It’s not news to anyone in our industry that we’re having to take on changes of tectonic proportions. Web 2.0 has put consumers firmly in control of communications, where they’re consumed, on what platform, if they’re shared, if they’re talked about…
And as an industry, we’re responding, but are we responding enough? And are we debating the right topics? Because the centre of gravity of what I’m reading in the trade press is all around two things.
Thing One: is it planning or creativity that is in charge of the future?
Thing Two: what kind of planning is in the ascendant and who’s going to ‘win out’?
And Thing One and Thing Two are wreaking as much havoc as their erstwhile namesakes from your childrens’ Dr Seuss books.
In actual fact, if we put our egos to one side for just a second and thought about what’s right for our clients, what’s going to drive their businesses forward and what’s going to constitute commercial success in the future, we wouldn’t only come to different conclusions, we’d be having a different debate.
Because the thing that’s common to both Thing One and Thing Two is that they focus on siloed disciplines, and therefore individuals. They can be boiled down to a single debate: “Creatives, Channel Planners, Strategic Planners, Media Planners, Data Planners – whose offices will be biggest in five years time?”
Strangely enough everyone seems to think it’s the kind of work that they do that’s going to take us into the bright new future of co-created consumer content and IP delivery. But whichever side you’ve plumped for in the debate, I have bad news for you. You’re wrong. The greatest strategic breakthroughs we’ll see in the next five years will come not from an individual discipline, but from the connections that are fostered between them.
If we’re going to provide consumers with content that they’ll contribute towards, post blogs about, get involved with and essentially co-create, we simply have to think about ideas in different ways. We’ll have to stop being linear and moving from business problem to communications solution to creative brief to creative idea to execution to measurement. We might have to start in the middle of the process, or even at the end.
Confused? That’s probably a good thing, because this kind of thing isn’t going to be easy for any of us. As Spring is in the air and my other half is nagging about booking holidays, have a look at Kidnap – the number one travel app on Facebook. (facebook.com/applications/Kidnap!/14057001167).
It’s fun, it’s popular to the tune of millions of us being ‘Napped and it achieves its business objectives of getting people to interact with the channel’s online collateral.
But can you tell who had the idea? The planner, who then wrote the brief about it? The creative who was responding to a brief about the fact that interaction with travelchannel.com drives viewing on the Travel Channel? The digital technologist who could see how to mash up the technologies that are required?
The fact is it doesn’t matter. But in order to facilitate this kind of thing happening, we have to be far more networked in our approach to strategy. We have to put the best brains in our agencies together and let them fuel our futures. We need to foster work that might not fit easily into existing processes and that might not be easy – or indeed cheap – to get out the door the first time.
So if you’re a client, and you only see one sort of planner working on your account, and you rarely see your creatives unless they’re trying to sell you work, start asking why. If you’re a media planner and you’re not being helped to build a relationship with the creatives whose work you’re placing, start asking why. And if you’re a planner whose agency thinks that your job is to fuel the creativity of others rather than be creative yourself, don’t just ask why – leave.
My prediction is that the agency specialisms of the past will start to blur as true integration of all strategic and creative functions begin to require physical proximity in order to work at the pace tomorrow demands.
And that will need a very big office indeed.
Gavin Hilton, Planning Director, RAPP UK
Well put– I could not agree more! These are exciting times we get to work in!
It’s amazing how communication is the key to successful communications! Well written.
