Planners Are Creatives That Just Like Big Words

I’m not a fan of planning’s unending and wearying ability to gaze into its own navel and contemplate what it really does. Indeed, much of the time it would appear that the one brand that planners are most interested in planning is in fact the discipline of planning itself.

I’m going to give in to this tendency just a little bit today because the wonderful and awesome Mikey Farr gave me today the best definition of planning I’ve come across in a while.

Actually, it’s less of a definition and something altogether more helpful, and more inspiring. A request that the planner be part of the creative team:

“In my mind the best planners are good creatives that just like big words, and the odd graph. This is sacrosanct in my opinion. Planning is just a different face of the creative bubble. Planners should be teeming with ideas. Bad ones mainly (that’s why they’re planners) but they should have lots and lots of ideas to create a rich humus on which our creative flowers can blossom”

When we ask What Planning Does perhaps planners are the wrong people to ask. Perhaps we should have been asking good creatives all along.

Thank you Mikey.

Comments

[pip pandey]

hello lovely martin,

very interesting thoughts here. we could talk this topic for hours i think, but nothing bugs me like the fallacy that the best ideas originate from the creative department. they don't - it's just that creatives get more thinking time than anyone else. it becomes perceived as a 'talent' only because baby creatives then get years of practice at coming up with good ideas.

in the same way, planners become especially adept at deciphering (manipulating?) data, whilst account men become masters of organisational psychology. i only have grade B maths GCSE, but i can read a P&L sheet or spot statistical anomalies in a second now: i wish it were talent, but it's just practice.

give me a room of 23 year olds fresh out of school/college, with no inkling of which agency discipline they prefer, and the REAL, god-given, talent will out in wholly unexpected individuals. anyone who has ever supervised graduate recruitment in an ad agency will know how staggeringly creative aspiring young account handlers can be.

it's a terrible injustice of our industry that securing your first job may be your last opportunity to do anything truly creative ever again.