What would Don Draper say to an account planner?

I’m guessing nothing all that positive, given his reaction to some market research in the first season of Mad Men. As recounted in the online Episode Guide, “Greta hands the report to Don who promptly files it into the trashcan.”

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Another chance at constrained creativity

Although I’d planned on entering, I narrowly missed the deadline (oops) for 2009 submissions to New Times’ 55 Fiction competition, which calls on readers to submit 55-word fictional stories. So I was excited to hear the announcement of NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction Contest, requiring authors to write stories that can easily be read out loud within three minutes (under 600 words, according to them, but shorter is fine).

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Why do we need strategists*, anyway?

[Originally published on B2B Brand Debate. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so here.]

* While differences surely exist from agency to agency, “strategist” and “planner” will be used interchangeably throughout this post. The author’s opinion is that the responsibilities implied by these titles involve considerable overlap, but this too is open for debate.

Has anyone else noticed that strategists and account planners are getting a bad rap lately? To see what I mean, check out the show Trust Me, and you’ll see that planners are consistently portrayed as vacuous time-wasters who do little more than provide eye-roll-inducing creative briefs. For a little insight into the source of the show’s point of view, look no further than a recent blog post by Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian, entitled “I’m Tired Of Strategists,” and a second by Simon Veksner, on his blog Scamp, about “Nightmare Propositions.” These two posts popped up almost simultaneously, and underscore doubts—at least among the industry’s “creatives”—as to the importance of strategists and planners.

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