The Planning Lab

This is hardcore

Reporting from the esoteric world of high-end hifi: a Wilson Audio speaker jack to lift heavy speakers. It has a cast-iron frame and machined parts. It's a real thing of beauty – unfortunately few brands go the extra mile to deliver this kind of product experience.

Thanks to Daniel who owns the thing.

Of agency websites and such

Agency websites is probably the most navel-gazing phenomena in the industry. You gotta love them though, because it's unbelievable how much time, mental effort and frustration that are invested in these (with varying results I might add). Crispin Porter has launched a new site today, and so has Jung von Matt in Germany. What's sort of cool is that the latter is also formatted for iPhone. 

There's nothing like a free lunch…

Photography: Dominic Davies

… unless you're a planner (with some knowledge to spare).

The art of getting a free lunch goes something like this:

"Leon, I need your thoughts on [x]. Do you have time to discuss it today?"

"Sorry, my calendar is FULL. But maybe we can have a lunch meeting (on you)?"

"Perfect"

"Indeed"

Book smart

A good day for creative planning

  

I've just received results from the New York Festivals and it turned out pretty good: two silver medals plus a finalist diploma for Miele makes fashion longer and Opera in the centre of the conflict - Literally. What's makes me especially happy is that there's proper planning thought in both of these campaigns (in contrast to a lot of award-winning work that jsut depend on pure creative executions). 

It's been a good day for my agency Jung von Matt as well: we totalled 1 gold, 4 silvers and 4 finalists with six entries.

Insight bingo (updated)

Simon Law

Can't remember where I got this from, but it's quite useful. 

Reader profile

Here's a brief compilation of some reader stats of The Planning Lab. Above are the results from a quick reader poll from last month. Not surprising, the majority of you readers are planners. What's maybe more interesting is that more than a fifth of you are creatives. Maybe because the distinction between planning and creation isn't that clear, or maybe because there are some natural-born planners waiting to come out of the closet? The "Other" slice of the pie deserves some further attention, but for now my best guess is that it's a mix of clients, students and agency account people (although the latter category isn't exactly known for their presence in the blogosphere). 

The latest analytics show that the Swedish slice is shrinking, from representing a third of all readers to less than a fifth. The American slice is growing however. God bless y'all! Globally, UK readers are still a small part.

At a city level, it's clear though that most readers come from Stockholm plus the big advertising cities. 

Most popular in western Europe, the East Coast of America, insignificant elsewhere including the African continent, Japan, Russia and China. 

Clay Shirky

This is good.

Planner-bashing

There are two popular advertising blogs, Scamp and Ad Contrarian that are particularily hostile against planners (also known as twats) and planning (has to be killed). 

Being a cynical blogger or blog commenter is easy, and achieving good account planning is difficult. The problem is therefore not planning itself, but the quality of it is. I don't know what the solution is, but I know that getting rid of planning would send advertising back to the stoneage. Please remember that planning was founded to keep clients and marketing research from owning the creative process. So in a world where creative ideas get killed by clients, media agencies, consultants and excel sheets on a day-to-day basis, the best remedy is account planning, twat or not. 

The Döner Menu

International, consistent and never over-promising. 

What's amazing is that somebody actually makes a living by art directing these. 

Coke for free!

Drug dealers seldom give away a pound of coke for free. Why? Because they are decent businessmen. Ad agencies, on the other hand often give away ideas for free (if you only knew how much an agency will go to get new business).

Maybe it's time we end the downward spiral of value-destructive competitive behavior and start selling instead of giving. 

Wanted: heavy-weight names in engagement planning

The Swedish Account Planning Group is looking for leading thinkers in engagement/connections/propagation planning for lectures this Autumn. Who are the most interesting names in this field? 

If you have suggestions, please let me know by leaving a comment or by email: leon@jvm.se.

How to connect everything to everything else

You've probably seen the twittering cat door, the twittering office chair and the twittering bakery. These lovely examples have one thing in common: they all use home-made devices that connect to Twitter. And while these application may seem like novelty, I do think they represent something something brilliant: off-the-shelf technology that allows anything to be part of the internet. 

Standardised low-tech means one thing: it's cheap and simple enough to be spread widely across the whole physical world (see previous post). 

A simple schematic shows how this works: most pieces of the puzzle exist today – the only missing link are standardised input-output devices and a community for developing plugins. And instead of using twitter as a frontend interface it can be used it as a backend dataflow that allows for interfaces to be built on top. 

The perspective here is not technical (since everything is based on existing ones), but from a user-perspective with one thing in mind: how technology can be packaged for maximum dissemination.

Does this make any sense? 

And btw, I'm not a techie, so my apologies for getting nomenclatures mixed up.

An intriguing thought

The thought of combining the physical world with the internet is kind of the vision for the next internet. The idea of obiquity is not new of course, but when seen from a practical perspective like this at least I find it easier to grasp what the whole thing is about. It's gonna be BIG. 

The four ad agency characters

Everybody knows that there are bad guys in the ad industry. You've of course met the psychopatic account guy or the egomaniac CD. But you also have two other types that in my opinion are FAR worse: 

First, you have the smug fucks that are always constructive and uncritical. These wholesome people have a nasty habit of always admiring other people's work no matter how mediocre, and they never swear.

Then you have the unintentional bad guys – the ones that always eager to making a slick impression and are totally ignorant of their own shallowness. These people really believe they are good guys, but they are in fact bad guys.

Luckily just about all planners that I've met are nice people. 

Bonus

As a planner it's not really my job to win creative awards. That's why it's extra sweet to see that some of the planning work (however small it may be) you've done gets nominated. This print campaign just became a finalist in the New York Festivals ad awards. What's nice is that the execution is mostly about the thinking behind the idea and the actual problem solving rather than just eyecandy and production value. 

Where will next-gen Swedish planners come from?

For the past year or so I've noticed an uprise in aspiring planners from creative ad schools. This is definitely a change in attitude because most Swedish planners have by tradition had an academic background in business studies. I like this development for a couple of reasons. First, I'm not sure business studies is the right background for account planning (in general and with exceptions). Second, good creatives are also pretty decent planners. There are also a lot more ad school students than there are advertising literate business graduates (trust me, you can count these on one hand), and quantity should theoretically lead to quality. As there's little room for hardcore strategic/analytical planning in the Swedish advertising industry, there's definitely a case for ad school graduates with curious minds. 

Risk, creativity and innovation part 2

 

Today I had a meeting with the nice people at PhD, a media agency, to discuss the possibilities of having a more innovative approach for one of our client’s media setups. 

Conclusion: while it is possible to tweak media formats, you’re basically stuck with these if the client has paid for certain number of impressions. In other words, reallocating the media budget towards developing new-to-the-world contact points (such as the Whopper facebook utility) is tough if there are no figures on this (a.k.a. the discussion about impressions vs engagement). 

A company that invests millions in media will simply want a return on it, and what it ultimately comes down to is risk – something that clients hate. 

As long as we don’t have industry-level measuring standards to fuel the risk discussion, traditional bought media will unfortunately be the standard for larger media investments. 

Unless somebody out there has an answer to either the measurement problem or a different approach to risk in marketing management, I don’t see how innovative communications can be anything else than small one-off search-of-excellence projects or nothing-to-lose scenarios such as pro bono work. 

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. The pursuit continues anyhow...

Previously: Risk, creativity and innovation

Effectiveness begins

There's currently a debate going on about the future of the 100 Wattaren effectiveness awards. I've written a piece about it here (in Swedish).

Quick reader poll

Just curious.