How the other half plan

I went along to the IPA’s Stratstock on Monday night. The intention of the event was to hear about what planning is like in different types of agency – digital, direct, PR, integrated, design, global, sales promotion, comms and start-up. 

It really hit home for me the extent to which ‘planning’ can mean very different things to different people, depending on your day-to-day experience of the job.

Hope the speakers won’t mind but here are some of my favourite words from the night (N.B. I didn’t manage to see everyone – hopefully next time!):

“Being stretched all the time is a good thing [for a planner]”

– David Bain of BMB on why ‘horizontal planning’, i.e. having a variety of problems in your head at once, leads to more interesting thinking.

“Transexual Pope Resuscitates Prince’s Polo Horse”

– James Gordon MacIntosh of 77PR on the ideal PR story headline containing the key topics of Sex, Health, Religion, Royalty, Celebrities, Sport & Animals. 

James also made an interesting point on how, theoretically, PR should be naturally skilled at engaging with consumers in the digital world given that it’s a displicine founded on the idea of talking to people in a way that isn’t ‘overtly branded’ (albeit via intermediaries).

“Branded Utility is a meritocracy”

– Martin Bailie of glue London on why in the uncompromising world of the internet, boring doesn’t spread.

Martin also talked about being ‘relevant through technology’, amongst other things, asking: why Coke didn’t create Blyk?

“More creative minds have higher exposure to multiple cultures”

– Guy Murphy of JWT on the benefits of being a global planner type.

The main thrust of Guy’s talk was that there are two big things changing the world, technology and geography, and the former tends to hog the limelight.

One challenge by someone in the audience was the common argument that technology is now rendering geography obselete. He responded by saying that the online population is still in a minority (there are about 1.5 billion according to these statistics) and that the aforementioned argument is based on a ‘political’ view of geography, i.e. country borders, when you can actually segment ‘the world’ in many different ways.

This is clearly an area worthy of more attention than this mere blog post and it was impressive how Guy managed to do this topic some justice in just 10 minutes…

Hope to hit more thought-inducing events in the very near future. Will keep you posted.