Last night I had the honour of speaking at 'Statstock: - how the other half plan'. This was an IPA Strategy Group event that brought together 9 planners to speak about what its like to plan from the perspective of their discipline.
The brief was to 'to help younger planners broaden their view of what strategy and planning can mean in very different types of agencies and consultancies'.
So I was speaking from the world of direct marketing. Which was bloody difficult as we had Max Wright from Rapier speaking about an integrated approach, Martin Bailie from Glue (digital), Sam Noble from iris (sales promotion). So as you can imagine, there was the potential for a lot of overlap... It was also made more difficult as we were speaking at the same time in a big room at the Mary Ward House with booming acoustics....
(Oh yeah, and there was no audio visual equipment either, so flip charts, pens and actual conversation were required)
The reality for me is that planning is planning is planning when you're looking for the 'grand strategy' (thanks to Stephen King's theory of planners here). It's about understanding people, motivations, moods, potential connections and how brands can be inciteful in linking these together in a useful and valuable way.
But planning is necessarily more discipline focused when you're 'advert tweaking' - i.e helping craft the execution (including the measurement / evaluation).
So for DM I tried to focus on the new and interesting things that i've been involved in that lead to more effective direct marketing: semiotics, discourse analysis and ethnography. (In retrospect, I tried to throw too much in to my 10 minutes!)
For me, the way that differerent speakers approached their chat was just as instructive on the shades of planning as their content:
- boards vs. live pen scribbling vs. just talking
- conversation vs. polemic (i didn't realise we were competing for which discipline was best...)
- facts and case studies vs. thoughts, ideas and suggestions
- looking back vs. looking forward
The ipa girls were filming, so hopefully we'll see some good edits on the ipa website soon.
5 comments:
Hey Paul ... thought that you were great! BTW, the Fast Strategy cards have also been made into a wizzy site. At some point a "submit your own top tip will be added ... http://www2.faststrategy.co.uk/
thanks james - appreciate the feedback. There's been some mixed responses for the event as a whole, so it's good to hear good stuff!
the fast strategy site is great btw!
hey paul - you're awesome ;)
seriously, looking forward to the vids. for the record it's a brave man that steps up and does that kind of gig, so kudos to you mate
cheers graeme. loving the new blog site and looking forward to iris & W&K & naked (with emma) mashups down the pub soon!
me too mate. all change!
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