Zeus Jones, Space 150, Strawberry Frog, ITO Partnership, Poke, and Mother are redrawing the role of strategy and it's often at the center or blurred with creative as a source of value (we're starting to walk a similar path at Integer).

Perhaps even more dramatic is the fact that most of these shops simply expect creative thinking from planners and strategic thinking from creatives.  Therein lies their strength: They have internalized a way of working good thinking into their cultures instead of seeing it as an issue to be solved organizationally.

And the boundaries of planning and the agency continue to be explored as Leland and the folks at Collins are set to play with yet a new approach.

7. Changing role of research
Market research - long the tool of the planner - is entering a midlife crisis. Today's environment demands anticipation over measurement.  Nimbleness over norms.  It's not that planners don't get it; we do.  It's just become more important than ever for us to make the case that rigorous learning is different from the dreaded T-word: testing. 

Because in a climate that requires innovation it's no longer sufficient to talk to consumers to find answers.  The role of research is becoming more about knowing your consumers but not letting them lead you.  One emergent example that recognizes this is peep, an Anomaly backed research boutique.
 

8. The flatlining 'line'
The traditional agency caste system, separating those above and those below, is a dying concept.  DraftFCB is the most obvious example of a macro merger experiment, and R/GA's establishment of a retail offering to "bring dynamic interactive shopping to the retail environment" has certainly broken a few molds.  And the passion to erase the line is felt abroad too.

For the planner this obviously pushes things into interesting territories.  Do you focus your strengths to be a 'retail planner', an 'interactive strategist' or simply a strategic generalist?  Who knows for sure.  But what is certain is that the Planner 1.0 will be a dying breed. Because the landscape is all at once fracturing and coalescing into a lovely strategic swamp, and we all must learn to swim.  Or at least to float.

I couldn't be more excited about it all.

Coffee mornings update

Well it's been a couple weeks since our last coffee and I haven't written any sort of a recap.

Briefly, we had nice group including David, Monique, Anoud, and Hillary who was new to coffee.  We talked about a range of things from Jello to loyalty programs to Meetup.com and Sheeples. (David and I got off on a tangent afterwards on how to design a new breed of research facility, which led to this post).

The new news is that we have a fresh Planning for Good brief in the door.  It's the last one of the year.  Unfortunately I'll be unable to attend the next coffee which is scheduled for this coming Friday 12/7 but Melissa Wilhelm has agreed to be our guest host.  She hasn't been at coffee for a few weeks so I'm sure she'll be fired up to work on this PFG assignment. 

Oh, I should also mention that the Unicef brief we worked on a few weeks ago was presented to the client.  Here is what Gareth said about it at the PFG Facebook Group:

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the UNICEF brief. As Ed said, it was a great meeting and the ideas lived beyond my scratchy voice. They were truly blown away and are due to get back to us with next steps in the next day or so.
Alisa, the client, asked us to pass on her thanks.  So thank you all very much.

The guys promised to get the presentation up on SlideShare in the near future. I'll post it once it's up.

Anyway, our new brief is an exciting one and I know Melissa has a lot of heart for the cause.  It's for Live Earth.  Here's a brief version of the assignment, from Planning for Good's new blog:

It’s no longer a debate. Global climate change is a fact of life today. Scientists from all over the world agree that the evidence of a warming trend is "unequivocal," and that human activity has "very likely" been the driving force in that change over the last 50 years; they believe the earth could warm by an additional 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 21st century if we fail to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels. This rise in average temperature will have far-reaching effects. Sea levels will rise, flooding coastal areas. Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense. Droughts and wildfires will occur more often. Disease-carrying mosquitoes will expand their range. And species will be pushed to extinction.

Global warming is already affecting the world we know, endangering polar bears, shortening ski seasons and creating more intense storms.

The Live Earth global concerts on 7/07/07 helped to create a tipping point of awareness in the U.S. this summer. Live Earth is leading the charge to create a mass movement to influence people to address climate change, through the power of entertainment. With 8 concerts on 7 continents, and a broadcast on over 150 TV stations around the globe. Live Earth was the largest global media event in history. This event was the single largest online entertainment event ever, and in total we had an estimated live audience of 1 million people, and 2 billion total viewers around the world.

The UN secretary general has called the climate crisis “the most defining crisis of our time,” and has pointed to the U.S. (and China) as the leading emitters of greenhouse gasses. In the next 9 months, Live Earth will focus our efforts here at home where awareness and behavior change are lagging from the rest of the western world.

Background – Live Earth 2008 Campus Program:
On April 20, 2008 we will kick-off a massive Live Earth fueled student movement in the U.S. Ultimately, we aim to reach half the total student population – nearly nine million undergraduates.

Assignment:
Help us position Live Earth and create a messaging strategy that will kick-start students to take action. Help us define actions that will be the most relevant to students and help the cause. Evaluate our current messaging and inform us on how we can make it smarter, more impactful.

The Live Earth Assignment has 3 components:
1. How should LE be positioned to college students?
2. How should messaging come out of that?
3. What do the actions look like?

The assignment is due 12/17 so bring your brain and some caffeine and join Melissa this Friday 12/7!  Usual time and place: 8:00am at Common Grounds, 17th and Wazee in downtown Denver.

[image: Live Earth belt sold in the UK, made from reclaimed London fire brigade hose, available for purchase here.]

Planning For Good entry: UNICEF

We used our Coffee Morning last Friday to chew over the Planning For Good assignment.  It was based on an interesting brief for UNICEF's holiday period giving drive. 

Many thanks to Ameet, Elizabeth, Eric, Sarah, Erin, Ralph, David and Tom for their energy and ideas. Sarah even wrote a follow-up about the coffee.

I've done my best, in a very short time, to bring it all together in our idea submission.  Already when I read it I see some things I'd do differently but such is the nature of short timelines. 

You can download our submission here.  What do you think?

Can't wait to see what other groups have submitted.

Coffee Mornings' first Planning For Good assignment

Did you ever think you could help a non-profit by drinking coffee with some friends?

This Friday's coffee is going to be a little different.  I've volunteered us help out a global group of planners trying to do good stuff for people who need it.  It's called Planning For Good and described as:

Account planners and their friends using their brains to help solve problems for causes and non-profits.

To date Planning For Good has, through its Facebook Group, tackled its first project: helping the New Orleans non-profit group Idea Village create a vibrant, entrepreneurial community through talent and collaboration and innovation.  See the first PFG presentation that resulted from that effort here.

Ed Cotton, the organizer of PFG recently sent this out to the group:

We are keen to get as many great ideas for non profits as possible and with time constraints we know it's often hard to participate.  So we want to make it easier. Here's how.

1, We want to create PFG city groups

2. Each city will have a leader who organizes coffee mornings - 30/40 minute brainstorms over a brief that happen once a month

3. The ideas generated are then sent in

It's a good way to meet people and do good at the same time.

So naturally I volunteered our coffee morning this Friday for just such an assignment.  And the brief came in today so we're going to tackle it Friday!

The assignment is about helping UNICEF in a late 2008 five-day push. 

So here's what I'm asking of you:

- Read the PFG brief for UNICEF 
- Come to Coffee this Friday with your strategy and creative hat on and start jabbering.  Hell, even if you haven't read the brief, come on by!
- You'll have done some good and had some good conversation doing it.

I'll coordinate any submissions / ideas that we create and will get it out to the PFG group.  It's a really quick deadline as all ideas need to be submitted four days later, 11/7.

Thanks in advance for your participation.

P.S. If you're feeling really frisky about it and want to get started before coffee, bring some of your ideas on the PFG Submission Form.