A ready reckoner for good planners
When people ask me what I am looking for in a planner the list of important attributes has traditionally been exhaustive. So in an attempt to simplify things and shorten interviews I have recently taken to issuing a three-point description. 1) Safe looking people with dangerous minds. This is an old phrase we...
A decade of Moleskines
The passage in Songlines in which Bruce Chatwin names the Moleskine. Image courtesy of Songlines. The biggest cliché in advertising is not lunching at the Ivy, drinking chilled rose on the Carlton Terrace or doing coke with the intern in the toilets at the Christmas party. The biggest cliché in advertising is the Moleskine notebook....
No more heroes any more
The original Forward thinking motherfucker. I gave a little talk at an APG (Account Planning Group) event recently. It’s a regular series of talks called Noisy Thinking and I shared the bill with Craig Mawdsley, Rachel Hatton, Russell Davies and Malcolm White, a pretty impressive line up in the world of planning. I talked...
What planners need
Image courtesy of Identity in Newcastle. We have finished the Summer Scholarship for 2012 at Saatchi & Saatchi. It’s a programme where we take ten or so young people into the agency for the summer and then give the best candidate a job at the end of it. Going through this process made me think...
The future of planning
A short while ago I figured out how to record the voice over to Slideshare presentations. This a good thing as my slides never make the slightest bit of sense without the narrative that goes with them. And to test it out I used a presentation I gave at the APG’s first Noisy Thinking Debate....
What’s your problem?
All great marketing solutions start with a well and accurately defined problem and a correct diagnosis of the course of action that needs to be followed. So I thought I’d talk a little about this to kick the new year off in a back to basics style. There is a very basic diagnostic tool I...
‘Tis the season to obsess about trends.
Image courtesy of SonOfJordan. For those of you frustrated by the lack of sense my trends presentation makes when you only have the charts, here is the story. I wrote it as a column for Brand Republic so its not identical but covers much the same ground.
Trends are trendy, insights get shit done
My new rubber stamp. If there is enough interest I might get some more made. I gave a talk at Haymarket’s Trends Plus conference this week. I’m sure it was a wonderful shindig – the speakers I saw were excellent – but I couldn’t help feeling a bit contrary about a conference on trends. I’ve...
How to run an agency
Tango, undoubtedly Jon Leach’s most famous planning hit, or was that the 4th Emergency service? I don’t often get to APG talks, to my eternal shame. However, yesterday I made a point of trucking up to the eternal ghastlyness of the Bloomsbury Holiday Inn for Jon Leach’s talk on the mathematics of creativity.
Welcome to the age of micro-planning
Downstream – where planning is heading. Image courtesy of SunnyUK I had the absolute privilege of judging the Account Planning Group Creative Strategy awards recently. I love the APG Awards, they showcase real planning and great planners in a way that the other so called planning awards do not. And for me this year saw...
Leadership 101
Napoleon, the source of the first leadership lesson. Image courtesy of Boston Public Library. I was recently asked to talk about leadership. Now, those that know me might think this is a faintly ridiculous idea but there are a few tips on leadership that I have picked up along the way, that I use all...
Crisis, what crisis?
What’s the plan for planning? Image courtesy of see_another_side. A few years ago in an orgy of self-congratulation and a pithy monographs invoking the spirit of King and Pollitt, planning turned forty. The second great advertising innovation of the twentieth century alongside Bernbach’s pairing of creative teams seemed confident and cocksure with a rosy future...