Freelance Brand and Creative Strategist / Strategic Planner and Fractional Strategy Director
I’ve been thinking a lot about creative briefs recently – I deliver Creative Brief Writing training for agency account handlers and/or junior planners and I’m also currently prepping a brief writing workshop that I’ll be delivering to some undergraduate students soon. It turns out that I have pretty strong feelings about briefs and briefing: 1. … Continue reading I really care about Creative Briefs
I read a lot and yes, as a Planner / Strategist / Whatever-we’re-calling-it-this-week of course I’ve read all the big titles in my field like How Brands Grow, Nudge, Truth Lies & Advertising and Paid Attention. But that’s only a tiny percentage of what I actually read. I read Sunday newspapers and regional newspapers and … Continue reading Why there’s nothing wrong with a RomCom paperback
Sampling has come up a lot in my professional life recently, with grocery brands seemingly increasing both their spend and their creative focus in this area. With the Groceries Code Adjudicator keeping a careful eye on retailers who might be milking their supplier brand’s marketing budgets for their own purposes, the days of the big … Continue reading Sampling is on the up – but there’s more to the Path to Purchase than that
I was talking to a senior researcher who works for a research agency recently about how long research projects take from brief to debrief and how that doesn't sit well with marketing agencies and clients increasingly working in agile, or at least agile-ish. When the project is in a constant state of flux, timelines are tight … Continue reading Why agency projects need Agile research – and why that’s really hard to achieve
My last post Where have all the Planners gone? about the lack of trained Junior and Midweight Planners round here (due to the lack of available training and opportunities for them) resonated with a few people Up North, particularly former Planner Chris McCash, now of Breadwinner. He offered to host a Planning get-together in Leeds to … Continue reading Training the future
Up here in Yorkshire, there's loads of roles going at Senior / Midweight Planner level, but no-one to fill them. I've had many conversations recently with recruiters and agencies about this, but the reason is obvious really - no-one trained them. With the exception of Sarah at Home and Joey at CreativeRace / Intermarketing, as … Continue reading Where have all the Planners gone?
When meeting prospective Planners, I always try to find out if their brains are wired the right way to be a great Planner - are they interested in what makes people tick, problem solving, investigation and communication? Do they appreciate the link between brand comms and the bottom line? And perhaps most importantly, have they … Continue reading for Planners, gut instinct matters however experienced you are
I work for an agency that is very, very excited about the way that data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to significantly change marketing, not least because all of the above will free us to spend less time knee deep in spreadsheets and Google Analytics and more time thinking (and in the … Continue reading Planning is changing, fast
I've been working as a freelance Planner for six and a half years with no intention of going back agency side - then I got offered my Dream Job which it would be nuts to turn down. So I'm now officially Head of Planning at Bloom in Leeds, who recently became part of Jaywing. Bloom's clients might … Continue reading change of plan
On the 12 days of Christmas, the Planner gave to the Agency: twelve propositions, eleven customer journeys, ten creative briefs, nine internal meetings, eight marcoms workshops, seven big brand pitches, six brand personas, loads of PowerPoint, four brand positionings, three focus groups, two conference calls, and a client away-day by the sea.