a festive anniversary
I started this blog exactly five years ago today – so thanks for reading. I’m off for a festive blogging break now, so I’ll leave you with the cartoon I licensed for my Christmas cards by Tom Fishborne:
deck the halls with festive ranting
What I want for Christmas (apart from a Range Rover Evoque and a horse with legs that work) is for the last wave of agencies to finally grow up.
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
yet more straight talking advice for aspiring account planners (part three)
I’m still being contacted regularly by aspiring account planners (thanks for getting in touch!) and it feels like my series of Straight Talking Advice for Wannabe Planners is due for another instalment (if this sounds like your kind of thing and you haven’t done so already, read part one and part two first).
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
communicating with an audience that doesn’t want to listen
I’ve blogged before about a well-meaning acquaintance who offers their unsolicited opinion a little too often. Since their most recent offering was effectively that I should hurry up and put my arthritic horse to sleep (fortunately neither I nor more importantly the Vet think it’s quite time for that yet) I spent a couple of days stomping around being cross.
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.
…or whatever it’s calling itself this week
I recently noticed that a Planner mate on LinkedIn had updated their entry to list them working at: [agency’s new name] (or whatever it’s calling itself this week).
Yes, their agency had just rebranded. Again. I had a think back and between them the three agencies I’ve worked for managed eight full rebrands and another seven specialism brands between them in the space of twelve years. Honestly, you’d think they didn’t have any client work to be getting on with.
From my perspective, there seemed to be two main trains of thought behind all this rebranding – either a ‘new broom’ MBO or merger team understandably wanting to announce and brand their ownership and fresh approach – or a re-arranging-deckchairs-on-the-titanic type reaction to less than brilliant financial results.
Surely rebranding must have an impact on the agency’s visibility and reputation? Apart from virtually having the start from scratch again on the social media and PR front and New Business having to explain to everyone they call that they’re from agency-B-that-used-to-be-agency-A I’m sure that clients must be just as confused and sometimes perplexed as the rest of us are.
I’ve no idea what the situation at my mate’s agency is as they’re discretion personified. But I do know that these days I regard agency rebrands with a healthy degree of scepticism.
what’s with all this obsession with cool (and by extension, youth)?
Sometimes, when I meet someone at a party and they find out I work in advertising (and especially once I explain what a Planner does) a flicker of surprise crosses their face. I suppose I don’t seem the type, perhaps like someone more likely to be a teacher or accountant.
You see, I’m not cool. I don’t have an edgy haircut or wear clothes that hover on the narrow line between ‘cutting edge fashion’ and ‘what the heck is she wearing’. I’m not into bands that haven’t signed a record deal yet, underground clubs, NHS glasses or Guatemalan street food and I can’t write code. In short, it’s a wonder they let me into the APG.
Ok, I might have made a few sweeping generalisations there but I think the outside world’s view of what AdLand and its people are like might have rubbed off on the industry itself in some kind of self-perpetuating cycle – I actually saw an agency MD wearing guyliner in the local regional newspaper recently.
And I’m not sure that all this Hipstering is actually a good thing. Hip and cool seems to be equated by this industry with youth, the general feeling seeming to be that if you’re over 45 you can’t possibly have anything of value to contribute. So for anyone middle aged who hasn’t made it far enough up the agency tree to have enough equity for age not to matter, the future looks pretty rubbish.
I’ve blogged about the age issue before, but it appears that the problem extends beyond agencies into the marketing departments of clients too. I recently caught up with an expert in marketing professional services brands who left their role with one of the big accountants after being “revered by the partners but dismissed by everyone under 30 who couldn’t understand why skills and experience might matter”.
I’m not saying that creativity and individualism don’t matter, of course they’re the lifeblood of any decent agency. But perhaps we need to get better at recognising that individuality and creativity comes in all shapes, sizes, clothing and age brackets. And that whatever challenges an agency might meet, someone who has been round the block a few times might well have met something similar before.
M&S and X Factor – which brand are they actually promoting?
So, I said I’d deal with the M&S X Factor Finalists Christmas Commercial in a separate post.
Now obviously, this is part of a much wider M&S / X Factor tie up that includes sponsored airtime competitions, behind the scenes films and so on.
I assume the brief was about repositioning M&S for a wider, younger audience, but with a touch of festive fuzziness thrown in.
God knows how much they’re spending on re-edits as finalists drop in and out of the competition like yo yos and heaven help the poor agency account managers if Clearcast have insisted on re-approving each version.
The behind-the-scenes film looks they filmed all the original finalists – including the four who were dropped prior to the public voting. Which ended up being rather handy when Amelia Lilly came back in following the Frankie Cocozza drugs malarkey. In fact, a cynical type might suggest that having an extra four ‘maybes’ known to the public but not in the final was designed to deal with just this kind of commercial problem.
exhibit A: the origional ad (I think):
exhibit B: the latest version (we’re due another one about now):
I did a side-by-side comparison and all the edit changes currently happen between 30 and 45 secs. It’s a cunning plan – put the good acts likely to stick around at the beginning and end and the ones likey to get voted off in the middle to simplify editing.
Anyway, is the ad actually any good? IMHO, not particularly. It doesn’t have enough warn and fuzzy family stuff to jerk the heartstrings a la John Lewis and the X Factor lot aren’t big enough yet (singly or together) to endorse as huge a brand as M&S. So it ends up as more of an ad for the TV show than the retailer.
I wonder if this December’s trading (and viewing) figures will bear me out?
xmas ads – Christmas Crackers and Festive Flops
There are some great Christmas ads already airing…and some not so great ones too.
Boots has continued the Here Come the Girls theme with a crack team of women getting Christmas sorted while everyone else is asleep. It’s engaging, funny, on brand and totally relatable. It also stands up to repeated viewing, which is a good job since it has been on air for several weeks already:
John Lewis has done it again with their ‘thoughtful kid’ ad, that judging by twitter seems to have reduced most Mums to tears on first viewing. I’m not sure how this one will stand up to weeks of airing though:
Waitrose’s School of Christmas Magic is great too – another double hander from Delia and Heston but interestingly focusing on semi-scratch solutions to Christmas catering:
There are, however, a few less impressive festive ads out there as well.
Argos use blue aliens to demonstrate why you should avoid stressmas shopping and ‘check and reserve online’ all your gifts and then pop down to Argos to pick them up. I’m not sure that slagging off high street shopping then suggesting you would be better off doing all your shopping by reserving online then shelpping down to the Argos store to pick it all up is actually a winning strategy:
I found the Argos ‘making of’ ad on youtube (why do so many brands feel the need to add a Making Of ad as if they’ve just made a major movie, complete with director, cast and client interviews?) and the client talks of how the campaign is brave, bold, arresting and “really bringing to life the dichotomy of the high street at Christmas”. I think you might be overthinking it a bit love – and that’s coming from a Planner…
I posted about the Littlewoods Christmas ad the other week (it seems to be to be rather heavily inspired by a scene in Love Actually), but even after having viewed the ad several times and written about it, talking to an agency bod this week I merrily misattributed the ad to Argos, which doesn’t say much for its memorability. I’m also not sure in Austerity Britain that ‘make your family happy by buying them lots of stuff’ is the way to go:
So some Christmas Crackers and a few Festive Flops. Let’s see what the next four weeks brings.
PS I know I haven’t mentioned the M&S X Factor ad, but I think it deserves a whole post to itself…
why clients and their agencies need to look back to the future
Apologies for the recent silence but I’ve been busy trying to get my head around a new client.
This particular organisation and it’s challenges has required speedy generation one of those Planner’s To Do lists where the short term and long term To Dos are very similar, but the urgent stuff will have to be done based on gut instinct, while the medium term stuff has the luxury of giving me enough time to do some research and base decisions on actual proper insight.
It’s going to be very interesting seeing if my gut instinct is anywhere close to what the research turns up.
And all this short term vs. long term malarkey has got me thinking a lot about testing. Russell wrote a lot in 2007/8ish (particularly here and here) about being always in beta, a habit he says brands (and their agencies) have to get into in order to operate in this blurry, unpredictable world.
picture nicked from Russell’s blog, when it was Howies t-shirt of the week
Russell’s thinking was mainly around agile brands that keep pushing lots of new ideas out there and turn any mistakes into opportunities. I suppose it’s the ‘let’s try something on a bit of a small scale test and see if it works’ approach. But I think more old school testing, i.e. ‘did what we just did actually work and how could we do it better next time?’ still has a massive place too.
The world of DM has been happily testing and reviewing/evaulating format, creative and messaging for years and years in order to find the most effective mailer. And the online media lot have been giving good spreadsheet about what did and didn’t and might and mightn’t work ever since someone invented display ads. You’d also hope that media planners would be just as interested in what was working / might work hardest as what the black box media planning software said would be most effective.
But I’m not sure that cross specialism, multi-agency teams servicing a brand have sat down together often enough and rationally discussed what has and hasn’t worked in the past – and what might be worth having a go at in the near future.
With several agencies and freelancers all working on his brand, Mr Head New Client has recognised my bossy streak and put me in charge of all multiple-agency-client meetings. Getting the client team and all their agencies to sit down and talk about what has and hasn’t worked and what might be most likely to work in the future has already produced a surprising amount of honesty – and some ideas that might not have made it onto a traditional marketing plan, however short term or long term it was.
But this approach has also required me to regularly chip in to remind everyone that just because it didn’t work last time, we shouldn’t entirely discount it. Because the problem with something not working is that it’s very rare you discover exactly which element didn’t work and why. The only thing worse than no data is misleading data – and misleading data means missed opportunities.
where has GAP gone wrong?
I used to love GAP. Mainly because their sales staff were always prepared to bring you dozens of different jeans to try on until you found one that fit. When your body shape is tricky (little waist but curvy hips), that kind of customer service makes a big difference and GAP became my first port of call for denim.
I’m 99% sure this exemplary customer service was because the staff were on some kind of a bonus scheme based on being name checked at checkout in answer to “has anyone helped you today?” It was certainly being logged on the tills.
Then maybe two years ago something changed. Getting any kind of assistance on the shop floor or in the changing room suddenly required an eagle eye and determination not to be fobbed off, ignored or redirected. Except at the tills, where the staff were now concentrating all their smiliest efforts on getting customers signed up to their email database, giving me a fair idea of exactly where the staff bonus scheme had been redirected.
It looks like Gap’s recent instore marketing materials haven’t been thought through either. I’ve tweeted several examples of not-great GAP signage I’ve spotted recently, including this one which obviously hadn’t been tweaked for the UK market:
either GAP’s underwear has become very pricey or they need country specific messaging…
I now darken GAP’s doors a couple of times a year to stock up on their black work trousers that miraculously seem to fit me, while playing the exciting game ‘how many staff members can fail to make eye contact while you try to buy something’. So bar a couple of pairs of essential oh-my-god-they-actually-fit trousers a year, sorry GAP, but I’m out.
A store can only get it so wrong, for so long before the target audience walks away. The brand reported last month that sales across its international markets fell 13 per cent year-on-year in the five week period ending October 1st 2011.
