What’s In a Great Planner
Great planners can take a client’s business apart, then put it all back together again, except in a new way that makes it better. Any old fool can take someone’s business apart, but very few can put it back together in a different and better way. And clients respect that hugely.
Great planners can connect the intellectual challenge posed by a brand with a brief that offers the most compelling and inspiring way for creatives to turn it into a real cultural expression.
Great planners take really complex issues, process them equally complexly in their heads, and then talk about them so simply that my mother (who isn’t a planner) can understand them.
Great planners have the confidence to search for the right answer, not necessarily THEIR right answer.
They often wear Bape trainers.
They see themselves as communicators more than intellectuals.
Great planners never sit on bean bags, ever.
They have the confidence to say when something is off brief.
They get to very good, very fast.
They believe in effectiveness and will poke around at quant methodologies for hours to prove it. (Only for the client to refuse to give them the data! But they try and try again.)
Great planners see the world as not round but triangular.
They are more connected than anyone else on line in the agency.
Great planners like Charlie Mingus and may well have appeared on a children’s quiz show when they were very young. And they probably won a prize, like a holiday.
They have more patience than account people.
They look scruffier than creatives.
Great planners provide the marketing credibility to be in the boardroom and not the playroom.
