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Future of Planning according to Zeus Jones

Zeus Jones' deck on the future of planning is now up for viewing.  In my opinion this was one of the highlights of the AAAA Account Planning conference last month in San Diego. 

Oh, and if you haven't roamed around SlideShare yet it's pretty wild... like YouTube for PowerPoint.

Naked planning

Since returning from the Account Planning Conference I've been chewing over a few things.  Here are a some thoughts that keep coming back to me.

In one Dutch city they are experimenting with the traffic congestion problem in a rather nontraditional way.  They've removed more than 80% of all traffic lights and more than half of the road signs in Drachten, Holland.  They call it Naked Streets. From an article in Good magazine:

Pulling up to an intersection where the traffic lights aren’t working is confusing. Whose turn is it to go? Who has the right-of-way? Inevitably, you have to negotiate the intersection by interacting—you look around for pedestrians, then, making eye contact with other drivers, slowly pull across the intersection.

After sitting through two and a half days of presentations in San Diego I was left with the sense that some fundamental assumptions within account planning - and in a bigger sense, advertising itself - are  being removed like so many Dutch street signs, leaving us to lead more by our instinct.  I think it is a good thing, to become more aware of the wayfinding crutches we use, and to step into the new marketing environment naked and hyper aware. 

A few of the assumptions I'm talking about:

Keeping it stupid simple v. being mister clever smartypants
Mark Earls' breakout session In Praise of Stupid argued for more Barnum, less brain surgery.  He cautioned agency planners on becoming too clever for our own good.  And he talked about planners playing the role of a creative producer rather than an artist.

Speed to market v. the single 'right' idea
A lot of talk around the importance - especially with web 2.0 and social media and the like - of being quick to market in myriad ways as opposed to researching the hell out of one idea then executing it across all mediums.  The greater point being that messaging is far inferior to brand behavior in building believers.

Creative as a department v. universal creativity
Ken Robinson eloquently stated the case that everyone is endowed with a creative intelligence.  It reminded me how sometimes you hear an agency say 'we believe creative ideas can come from anywhere' but this basically takes sit a step further to say 'creativity must come from everywhere'. Because in many ways creativity is the only competitive advantage.  The planner then helps to create the climate for creativity to flourish. 

Message v. behavior
Moving from the business of messages to one of inciting belief in a brand through behavior.  There was lot of discussion around Belief Brands with Eric Ryan's presentation of his company Method being the most prominent example.  In a couple of the most amusing and memorable pirate / navy moments he compared his marketing budget to the amount P&G spends on their own toilet paper and said his company has an advantage over P&G, Unilever and S.C. Johnson because he's alive.  (You can watch the webcast of his presentation but you can't actually see the slides in the video.)  And Mark Earls talked about how thinking follows behavior and behavior follows belief.

Researching insight v. test marketing instinct
Perhaps most shocking (not sure if that's too strong a word but I'll stick with it) was how diminished the role of research, especially qualitative, was in the conversations.  Great planners that have broken free of agencies (Eric Ryan, the guys at Zeus Jones, Mark Earls, Adam Morgan, etc.) spoke very little about research.  When it came up it seemed to be playing such a back seat role to informed action.  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; then putting something in market in different ways in measured amounts, and seeing how it performs.

Consistency and control v. other stuff
And Gareth Kay and Mark Lewis argued there are Seven Deadly Sins of marketing today. I like how they talked about seven sins of marketing not just planning.  The themes they identified pretty much cover the stuff above and then some. 

 

Planning blogs talking about planning blogs

Just returned from the Account Planning Conference. 

I didn't attend this particular breakout session but the guys over at Butler Shine + Stern's Influx Insights and Aki Spicer of Fallon Planning Blog have posted the deck from the talk on Blogging the Agency. 

They did a survey among planners which ended up segmenting them into three types on their attitudes about planning.  This slide is a quote from from Jon Steel who obviously represents the skeptics. 

Love the debate!

I've got more observations from the conference coming soon.

APG around the corner

As we near the APG next week AdAge just written the expected soul searching piece.  (At least it doesn't include some part of the phrase "The Death of... as we know it.")

And AdWeek writes about the increasingly Crowded Space for Strategic Thinkers which raises the question of strategy ownership.  A few things to knock around the noggin heading into San Diego on Monday.

I'm not really going to go into much on these articles except to say they do get the wheels turning, and as planners there's a sense that we have to consider things like:

- The role of media / context planning with account planning
- A planner's role to lead with simple and single minded thinking in an age where brands behave in increasingly dynamic and complex ways
- User generated content and control over marketing
- The tension between needing to learn first then act deliberately, versus act / learn / repeat
- How the planner armed with a brief or something like it can shape brand behavior rather than simply brand communication
- The increasing role of retail and shopping as an experience and the rise of retail brands over product brands

Am I missing anything?

Not sure how much I will be posting over the course of the conference but it looks like WARC teamed up with AAAA to host some sort of a planning blog here.

And if you happen to be really into writing about conferences as you attend them help is out there from the guy who studiously blogs the legendary TED Conference.

Next up: User Generated Strategy?

When it comes to consumer generated content, most of it tends to have a pretty short shelf life.  A video, a tagline, etc.  But one submission headed for the Heinz Top This TV challenge has a bit more staying power.  Sculptor Robin Antar has made a ketchup bottle out of marble and is going to film the process for a commercial she'll submit to Heinz. (The thing is on display along with other marble pieces at the Marble Sculpting Symposium until Aug. 5 in the town of Marble, Colorado.)

Heinz has been big on the consumer generated content thing for awhile now. Say Something Ketchuppy was among the more interesting UGC campaigns as it tinkered with the almighty logo.

This new contest is pretty conventional but instead of broadcasting the winner and spending all that money on media they're simply posting the top 15 videos on YouTube and having the public vote on the winner.  Most of the submissions I viewed are pretty forgettable though this one stood out to me:

But I have to say if I was a creative I would be pretty nervous about this user generated content thing.  How long can a brand be buoyed by consumer content contests?  It's really starting to get old.  And how many modifications of the same 'submit your...' approach can smart creative departments crank out before they feel like expendable middlemen?  Daniel Pink wrote a compelling argument about about how in the conceptual economy jobs that require creative thinking will thrive while those that can be automated, a la computer programming, will be outsourced.  Perhaps this should serve as a small warning to the agencies over-reliant on the UGC trend:  Is it diminishing the 'conceptual' nature of our contribution and even our role in the Conceptual Age?

To me, the sweet spot could be some sort of a hybrid between 'here is our idea, love it or leave it' being one extreme and 'hey we give up, you tell us what this brand should say' on the other. 

But all of this dangles the question, what about the planner's contribution?  Our brand conscience?  What kind of rubber stamp strategic thinking goes into 'lets' leverage consumer's ability to operate a video camera and let them make an ad'? 

It certainly makes use of a salient trend but I can't help but think the people behind the cameras are becoming the next generation of professional sweepstakes entrants.  In the short term it adds up:  The brand is happy because it saved money on big production and media budgets.  The consumers like participating and seeing genuine content created by their peers.  But what does this do long term to the agency role? 

Of course the reason for these big questions is that this stuff used to be totally promotional and always complemented by a more strategic brand advertising campaign.  But now these contests are soliciting brand ideas that get big exposure and act as a proxy for mainline brand advertising (like Doritos' super bowl spot).  I can almost hear a client asking why, in this example, does Heinz need an agency at all?

The good news is that despite this trend the marketplace for strategic thinking is getting ever more crowded and good planning is in greater demand.   

Hmmm.  Why pay all those expensive agency fees?  I smell a contest brewing!

The other book of lists: Milk Eggs Vodka

Bill Keaggy, an early blogger and collector of pointless things (like rocks shaped like shoes.  Really.) has published a book of equally mundane yet slightly more significant things.  Shopping lists.  Discarded shopping lists to be exact. (By the way, if you're into other people's discarded things and haven't read Found magazine it will be your Nirvana.   The mag is better than the site.)

For awhile he's run the site grocerylists.org and I've checked out a few lists here and there.  But now they're combined into a book called Milk Eggs Vodka.  I haven't read the book yet, but I was amused at something he's published online as a teaser for the book.  It's a serial narrative based on the lists themselves, strung together to tell the life story and romance of Allan and Janie.  I like the creative license there, in fact it makes a pretty plausible story. 

The role of the lists themselves as the key players in this drama kind of raises the whole Shopper Culture thing again.  No sooner has Meg written another excellent article on the subject, called Culture of Shopping.  It introduces a study that us Integer planners have just conducted about the role of shopping in American Culture.  Anyway, give it a read and share a thought or two.

The planner as writer

After I read this quote I remembered the times I've struggled to get it right on a brief.  Ultimately I would come out the other side, with the satisfaction of having achieved a measure of clarity of an idea on paper.  Not sure how long that feeling lasted (!) but my point is that I think it is difficult to be a good planner if you are a poor writer.

That said, here is the quote:

“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.”

  - William Goldman, author, screenwriter, on the uncertainties of show business

Tesco goes gonzo

You probably know that Tesco is coming to America.  But some more of the story was revealed in a recent WSJ article, summaried by Tim Manners at Reveries.  You've got to love the gonzo approach Sir Terry takes as he heads ashore, and his plannerly curiosity:

Terry & Tesco. Yet another lad from Liverpool is set to invade America, reports Cecilie Rohwedder in The Wall Street Journal (6/28/07). He may not have a mop-top, and he may not shake up teenage girls, but Sir Terry Leahy, ceo of Tesco plc, sounds like he's more than ready to rave across America's west coast this fall. Tesco is, after all, "the world's third-largest retailer by sales after Wal-Mart and Carrefour" ($84.9 billion), and Sir Terry says he's done his homework on Americans and what they really want in a grocery store. Nobody knows exactly what Tesco's first 100 U.S. stores will be like -- other than small format -- but we do know that they will be designed just for Americans.

"No one store gives them everything they want," says Terry. "You would think it is the home of the one-stop shop but it's not." He arrived at that conclusion only after his team moved in with American families, and "went through their fridges ... we're good at research," says Terry. Tesco then tested such observations in a top-secret prototype store, built inside a warehouse. "We claimed it was a movie set so that people would deliver all these goods and not think it was us," says Terry. ( Paging Homeland Security! :-). "We took ordinary people in, and they really, really liked it," he adds.

Terry also says "climate change" is one of the biggest subjects among consumers, but that most don't know what to do about it. Tesco does. They cut in half the price of low-energy bulbs. "And once we do that," says Terry, "... our competitors ... reduce the price for low-energy bulbs, so now low-energy bulbs are a no-brainer for people." In other words, Tesco listens. "Many organizations say they listen, but they're very selective in what they allow themselves to hear," says Terry. "The great thing about customers is that they're very honest people." And the great thing about America, says Terry, is that "it's a place that rewards innovative retailers." Terry says he's especially excited about Tesco's tortillas, their yogurt, and their Viognier.

I can see clearly now

I sometimes think that in another life when I had more talent, maybe I was (or will be) a designer of some sort.

Until then, I struggle.  So I was delighted to find kuler, a site from Adobe Labs that presents thousands of color combinations that look nice together. 

Thanks to whoever posted it over at plannersphere.

Frustrated art directors unite!

Consumer connection not found

Interesting approach for an agency to take.  But I think it's a missed opportunity. 

This would make a fantastic splash page, leading to a great website behind it.  But the clever roadblock ends with a single email and I'm guessing that prospective clients will leave the site feeling a little underwhelmed.  At least one guy's attempt at contacting them went unsuccessful.

Do you agree?

Thanks to Nicole for passing this on.