08.10
Back in April, Rob Campbell (now head of planning at Wieden+Kennedy’s Shanghai office) posted an “assignment” on his blog. He and some other account planning types, including Russell Davies and Gareth Kay, have for awhile now been running what they call the “Account [Planning] School on the Web,” or A[P]SOTW. They more or less take turns posting assignments on their respective blogs and accepting submissions from anyone who’s interested. Then they look at all the submissions, pick a “winner,” and provide useful feedback based on their significant experience in adland.
Having met Rob a few months back in Hong Kong, I check his blog sometimes and I decided I’d give this assignment a shot. The challenge was
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04.15
[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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04.02
A few weeks back I wrote a post about how to build a brand for free, in which I (jokingly) suggested that in order to come up with an idea you could go to a website, choose a couple of words, and string them together. This technique might prove interesting or even fun, but of course it rarely produces more than a random phrase (examples I gave were “Sensible Passion” and “Solid Library”). If you really want some instruction on generating good ideas, I recommend looking into the work of James Webb Young.
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03.19
[Originally published this on B2B Brand Debate, where it got some comments including one comment from Al Ries himself.]
Before Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote their seminal book “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind,” David Ogilvy—one of the true Mad Men—set the stage for their thesis, stating “It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product.” Ogilvy’s “big idea”—one that reflects the qualities of the brand and differentiates it from competitors—is Ries and Trout’s “position.” A quick glance at the websites and whitepapers of today’s leading branding firms suggests that elements of this definition remain intact. They speak of “relevant differentiation in the marketplace” (Landor) and ensuring that customers “can tell the brand apart from others” (Interbrand’s Brandchannel.com). Some experience in the world of branding firms and a look at the work posted on their sites, however, reveal that definitions and deliverables don’t always align.
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