The 30 Minute University of Planning Working Paper Series

No.4

How you avoid becoming most planners.

By Steve Walls
Most planners …
I’ll get straight to the point here.
Most planning, and most planners, are a complete waste of time.
Sure their hours are billable, but their contribution - well it tends to be negligible.

Ask a creative about it, if you dare. They’ll tell you that most of the briefs that cross their desks
are bland, boring, limp, lacking and late - and that most of the briefings that they’re forced into
are mandatory exercises in powerpoint platitude.

So, how do you avoid being “most planners”?

Well I reckon that you’ve gotta look at two, connected, things - Time and Truth.
Let’s start with Time.

Ruthlessly exterminate the dull and obvious, so the creatives don’t have to.
A great planner saves time for their creatives upfront by getting to an interesting, fresh thought
- fast.

That planner then steals time for their brief, from every other brief in the building, by making it
so provocative and compelling that the teams don’t want to think about anything else.

The saving time thing is easiest, so let’s start there.

If you’re given a week to write a brief, then that brief should land in a place that would have
taken the creative teams longer than a week to get to. If it doesn’t, then all you’ve done is
burned hours that could have been spent doing the real work. Put really simply, by the time the
brief arrives on a creative’s desk the planner should have shaved days off the process.

They should have exhausted the obvious, explored the dead ends, discounted all of the logical,
rational arguments and thrown “the data leads you to only one conclusion” routes onto the
pyre of “plausible but predictable.”

Every first thought, obvious way in, lazy shortcut and cut n paste cliche should have been
identified, examined and ruthlessly exterminated - the process acting as a machete through the
jungle of bullshit, clearing a path that seems, if nothing else, a lot more interesting.

You’ll often hear that planning is simplifying. It’s more than that. Planning is discarding the
familiar in search of a fresh take, a fresh angle, a new approach to a problem that the usual
answers haven’t put a dent in.

But of course most planners don’t do that. Instead they consult google.

“First page of google planning” is everywhere.

It “works” a bit like this

“Instant Noodles you say,

Let me google that.

Well according to my research here, they’re convenient, cheap, need no clean up, contain less shit than you’d
imagine and are a staple of student dorms everywhere.

‘Contain less shit than you’d imagine,’ is new to me - excellent, bang that into a brief for the creatives, and let
them try to figure out an interesting way to talk about it.

My work here is done.

I’m off to a Facebook planning forum where I can wank on about my insight, and maybe add to the posts on
imposter syndrome, NFTs and Brand Purpose for a couple of hours.”

How do you know whether you’re a First Page Of Google Planner?

Here’s a hint.

“Planning is an outdoor sport.”

If you wrote the brief without going outside, without speaking to anyone you’ve not spoken to
before, without leaving the office… you’re a PFoG Planner. As Mr Campbell often says
“planning is an outdoor sport.”

It’s why I’ve found the money, time and space to get my planners out looking for answers in
the traffic of Mexico City, in the beauty regimes of Indonesian soap stars, the upsell tactics of
Nevada brothels, the dating habits of the Bangkok Kathoey community, in chemo wards, at
pop up dinner parties and in the nervous anticipation of jumping from a plane or attending
your first munch.

If you don’t have an “the answer was in the strangest place” story, I’ll wager you’re a FPoG
planner.

So get out of the building, get into the world, abandon google, discount the obvious and get
somewhere new… fast.

Great.

Let’s do the Stealing Time bit.

No creative team that you speak to only has one brief on their desk.

Your job, as a planner, is to ensure that yours is the only one that they’re thinking about. It’s to
make it sit at the back of their heads, to get it into the back of their brain so that it’s the one
that wakes them up in the middle of the night, haunts them in the morning and is the first thing
that they turn to when they arrive at work.

Your job as a planner is to steal all of the time and all of the attention that you can for your
brief.
Which means that it isn’t enough that your brief is relevant, or right or urgent.
What matters is that it’s arresting, attention stealing and challenging.

So, how do you get to a brief that has enough bite to penetrate the armour of indifference?

Well it starts way before the brief.. with an honest conversation and an often uncomfortable
truth.

Yup, truth is the fastest way to a compelling brief. Because real, hard truth is so rarely
spoken.

That’s not news, I know. Planning started as a way of bringing the truth into a room filled with
too much cigar smoke and idle speculation. It brought in the voice of the customer as a way to
prick the bubble of an agency / client relationship that had too often drifted from reality.
“That’s not actually true Nigel, a Vacuum cleaner isn’t her dream anniversary present”

And it’s those bubble pricking truths that unlock the briefs that really stick.

By giving voice to the unspoken, unacknowledged truths around a business, brand, category or
customer a planner can get to a stand out brief very quickly.

Can you speak truth to complacency?

But it takes the courage to say in front of a client what 100 people before you have
swallowed…

“I’ve read your brief and it defines a problem, just not the real one …. the real problem is….”

… the fact that when someone is told they have cancer

they assume that getting what they’re due from this insurance company is going to be “a fight”

… the fact that you made over 100 ads showing women draped over the hood of the car, before you made one with her behind the
wheel

… the fact that the world thinks that your magic was buried with your founder

… the fact that we pretend to be a like for like alternative to the iPhone,
when people know that we’re what you end up with when you can’t afford an i-phone

… the fact that you seem to accidentally produce racist content on a pretty regular basis

… the fact that still having your furniture at 40 is taken sign that you’re failing at life

If you can find the courage to speak truth to complacency, to get your client to recognise the
bigger issue, to raise the uncomfortable issues… then you’re more than half way to having a
brief that the creative teams won’t be able to escape.

Because you’re giving them a real problem to solve, rather than a bullshit “reason to buy” - and
problems are always interesting.
Suck the marrow out of the bones of the advertising industry
I’m almost done, I promise.

But I want to leave with a plea that you be selfish.

Your time in this industry is short. None of us attend retirement parties.

People don’t retire from advertising, they are disappeared 30 years before their retirement date.

As WPP’s Mark Read put it “if you look at our people — the average age of someone who works at WPP
is less than 30. They don’t hark back to the 1980s, luckily.”

The pay off for this short lifespan is the permission to get out there and do interesting things.
To make interesting things.

To gather the skills, the stories and the reputation that will carry you for the twenty or thirty
working years you have in front of you after your agency consigns you to the bin of expensive
irrelevance.

Suck the marrow out of the bones of that opportunity. Burn short, burn bright, fight not to
waste your limited time on mediocrity. Do the work and make work that you love.