United London’s anti-salt campaign from last year. The four I’s in action.
I have been giving a bit of thought to a planning approach recently. Something that reflects they way I do it at the moment but nothing too heavy and contrived.
Naturally it involves alliteration and specifically the words ‘interesting’, ‘instinct’, ‘insight’ and ‘idea’..
La Danaide by August Rodin. Image courtesy of Jahsonic.
It is one of the least edifying characteristics of planning directors that they spend a lot of time creating a new briefing format for the agency or network. It is what my old boss Jim Kelly would call “displacement activity”.
Never surrender to lacklustre thinking, always know you have a better idea. Image courtesy of asboluv
I like Skunk Strategies.
Or rather I like them in the absence of anything else. And you might find the approach useful especially if you are working in a difficult sector, on a difficult piece of business or at an un-inspiring agency.
Image courtesy of Casual clicks Now that I am safely ensconced in my new advertising home I thought I’d put up some stuff from United…
One of the things that I always bang on about without really thinking about it in depth is the idea that Clients and agencies need to place less emphasis on consistency and more on coherence. So I thought I’d worry this one out a bit.
If anyone is interested I have uploaded my speech from The APG’s Battle of Big Thinking as well as the slides.
For regular readers many of the themes will be very familiar.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia.
I recently enjoyed an evening at Leith’s cookery school in well heeled Kensington.
All in all a very good evening matching wine to food even if I stood out like an ad man at a posh cookery school wine tasting night.
Anyway, there was rather a fascinating story about accessibility, commodification and provenance that I thought I would share with you, my brand loving friends.
Image courtesy of Rune T
I have long believed that a planner’s job must continue right up to the playout of an ad – not just working on the client’s business but working on the ad itself.
For me a planner needs to be hold onto the project whilst it is in production and post production right up until the clock number is allocated.
I call this continuity planning for some inelegant reason.
There are a number of things happening this autumn to commerate the life and work of Stephen King the co (and coincidental) founder of the planning discipline (along with Stanley Pollitt).
My efforts have been focused on the inagural Stephen King Strategy Agency of the Year Award in November but the APG is also launching a collection of Stephen’s writings on the 1st of October.
So it is time to get acquinted or re-acquainted with the great man’s work – whether from this post, by buying the book from the APG or rocking up to the book launch. If you want to go to the latter (£50 including a copy of the book – loads of lumanaires are going to speak so get your planning director to cough up) email the APG pronto here .
Led Zeppelin are reforming for a one off gig at the O2 in London on November 26th, so far 20 million people have tried to get a ticket.
And here is another thing I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime.
An insight in a razor campaign. I’ll leave it to you to discover but it’s one for the dad’s (like me) out there.
A friend reminded me this weekend me of a clip from South Park in which the underpant gnomes are stealing all the underpants from the town. This is stage one in a three stage plan in which the third stage is to make a huge amount of profit. The problem is that there is no stage two.
How redolent of the vast majority of advertising campaigns.
A push pin rendering of Wieden’s Fail Harder ethos. Image courtesy of media bistro.
Despite the Nike bombshell and a recurring sense that Dan’s ‘I’m just an old hippy’ routine is wearing a bit thin, Wieden + Kennedy is the plannersphere’s ideal agency to work for. And with work like Old Spice and Honda, and that lovely blog, who can blame us.
