APG Sweden December 6 gathering: some take-aways (updated)

Who's your daddy and what does he do?

About ten planners met yesterday at the Swedish Advertising Association for a nice talk about their daily work. My conclusions from this meetings were:

1. Dual agency roles. There seem to be quite a lot of planners out there that today are doing both planning and project management/creative. Not sure if it's a good idea to combine roles, but maybe this can be seen as a starting point for agencies that do not yet have a dedicated planning function.

2. Two types of briefs: broad vs narrow. It's a planner's job to summarize and distill, yet there can be room for misinterpretation by creatives when directions are too short (e.g. single words or sentences). A better way might be to increase the amount of information and eliminate any 'decoding errors'.

3. Two types of planning philosophies: objective or subjective. Some planners strongly advocated for a more subjective/controlled planning, in other words going towards a semi-creative solution (e.g. communication strategy) and also being 'the third creative' in the room. This depends on the project, however, as some assignments are more bread-and-butter-planning.

4. The definition of planning. Dan has a very nice definition of planning: "To make the work work, through insight and inspiration".

Thanks Dan/APG for this evening including the beer and hot dogs. Most appreciated!

Comments

[Dan]

"To make the work work, through insight and inspiration." How's that for a definition? I agree that to define something (too narrowly, at least) tends to make it smaller and less interesting. On the other hand, as planners we need to be able to somewhat succinctly explain what we're doing and what we're for - both in relation to clients and our own industry.

And here's a thanks right back atcha. Great of you to show up, Leon!

[Leon]

It's a good definition, it distills and simplifies without trivialising. Since it's better than anything APG has for the moment, I've updated the post with it.