In my second Planning job one of my clients was a big shopping centre.  One of the insights we came up with was that this out of town complex was simply shopping made easier than the high street – it was warm, dry, flat for easy pushing of pushchairs and had free parking.  It was also seen by many women as being a lot safer place to shop, chiefly because the security guards and zero tolerance policy towards buskers, beggars and chuggers made it less intimidating and consequently more relaxing.

Anyone who has recently tried to make their way on foot through a city centre will know that ‘relaxing’ is not really an appropriate word to use.  Since one of my busiest clients is based in Leeds city centre I’ve been taking the opportunity to run a few errands after meetings but I regularly have to face an assault course of big issue sellers (who, to be fair, are the most polite of all of them), MRS clipboard ladies, lucky heather sellers, buskers, the-end-is-nigh religious types, novelty woolly hat cart traders, leafleteers and chuggers.

Last week in Leeds I was approached by twelve different variations of the above in the time it took me to walk from the car to M&S.

Shelter had no less than six chuggers within 200 yards of each other (I counted) in Leeds this Tuesday

The chuggers are worst of all.  Again last week I was walking along when out of the corner of my eye a 6 foot something bloke built like a tank strode towards me shouting “hey, lady in the black coat!”.  My first thought was not ‘goodness me, who is that interesting and charming man?’, it was ‘Help’.  When another dirty great chugger bloke tried “hey, lady in the stripy grey trousers” a hundred yards further along I’m afraid my reply was most unladylike.

Shopping is supposed to be pleasurable.  Not scary.  And until city centres put their foot down and clean up their high streets, more and more people will decamp to the safety and reduced stress of out of town shopping.  Which means that the stores will follow them.

I have an android smartphone and I’m rather attached to it…but I’ve just declined the upgrade I was due.  As well as the cost savings of switching to a SIM only plan I can’t bear the thought of wasting a day of my life trying to get a new smartphone up and running and the possible/probable data loss that would occur as a result of the changeover.

You see, I just don’t quite trust technology.  I did a software update on the phone last week that mysteriously and randomly wiped 20% of my contacts.  It was only because I refuse to be parted from my backup Filofax that I had a copy of everything.

If I was entirely reliant on my phone as camera, diary, address book, credit card, keys, web browser, email reader, calculator and, erm, phone then my handbag would unquestionably be a lot lighter and smaller.  But what if the phone got nicked?  Or broke?  Or just ran out of battery?  My entire life would grind to a halt.

I’m just not sure that the majority of smartphone owners are ready to break away from their other Stuff and trust their lives to the gods of hardware, software and signal.

this is the short version, the long one lasts a full ad break

It’s caused quite a bit of upset among Weightwatchers loyal followers (and the wider dieting community) as it features the almost-too-skinny-and-has-never-dieted Alesha Dixon.

You can see their point – why should someone who is naturally skinny and/or a gym bunny and/or just doesn’t eat much ever be a great brand ambassador for a brand that helps people change their attitude towards food and lose weight?  Alesha hasn’t fought the good fight and won her weight loss medal.

In contrast, Weightwatchers USA has Jennifer Hudson as a front/spokeswoman who went from curvy/a bit unhealthy to less-curvy/healthy with Weightwatchers.  They’ve produced this ‘Believe’ ad for 2012:

and even have a compare-and-contrast video:

The UK ad makes a point of only using actual Weightwatchers members who have lost weight on their plan (plus, of course, Alesha), however as a result it also features some pretty awful lip syncing and arm waving.  I can totally see what Saatchi were trying to do but I know which country’s efforts would be more likely to inspire me to get down to a meeting (not that I’m on a diet, for the record).

Then it dawned on me that since my clients were paying for my time (as I laboriously rewinded the tape yet again, typing the best bits out at 25wpm), it would actually be cheaper for them to pay a professional transcription agency to knock out transcripts of my groups at 100wpm.  Everyone was a winner.

In fact, I came out of it even better as it turns out that transcripts are a brilliant learning tool.  While you’re wincing at the sound of your own voice on the tape and typing as fast as you can you don’t really pause to wonder if you worded that question right or should have left that lady to talk for a bit longer.  But looking though a nicely laid out transcript the week after the groups your less-than-brilliant moments are there in black and white.

Through my transcripts I’ve identified several little bad moderating habits to be nipped in the bud – and transcripts are dead handy (in a word doc edit-find kind of way) when you suddenly need a quote about product guarantees and don’t want to wade through nine hours of tape to find it.

I honestly believe that all researchers should be getting professional transcripts of their groups done occasionally simply to see where they might be going wrong or right. Or are you all doing that anyway and I’m just late to the party?

I can see the idea of a diet campaign – they’ll have quiet restaurants in January (mainly because nearly everyone is skint) but also partly because a lot of people are on a health kick and don’t want to spoil it by dining out.  So team up with a nutritionist to create a 14 day diet plan that includes a list of dishes off the menu that you *can* enjoy and still lose weight and hopefully drive some extra footfall into the restaurants.

But it all falls apart when you read the bottom of the email or click through to the website. Aside from the fact that I’ve never heard of their celebrity nutritionist (a quick search reveals she’s been on Sky Living), it appears that Gusto want their customers to cough up £20 for the privilege of having a copy of this diet plan.

Twenty pounds.

Entire hardback diet cookbooks don’t cost that much.  And the last time I checked, most brands were offering their ‘diet plan that benefits our brand’ info for free. Like (*quickly googles*) Special K, Edam cheese and Activia yoghurts for a start.

Either Gusto have a hugely over-inflated idea of the perceived value it’s customers place on the brand, or they mistakenly saw an opportunity to make a quick buck.  Either way, I’ll be very surprised if they shift more than a couple of downloads.  Which is a shame as a free diet plan (with perhaps a discount voucher for dining at Gusto in January) would have shifted a heck of a lot more value in dinners.

All in all, it’s a big, fat fail.

From Kirstie’s Homemade Christmas to Lorraine’s Last Minute Christmas, switching on the TV it was easy to get the impression that if you weren’t making your own gifts in 2011, you just weren’t trying.

It’s lovely that people are choosing to go back to basics and put more thought and effort than cash into their gifts, but all this domestic goddessing is slightly tricky to reconcile with my career in an industry whose primary purpose seems to be to get people to buy more Stuff.

I do appreciate that sometimes we create very worthy behaviour change – persuading people to eat more healthily, support charities or drive more sensibly for example.  But when it comes down to it, the majority of the British marketing industry’s turnover comes from businesses that sell food, toys, cosmetics, alcohol, furniture and so on.  Stuff we might want, but don’t necessarily actually need.

Ok, we do need to eat, but we don’t necessarily need an unlimited supply of Ferrero Rocher, a Heston Christmas Pudding or an Iceland prawn ring in order to celebrate Christmas properly.

Of course you can always reassure yourself that you’re not telling people they need more stuff, you’re just persuading them that should they happen to need item X, your brand is better than the alternatives.

I don’t know yet quite how the two trains of thought fit together.  If we’re moving away from consumption as a measure of success and/or affection and towards something more personal and meaningful, what does that mean for the economy?  But then there’s the positive impact on the environment to consider too…

My head hurts and I haven’t even tried that flavoured vodka yet.

They need to wake up to the fact that it isn’t 1995 anymore.  That having a full time staff of 40 while claiming to be experts in TV, radio, press, DM, PR, SP, research and all things digital is at best optimistic and at worst a flat out lie.

That it’s OK to have a small but perfectly formed family core of full time staff surrounded by a loyal but constantly fluctuating team of freelance and supplier friends.  And that it’s actually OK to be upfront to clients about this way of working.

That yes, you can employ someone over the age of 40 and find they have a surprising amount to contribute. And no, bullying and 70 hour weeks aren’t the fast track to financial or creative success.

I said I wanted them to grown up, not grow old. To ditch last minute pitch panics and creative takes on the truth but retain the love of what got us all started in the first place – changing behaviour through great creative in great places.

screen grabs from the rather fab Advertising With Bells On by fold7

This time I want to focus not on the practical stuff like skillset and good books to read, but on the bigger picture.

It seems to me that not everyone who wants a career as an Account Planner really understands exactly what the job entails.

In the last few months I’ve had tell aspiring Planners:
- No, you probably won’t be earning £50K in your first year as a Junior Planner
- No, I don’t think anyone would hire you as a freelance Planner with just Planning internships under your belt
- No, I don’t think you’d be able to run a full blown Planning department  in another country after a year as a UK Planner

Perhaps it’s the fault of all we Planners Wot Blog, but there seems to be a bit of a veil over what we actually do all day, what skills we need to do it and how long it takes to become any good at it.

In 2009 I wrote about a day in my (reality checked) life as a full time agency Account Planner.  Freelance life is a bit less predictable, but to give you an idea, these are some of the things I did in the last month:

• Prepared for, facilitated and wrote up a workshop
• Researched cultural differences in a potential overseas market for a UK retailer
• Wrote an emergency quick fix marketing plan for a client’s emergency quick fix problem
• Managed a quantitative research project (I need the output for some brand development work in Jan)
• Managed a qualitative research project for the same client (the groups are next week, I’m moderating)
• Researched and wrote a report on predicted consumer behaviour for Summer 2012
• Chaired two client meetings and made sure everyone did what they said they would afterwards
• Rewrote someone else’s brand positioning document to make it more engaging
• Spent two hours in the library, a hour queuing at the post office and 30 minutes in Staples

So I’m asking my fellow Planners Wot Blog – will you write a quick day-in-the-life  or ‘what I did this month’ about what being an Account Planner is REALLY like too please?  Link back to this post or drop me an email and I’ll make sure they all end up linked from here.

03/01/2012 – here’s Sarah’s contribution

15/01/2012 – and you should also have a look at page 49 of Heather’s 2011 Planner Survey for more on What Planners Actually Do All Day

18/01/2012 – here’s Andrea’s thoughts

image from here

Then I simmered down, my work head took over and I started thinking about public sector campaigns that ask us to give up smoking, drink less or otherwise do something we really don’t want to.  And I realised that historically the intended target audience of those campaigns probably felt rather affronted (to put it politely) too.

You could say that a lot of the recent health campaigns like this one below addressed this mindset and used behavioural economics to get round the whole ‘outraged, fingers in ears, la la la not listening’ habitual response of the core target audience:

But then again, I think you could maybe simplify the secret to difficult communications challenges like this down to simply:

Tell.  Don’t yell.