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 [email protected]. 

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.

Diaolgue, Part 2

I just went back and reread Part 1.  It feels forced, and like it was written by a planner, which it was.  I didn't mean for the creative to be so shortsighted, I guess it's just that there are a lot of creative minds out there (just as there are a lot of planners) and some of them think that way. 

If I wrote about a creative that was a complete likemind then we wouldn't have to have a conversation at all.  We'd just sit there in a room, silent, knowing exactly what should be done.  Gee, that actually sounds even more strange.

Continued from Part 1.

Setting: An internal creative review, Conference Room C

PLANNER: Yes, beautifully told.  Consciously beautiful.  Like, way too perfectly beautiful.  Not relatable.  We assume way too much here.  Like the people looking at this want to hear from us.  Like they will be paying full attention.  Like they really give a s**t about hearing a story from [brand] about [benefit].  I'm not saying it's not beautiful I'm just saying that beautiful is not going to cut through. 

CREATIVE: We tried cutting through before and you know how that one ended.

PLANNER: That's because we shouted louder.  That's a volume issue not a tone issue. 

CREATIVE: This is what they're asking for.  I think they'll buy it.

PLANNER: Do you buy it?

CREATIVE: F**k man, it's not about me, like you said before, I'm not the target audience.  They aren't buying [brand] because they can't justify the higher price.  We have to show them why they should.  Their lives are so busy and stuff that we have to reach them with something meaningful, like you said.

PLANNER: Right.  But what is meaningful in this context?  We can't talk to people like that anymore.  We'll get ignored.  Look, you've got a fantastic intuitive sense about people.  You don't need me to tell you about the human draw to a good story, about characters, about drama, hope, dreams, all that s**t.  You get it.  But those are also the things that are thrown around into bad TV and movies.  The thing is, the way things are going, that kind of blockbuster mainstream story is going away in favor of other things.  It takes a new kind of creativity.  It's a lot harder, I have to say.  I worry that we're taking the easy way out.

CREATIVE: We're just trying to sell more [category]. You make it sound like we're saving the world.

PLANNER: We're sparing the world from more crap.

CREATIVE: Maybe, but it is still advertising.  The other one we did that was similar to this tested through the f*****g roof.

PLANNER: Oh, so now you're a fan of our client's copy testing?

CREATIVE: No, but this will probably test well too, and that's the only way it will get made.

To be continued...

Dialogue, Part 1

I was wondering if sometimes it might be easier to write a conversation than to write a straight-on point of view.   

And I had some stuff knocking around to get out.  So how about some imagined exchanges between agency people. 

Is it an easier read?  Different?  Break things up a bit?  Whatever, here goes.

Setting: An internal creative review, Conference Room C

PLANNER: It feels like an ad.

CREATIVE: It is an ad.

PLANNER: I know, I know... it just feels conspicuously like an ad.

CREATIVE: Well it's supposed to sell stuff so...

PLANNER: It just feels false, I can't put my finger on it.  Like we're not really getting to the truth we talked about, the insight.

CREATIVE: What do you mean, it's all right there.  It's bringing that insight to life.

PLANNER: Yes but, ummm.  Give me a sec, I'm trying to figure this out. 

Okay, It's like I'm watching Pearl Harbor.  I'm totally aware that I'm watching a movie.  Like I'm on blockbuster ride that leaves a bad actor taste in my mouth.  There are special effects that I've seen a million times before.  I know what's going to happen, and when.  But we want this to be more authentic, like a Paul Greengrass thing.  The guy made the Bourne movies and, whether you like them or not, you didn't totally feel like you were watching a movie while you were watching them.

CREATIVE: But blockbusters make money.  It sounds like you're trying to impose your particular sense of taste.

PLANNER: In a way, yes.  Because the tastes of people are shifting.  Blockbusters aren't performing nearly as much as they used to.  People are turning to more imaginative and authentic kinds of entertainment, and doing it on their terms.  We need to make stuff that people would not instantly look at and say, "that feels like an ad."

CREATIVE: It is real though.  The art direction is beautiful.  The casting is perfect.  It's a genuine moment between the [subject A] and the [subject B].

PLANNER: Really?  Do you think people will look at that and feel a genuine impulse of human emotion?  Is it more like a Hallmark card or is it more like some high-impact kind of art? 

CREATIVE: Neither.  There's a story in there.  It's telling a story.  It's a beautifully told story.

To be continued...

[image from Doc Ross]

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.

BBH's response to talent crisis: an idea

With all the chatter about the talent crisis in agencies these days it's nice to see at least one agency taking a novel approach to finding good people.  BBH has taken a page from Monster's lauded 1999 commercial, which was lampooned in another all-too-long advertising film (and then downhill even further to this waste of time).  Although not completely original the BBH take is executed with more craft and wit than the rest.  And though I struggled sometimes to understand what he was saying, to my American ears the accents only add to the fun.

Via Only Dead Fish

Sloppy praise

Every year the Advertising Week supplement in AdAge has a bunch of agency ads.  It's entertaining to see what agencies do when they have to advertise themselves.  One such ad from Deutsch points you to adsturbation.com, a place where you can get your kicks receiving unabashed praise from a client, intern, creative or account guy.  The site runs slowly, but maybe it's on purpose... even the loading page makes you feel dirty.