Why I am tired of the big idea debate

You’ve heard it before.  ‘The big idea is dead.’  ‘It’s all about lots of little ideas now.’

I just read yet another article about it and felt that it was time to say something again.

I am of the impression that we work from ‘brand platforms’ – sets of values and messages which they use to connect with their audiences, and that we can use these platforms as means of creating work based around ideas of all different sizes.  (Whatever ‘size’ means.  I think it means that a big idea can do lots of things, whereas a smaller one doesn’t go as far.)

However, the debate about the big idea still goes on.  I believe that this is because there is a wee backlash going on.  This is based on traditional planning vs the new planning.  People like me who have made the transition from making above the line campaigns in agencies where TV was the pinnacle, to digitally led agencies where we can do whatever is best for our clients because we have every channel at our disposal.

Because planning in digital seems so different, we feel the need to redefine what we do.  However, after doing this myself for a while, I now feel it is a complete waste of time.  What I do now is essentially the same as it has always been:

• understand the audience
• identify insights
• agree what we want people to understand about the brand
• agree what we want people to do with the brand
• come up with good ideas about how we can make that happen

I’ve been criticised on the blog for this in the past.  And that criticism was fair, so I had a go at trying to explain why I wasn’t totally old school about it.

Big ideas are sexy.  They take ages to come up with.  Wouldn’t we all like to come up with one now and again?  On the other hand, lots of little ideas can be greater than the sum of its parts.  Horses for courses.  It’s up to us to work with our clients to do what is best for their brand.

I’d really like if the big idea debate could just die, rather than the big idea.

Rather than go on about it any more I’d suggest reading the following articles and making up your own mind.  (And then let me know what you think. Or don’t bother.  If you don’t reply I will assume you are getting on with having good ideas.)

 

The big idea is dead:

Think small

Why small matters

The big idea is dead

Rethinking the big idea

The elusive big idea

Simple ideas, well executed

Why it’s time to move away from the big idea

 

The big idea isn’t dead:

The big idea isn’t dead, it’s just smashed up into millions of pieces

Why size matters, big ideas aren’t dead, and ‘think small’ is dangerous advice

The big idea is alive and well

The big idea ain’t dead

Are big ideas dead?  Here’s one to watch out for

 

Is invention strategy the answer?

Ooh, just saw this post of Bud Caddell’s.  Now I am not going to apply for a job in LA any time soon (having found the 50 mile commute to Edinburgh a complete killer) but I absolutely love the concept of Invention Strategy.  I think it is a really neat way of putting what planners/strategists do in digitally led agencies.  So beautifully simple and succinct.  And everyone loves a good Venn, don’t they?

Where do good ideas come from? A post about ideas and creative briefs

Where do good ideas come from?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week, as I was asked this very question the other day, as my good friend Nicki Sprinz was giving a talk on ideas at the most recent She Says event.  I answered her question with lots of rambly stuff, which she kindly edited into something that sounded quite pithy and sensible.

I said

Good ideas come from intelligent creative people working together.  The brief just sets the parameters for the direction and records the thinking.

This has come at a good time as I’ve been asked to do some training with the people in my department on what a planner/strategist does, why planning/strategy is good, and also how to make better creative work/ideas happen (but still be ‘on brief’.)

One of the important elements in this argument is the creative brief.  Creative briefs are important.  Lots of agencies don’t bother with them any more – many more than that don’t seem to care if they’re good – but they should still be held in high esteem because:

They are a record of all the thinking that has happened to date.  This should be a lot of thinking.  There should have been desk research, consumer research, trawling through stats and reports and whatever else to find golden nuggets of insight.  These insights, challenging thoughts which should be no less than ‘revolutionary’, should get people excited about the task.

Here’s an absolutely terrific presentation about creative briefs from Dare:

Anything can be exciting if the benefit to the consumer is made clear in the brief.  If that’s clear then thinking up the next ideas beyond that is down to the people in the room.

Good ideas come from creative people working together.  The brief should be great and the person doing the brief has to know their stuff.  The other people in the room should be creative, smart, funny (funny is essential), enthusiastic, and prepared to say whatever comes into their heads.  The cliche that nothing is wrong in a brainstorm is right.  That’s why it’s a cliche.  I also say ‘working together’ because it is work.  We should be prepared to take lots of time to hone, refine and perfect our ideas.

So, that’s it.  I really would have liked to have been at the event – sounds like it went very well.

I re-wrote a post about brand strategy so hopefully it makes sense now

The story goes, a friend tweeted a link to this article about brand strategy.

In the article Adam Ferrier raises several important points, so I definitely recommend giving it some time.  He also commented on my previous post on the subject and he rightly pointed out that it was difficult to read through the rushed job to get to the points, and also had some further feedback which I’d like to explore.  So I have re-written, because I think the points raised in the article, and in his comments are worth it.

To sum up the last post, what I really wanted to say was this:

Business problems – in terms of solving these, what we are capable of in digitally-led agencies is huge – I’d like to say it’s practically infinite. Yet often we’re just expected to implement a particular thing rather than think about it first.  We’re often not asked to think about the big picture at all, or what it means for the brand more generally.

This isn’t really an ‘us and them’ mentality – I think that things are changing, but they’re not changing very fast.  Clients still think they should go to an ad agency for a ‘viral’ or a brand house for a brand strategy.  In my agency (and I expect most digital/integrated agencies of a particular size) we have the skills in house to do most of this.  I am of the opinion that no brand can survive without sizeable support in digital space.  Working with people who ‘get digital’ is essential.

However, this means that planners/strategists have to be ‘digital’ but they also have to be trained in the traditional skills

I go back to my point in an earlier post. Planning is planning, is planning/strategy.  Whatever you want to call it, it is still answering the questions:

• What are we trying to achieve? (From a business and a comms point of view)
• Who are we targeting and why? And what insight are we operating around?
• What do we want people to say/think/feel/do?
• How are we going to get there?
• And then returning to the question what are we trying to achieve to check, ‘is this right’? And then going back to the beginning if it’s not (being fairly agile about it, innit.)

Adam Ferrier commented that these felt:

• Old School
• Us vs them
• Consumer centric (vs business centric or NPD centric, or partnership centric)
• Doesn’t take into account co-collaboration (consumer and producer)
• Doesn’t take into account strategy through opportunity – rather than the other way around

I think they are old-school, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think it’s important to remember to try to simplify difficult things by asking uncomplicated questions.  There are more questions than this but I do feel that these are the core ones, the ones to start with.  If you don’t have answers to these then you’re less likely to have an easy time of it.

These are the things I learnt as a planner in advertising agencies. I count them – as well as the mantra ‘in order to move products you’ve got to move people’ (thanks to Phil Teer for being my boss when I was at an impressionable age) as the foundations of everything I do.  So that’s possibly why I’m consumer-centric.  A business or a new product is nothing without consumers.  I am still the ‘voice of the consumer’ in the agency.

Outside of advertising agencies – and I should say that actually that means London advertising agencies – I have not had an easy time as a planner until recently.  In digital it is still being understood as a role and in Scotland it is not a very common thing to be.  So maybe that’s why I come across as ‘us and them’.

Digital agencies should be really clear about what their planners/strategists are for, why they are essential, and be much better at selling strategy.

Clients should be prepared to spend more on online brand planning time and research. They should involve their digital agency more in their brand strategies, invite us to the focus groups, and research debriefs.

But mostly it is up to us, as planners/strategists to demonstrate what we are able to do and the value we do add.

First of all, we need to agree that, as Adam says in his article,  that brand strategy needs to be taken more seriously in digital agencies.  This doesn’t really mean the role has to be re-defined, but we should collectively find consensus on it – at least agree what we call ourselves, what the core skillset is.  In my opinion it is the brand and the consumer that are the most important things – whatever we do is dependent on them.  Therefore, the decision on channel, activity, technology, whatever, comes second.

How did that sound?

Why it’s time to value brand strategy (again?)

A friend tweeted a link to this article about brand strategy today. The very same Nicki Sprinz with whom I had a chat about ‘big ideas’ over lunch on Saturday. I quite like them, she doesn’t, although we’re both ‘strategists’.

Anyway, this article is quite badly written – I am not sure what Adam Ferrier was doing that day, but he perhaps had other things on his mind. Planners often do… Anyway it’s a call to arms for planners to ‘innovate, create and play’, and amidst the mentalness of his writing style (maybe that’s why I liked the article so much) there are a several more very important points, which make reading the article worthwhile.

Here are some of the thoughts it provoked in me…

Business problems – what digital can do to solve business problems is huge. Yet often we’re tied up implementing something technical without thinking about it properly. If someone asks you to do a banner or a booking engine, ask them why they want it, find out what they really want their consumers to feel or believe when they see the banner or the booking engine, and take a step back and look at the big picture. Perhaps they want a banner because they’re not getting enough traffic to a particular place on their site, but maybe what they need isn’t a banner but more useful content…

You can’t really do content without having some form of ‘big idea’ or ‘territory’ or ‘manifesto’ sitting there in the background, supporting what you do and making your messaging more joined up. That’s all.

Redefining the discipline… He talks about the role of brand strategist (or planner) needing to be redefined. But I go back to my point in an earlier post. Planning is planning, is strategy, or whatever. You’re always answering the questions whatever it says in your email signature:

• What are we trying to achieve? (From a business and a comms point of view)
• Who are we targeting and why? And what insight are we operating around?
• What do we want people to say/think/feel/do?
• How are we going to get there?
• And then returning to the question what are we trying to achieve to check, ‘is this right’? And then going back to the beginning if it’s not (being fairly agile about it, innit.)

I don’t think that we need to redefine the role at all. We don’t need to re-write the creative brief. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel either. His point that brand strategy needs to be taken more seriously in digital agencies is very important though. Brand strategy gives weight and meaning to everything we do. Strategists should be thicker on the ground than they are. Then we might get less implementation briefs and more thinking ones.

So, here are some questions.

• What digital agencies do take brand strategy seriously and what can we learn from them?
• What trad ad agencies with famously good planning departments are making the move into digital well?
• Does it really matter? Shall we all just stop talking about it and get on with doing some work instead?

Get used to hearing about Agile Planning

Take the time out to read Neil Perkin’s presentation on ‘Agile Planning.’  You won’t regret it.

There are lots of ‘this is the new planning’-type declarations out there.  Planning is planning is planning.  However, this is still fantastic, for a number of reasons.  7 reasons, in fact, which match the 7 sections, which cover the main aspects of our work:

1. I love the way he talks about how increased connectivity is a driver for creativity and better ideas.  How partial hunches, half-ideas need to be put out there, allowed to collide and network, and become better ideas.  This is a totally true truism but it never hurts to repeat it.  Stop leaving people to work things out alone – together we are better.
2. The use of 2 killer quotes, reminding us to challenge the question and find the problem to solve.  We should always challenge our clients’ questions and help them identify the real business problem, even if they tell us to get on with it and do them a banner, we have still shown that we are thinking about the bigger picture.
• Jeff Bezos said, ‘There are two ways to get bigger as a company – look at what you’re good at…or start with the customer and work backwards, even if it requires new skills.’  I’ve always thought of the audience first.  It always makes it easier, even if you have to work back to what the company is good at/wants to push.
• Clay Shirky said, ‘Institutions will try to preseve the problem to which they are the solution.’  This is also true, although I reckon it is becoming less so.
3. Creating and curating choice is a very interesting section of the presntation – I’m not sure that I fully agree with it.  It’s good to explore all the options but when it comes to talking to clients about what they can do it usually makes sense to have a fairly limited number of choices, as you can seem indecisive or unsure.  On the other hand, it is far preferable to make decisions with clients, collaborate, and so the best thing to do here is agree that there will be a collaborative discovery process.
4. Test and learn – think like a start up.  Don’t be afraid to take risks, embrace uncertainty.  Make stuff hackable – this is what I like about the Cult of Done manifesto – things don;t have to be perfect – if they are imperfect there is scope for them to improve.  Someone wise who I work with says on a fairly regular basis that ‘a website is never finished’ and this is the truth.  And this is something I like but I think a lot of us are a little bit afraid of it.
5. ‘Always on’ marketing – just a reminder that we’re not about campaigns anymore, we’re about continuous communication.  Yes, yes, yes, but also, we have campaigns too.  I’m more comfortable with the molecule approach a la John Grant.  This is more helpful, and easier to explain because you can go into detail but also look at the big picture.
6. Smart collection and re-application of data – turning data into wisdom.  When I was a baby planner I also worked as a knowledge manager, which was all about turning information into insight, knowledge and wisdom.  Knowledge is information you can do something with.  What you do with it depends how wise you are…  there’s lots of nice data collection stuff in there, APIs etc.
7. Free your mind and your budget.  We’d all like to do this…

So we’ve had account planning, digital planning, connections planning, integration planning, brand planning, comms planning…  I think we will hear a fair amount about agile planning and this may be the thing that stays, given that our projects are agile, or at least they are here at Equator…

Things planners shouldn’t do

If you want to understand what a planner is, one of the best places to start is Merry Baskin‘s document ‘What is Account Planning?’ on the APG website.

When I first read it I was excited by the diversity of the role and the skills it required.  I also liked the idea that there were things planners shouldn’t do…

I really liked the idea that there were elements of the business I could be protected from.  Boring admin and bossing people around, negotiating timings or budgets, having any responsibility for making money.  It was maybe like being an academic.  Being organised by someone else meant I largely didn’t have to care about anything other than the project I was working on.

But actually, a lot of that wasn’t very fair.  I am organised…  I always know where things are in a mountain of printouts, even if no one else does.  I’ve never lost my phone.

I also did care – if not about ‘invoicing’ (and certainly not about doing my timesheets) – I did care about the business side of things.  I wasn’t an academic, distanced from putting an hourly rate to the time I spent working (although many academics are feeling this more and more.)  I wanted to know how to make money!  And to know how to increase the value of planning in Scotland, because there are so few of us here (although we are growing in numbers.)

Last year I was offered the opportunity to be an account director and I took it.  The last 8 months have been incredibly educational.  Every planner should try client servicing, account handling, for a while, in some shape or form.  We get lots of training courses that help us see ourselves in the creative’s shoes – but the amount of insight you get from an account man’s perspective is amazing, and I am sure it will make me a better strategist/planner because:

Account people have to know everything, all the time.  This is very difficult (impossible) so you get very good at knowing what you have to know, prioritising knowledge.  Cutting to the chase saves time.

Account people know their clients inside out.  What they do in their spare time, what their kids’ names are.  They also know what they respond to well.  How to negotiate with one client is completely different from another.  This helps you tailor presentations to your audience’s needs.

I realise the value of what I do as a planner in a very new way.  In an agency where there are no planners, the job is split between the account man, the creative director, and whoever else wants to have a go.  Sometimes no one has a go.  If there is a planner, someone is making sure it’s all happening and the ideas are being coordinated.

A planner writing a brief or a presentation for an account person saves time, does it better.  Not necessarily because they are more skilled (although they should be) but because they have the luxury of time to think about it.  It’s strange to think of luxury thinking time as being something that saves time and money – but it does.

People management.  Enough said.

I’ll never take an account manager for granted again.  They work so hard.  It’s a major job bringing people together, getting them to do the right thing, or finding a compromise if they won’t.

Hopefully this all made sense.  Try client servicing, swap roles, have a go at something else.  I guess what I am saying is it’s as important to understand your colleagues as well as you understand users and audiences and brands.

Fast Strategy

Glue tweeted this today: the IPA’s new Fast Strategy app.  It’s 70 ideas from planning superstars to help you get better ideas – very timely considering my request recently to add to my ‘7 Things’.

The app looks pretty good – some of the ideas (generally the simplest) are great.  Others are a little bit ‘look at me’.  There is a rating system too, to keep those superstars in check.

I’m going to keep it on my phone – you never know when things like this can help to take your thinking forward.

Is planning useful in real life?

I’ve been on holiday, thinking about things I could blog about, and the thing that kept coming up was the question of  whether what I do for a living is of any use in the real world at all.  i.e., in the way that doctors help people who have heart attacks on planes, or psychotherapists can analyse what’s going on in their relationships with their mothers, or chefs can make a pretty mean bacon sandwich on the morning after the big night before.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and come to the conclusion planning is no use at all in real life.  Not in the slightest.

Here are a few reasons why I will not be authoring a self-help manual entitled ‘Plan your life’:

No idea is a bad idea

In a brainstorm, this is true.  My colleagues and I get paid to chat about nonsense and other stuff, y’know, monkeys and the Beano and breadsticks and ice rinks and so on, and we can put ridiculous ideas on the table because 99% of the time, they lead on to other, less ridiculous and usually workable ideas we can put into practice for our clients.

In real life, people don’t brainstorm, and nor do they tolerate apparently crazy ideas.  In real life you are highly unlikely to get away with suggesting something completely left of field.  I wonder whether life would be better if conversations were more like brainstorms.  I’m not suggesting we’d end up with world peace or anything like that, but there might be fewer misunderstandings and arguments if everyone was a bit more open to talking nonsense and considering crazy ideas.

Timings

One of the reasons I would have made a very bad academic is because everything takes ages and I’m really impatient.  Being a planner suits me because on the whole, projects are short, and things change on a daily basis.  Real life can be a bit more like being an academic.  We’re in it until we die, so most things seem to take a long time, and it can get depressing if you always want everything to happen right now.  The life lesson here would be balance work and life, and balance the things in your non-work life between the short-term and long-term.  Boring but true.

Objective setting

When we take briefs from clients practically the first things we ask are objective-setting questions, i.e. ‘What do you want this to do?  What does success look like?  Where do you want this to take you?  Where do you want to be?’  These help us identify goals we can then create the plan for achieving.

In real life it’s pretty hard to set and stick to these kind of goals because there’s too much human error involved.*  For example, I have been going to learn German for about ten years.  Success would be me swanning round Berlin like I owned the place.  I have the goal, but the planning’s impossible.  The classes are always at the wrong time, too expensive, or I’ve stayed in bed/sunbathed/gone to the pub instead of going to class.  In this case it might help to account manage my life, but that’s another self-help book.

*It is impossible to set KPIs for much the same reasons.

Propositions

Imagine if every conversation we had we had to think of what the single most important thing we had to say was…  Actually, that might be good.  I come away from most conversations thinking, “Ooh, what I meant was…” and “Ooh, I wish I’d said…”  However, most conversations would grind to a halt whilst people thought of how to put it in a pithy singleminded sentence that isn’t a strapline, and the world would be a lot quieter and possibly a lot duller.  So it’s not a good idea to talk in propositions.

Some useful things

Having slated taking the planning approach to life there are a few useful life learnings.  For example, knowing your audience.  Being able to listen, and identify the important thing in what someone is saying, even if they’re not sure what they think is the most important thing.  Carrying curiosity backwards and forwards between work and life, and enjoying both…  So it’s not all bad, not at all.

Finally, although this is just a silly list of thoughts I had on holiday, the fact that not much carries across from planning into real life is an important work lesson – treat working as a planner like real life, be flexible about things like propositions and kpis (but not the overall objectives or the freedom to have crazy ideas) and above all be human about it.

My favourite part of the planning process

Most planning projects are the same. You spend days, weeks, sometimes months, collecting information and insight, until your head is full of what you’re working on and your friends get bored with you talking about it all the time.

There is a blissful moment when everything seems perfectly clear. Then you spend a few days or weeks panicking about how big it all is, and how you will ever possibly make any sense of it.

Then you bite the bullet and remember that it was once pretty straightforward, and despite the fact that it’s very big, you know you can get it all down on paper.

The fun begins… Post-Its and slides covered in thoughts. Things to remember. A forget-it pile. Embryonic diagrams and models.  There’s still more research to do but you’re confident that you’re testing hypotheses rather than educated guesswork.

I reached this point today. I love my job.

The cat isn’t impressed.