"How to..." in a world full of "What ifs?"

Every day millions of people have countless millions of ideas - and most are lost into the ether, where they're fed upon by hungry monsters. These monsters are desperate to maintain the status quo (hungry monsters being huge fans of fossilization due largely to their inability to adapt to change) and so they gobble up all but the most well championed thoughts, growing fat on our inertia and sleeping soundly at night on mattresses stuffed with genius thought that went nowhere.

A planner's job is to ensure that fewer of those ideas are lost to hungry monsters and that more of them make it out into the world, where they can make a difference.

The problem is nobody is really helping Planners to do that.

That's where this book aims to help.

If this book aims to be a practical guide to getting ideas out into the world.

A 'How to..." in a world full of "What Ifs?"

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I've been a planner for a long time now.

It may look easy. At face value all that you need is access to the internet, a knowledge of a couple of key powerpoint shapes and marketing models, a graphic t-shirt and some ridiculous glasses.

You're not responsible for anything that actually makes it out into the world, you win awards for summarizing what other people have done, you outsource research, and you have plenty of time to blog about life in the agency, your theories on life, and what you're planning to do with Gareth or Russell the next time you all meet. Plus you get to wear sandals, in winter.

But the truth is that whilst there's no shortage of theory on what planning should be about. And while there's a surfeit of stories, anecdotes or retro-fit case histories (the formula for which is "We believed this, we tested the work, we were wrong, we learned humility, we had an a-ha moment, we re-calibrated, it worked, we are brilliant...") nobody really tells you what you should be doing when it comes to the day in and day out of frozen peas, pasta sauces and weight loss clubs.

Let's change that.

What am I talking about?
Fair question, here's an example of when I think that this book will be useful...

Your client knows that marketing works best when it's expressing a core brand belief
And when that core belief is expressed through the product
And at every touchpoint.

Because you've told him
And because it's in every marketing book he's read in the last 3 years.

He has an issue though
His brand doesn't have a belief.
It doesn't have a charismatic founder.
It doesn't have any obvious reason for being.

It was founded in a meeting room in New Jersey in answer to segment growth of 14% a year, a chance to flood the market via a friendly distribution channel and research that showed that people respond well to thistle imagery in the semi-premium yellow fat market.

Now you can throw Apple, Nike, Starbucks and Virgin logos at him for a while
You can pull out a Dove case study
And you can show him brands like Innocent

And if you art direct it well, and phrase it aggressively enough ("How can you call yourself a brand and not have a single guiding principle, would Steve Jobs have allowed that?) you can buy a couple of weeks for yourself and the agency.

But ultimately the client wants to know... where can I find my belief? How can I run it through the company? How can I get it to inform the product and distribution of the product? And how do I ensure that it's all credible?

And you have no fucking clue how to answer that.

We've all been there. Trapped in the circle of "You should", "We haven't", "But you should know", "Alas we don't" that leads nowhere good.

That's where and when I hope that this book will help.

Pick it up and it will tell you - where to look for that belief, who to talk with, the kind of meetings you need to have with them, how to plan those meetings, how to introduce product people to the idea, how to anchor it, how to build momentum, and consensus and how to get it through the system.

Practical, sensible, start points to deal with the issue.

It's a planner's "WTF" guide...

Let's do this

Idea Protection Program

One of the most frustrating things about being 'a consultant' is that you tend to leave all of your good ideas on paper, with a client who due to time constraint and internal pressure then neglects the idea for long enough to have it atrophy and die.

Everyone recognizes this - there's no dearth of good ideas out there; just an absence of good ideas that make it out into the world.

That's probably why one of the ideas that people are most excited about when I talk to them about my new company is the Idea Protection Program.

Basically what we do is offer to stay with an idea and to give assistance at the key - idea threatening points of the process.

What we offer is help with research methodology - so that the idea gets the fairest shot in testing. No 'squeeze into this dress Margaret' testing for our ideas - the research is bespoke and designed to help improve rather than disprove the idea.

We also offer help with stimulus here - so that the people are responding to something that accurately represents the idea that we have in mind

And we offer help with recruitment.. so that the right people see and respond to the idea


We then offer help with internal presentations... pulling together the data, making the charts look great, proof testing the story and even coming along and presenting the hell out if it, if that's what's required

And finally we help with the briefs to external agencies...taking the time to explain the idea, the work to date and the requirements going forward

It's a simple idea...


- Set up research for learning and success
- present that work in as impactful a way as possible
- share the idea, stoke the excitement

But ultimately it's about ensuring that understaffed companies don't kill ideas with neglect and standard process.
And it seems to be something that people want

How to get who you want

I’m about to do something very rare (for me) here, I’m about to admit that I was wrong about something.

You see before George Bush slipped in one final fuck-up – the global collapse of capitalism – I was watching an exodus of talent from big agencies and thinking, hmmm maybe we’re about to see something interesting here. Maybe we’re going to see agencies looking again at the way that they work. Maybe this massive talent drain is going to force some introspection. Maybe, just maybe, things are about to change here.

And then of course the world’s economies turned to mush, the big agencies started laying people off left, right and center, retrenchment became one of those words that tripped easily off the tongue and the moment seemed to have passed. Sure there were hundreds of creative people all looking to start something smaller, and more collaborative and with less overhead; a thousand plans for a loose network of non-network talent. Facebook lit up. Twitter was abuzz with fresh noise. GoDaddy registered site name after site name. But I thought that the real opportunity, the opportunity to change the way that the big networks operated had slipped away, the power of the talent exodus buried beneath the noise of the recently redundant.

But I was wrong. As I’ve lounged in various coffee shops, my mac aglow, live streaming myself typing away and talking to various people as I’ve done it I’ve found something really interesting. All of the good people, the people with a real idea, the people who are looking beyond the ‘burn it down’ model and towards the ‘make it more fun, make it better’ model are talking with the big networks. It seems that I was wrong. The big networks haven’t been blinded by the squirting jugular of recession to the sights and sounds of a new, quiet revolution. Instead they’re watching, learning, networking, and cherry picking the best ideas.

Here’s what I think they’re hearing.

The smartest people don’t want to do something trivial – advertising used to be seen as something that was kind of glamorous. It was fun, it was frothy, it paid reasonably well, the girls wore short skirts and heels high enough to compensate for the baseness of their morals. You could have ideas and see them out in the world. You could change the way that people thought about things. And you could wear what you wanted while you were doing it. But that was then, back when greed was good and suspenders were red. Over time advertising lost its sheen. The money was nothing compared to the city, or silicon valley or consulting. So the smart and the greedy went elsewhere. The offices and the perks were nowhere near as glossy as the fashion industry and the media, so the shiny chose something else too. New holding companies demanded that the people in the offices conform to standard HR policies, so the deviant, the drunk and the deranged chose the music companies and then the weird world of mobile media. And of course Hollywood weighed in – advertising man became a shorthand for shallow, silly and in need of a lesson (thanks Mel Gibson) and so the serious minded looked at academia and at research. Advertising is like a 29 year old Miami party girl, no longer frothy and fun – but desperate, showing its age and smiling through it.

The smartest people do want access to the power of brands however. They realize that while spending your life trying to figure out a new way to say ‘now tastes of something’ or ‘now without cancer causing fats’ nay not be the most rewarding job nor the job with the most integrity it does give you access to something with tremendous power. It gives you access to brands.

Brands are a powerful shorthand, they touch almost everyone in the first world and they give you access to large groups of people willing to hear you out. Brands are intimately connected with people, and they have the money to broadcast a message. They can whisper and they can evangelize. Work in the confession box and in the pulpit of a mega-church, And that’s why really smart people are willing to work with agencies. They’re not going near a brand that’s all about being ‘one quarter moisturizer so it won’t dry your skin like soap’ but they are going to want to be part of a brand looking to ‘Stand against stereotypes and stand for Real Types’.

Better still they’re going to bring you new ways to express and prove your promise. The people that agree to work with you because they to believe in a brands message aren’t coming to you blank, they’re coming with a social agenda, they want to change things, they think they know how and they have a completely different approach to you and to the agency. They’re interested in playing with new media models, they’re interested in activism, they want to measure success in a different way. They’re going to stretch you, they’re going to challenge you and ultimately they need you too.

So the first thing to take out of this brave new world is this – don’t try to hire the smartest people in the world to work in and for your agency; try to hire them on projects where they can work for the brands within your agency. Agencies are frothy, brands are meaty.


It’s not about select Creative people, it’s about energetic environments – if your agency is reliant on a single department, strictly paired together as art director and copywriter then frankly, you’re fucked. Agencies have been wrestling with the idea of how to bring their different departments together earlier, how to cross pollinate more and how to take the pressure for ideas off the shoulders of the few and into the hands of the many. Most see it as a process problem and invent new ways to force people into proximity at key points in the process. Most have ‘ideas can come from anywhere’ written somewhere in the building… but very few are genuinely ‘open source’. I’ve always believed that the best ideas are both bouncy and sticky. You have an idea and you throw it to someone, they add to it and throw it again, with greater force. The best ideas gain in size and momentum as they pick up something from every hand that touched them and increase in velocity as they feed off the energy that they create. The key to making an agency work is to allow people to see just how bouncy and how sticky an idea is.

Most of the people that I know who have left the agency space haven’t immediately locked themselves into cubicles or offices. They haven’t set up strict departments. And they haven’t decided that their job is to take the brands that they’re working on into whatever media was bought by the company in the upfront.

They also miss being surrounded by amazing people from different disciplines. Creativity is an energy level.

So the second way to get people to work with you is to set up an Energetic Environment invite people in before you have a brief, ask them to help fill a blank wall with facts that might lead to a strategy, give them the opportunity to work with a bunch of people from across your company, have lots of open space, allow people to write on the walls, allow people to work on whichever brief interests them the most, with people who are also interested in it, fill the place with stimulus, make it tactile. Allow anyone to wander in at any time and throw an idea. Set aside an afternoon a week where the people you love the most from outside your agency come in and get to play with the ideas that the people from inside the agency have had. And pay those people for their time. Make it fun, make it physical, have ‘idea battles’, don’t set up the invitation list based on department and always have the session facilitated by someone who has no end goal other than keeping it fun and keeping it flowing.

Finally, it’s who you know, not who you employ… agencies have amazing black books, they know lots of great people. Bring together people from radically different backgrounds, bring together people with radically different points of view, bring together people that you know are going to just love each other; regardless of what their background is – and ask only that they give you and idea, a song, a piece of strategy, a piece of art in return.

Connections and networks are vital to the people that you’re looking to woo. You can help facilitate that. Tell me that you have a project going and that it has Jonathan Harris involved and I’m there. Tell someone that you have an innovation thing and I’m involved and they may have the same reaction. Leverage who you know, not who you employ and you’ll become magnetic

Again all basic stuff.

Invite people to work in brands
Offer energetic environments
Act as a talent hub

And I promise that the people you’ve been itching to work with will come running and that the people you employ will walk 6 inches taller.

Amplified Ignorance

I talked a little before about the “Culture of Comment” and the predicament that brands find themselves in when facing an online world where the comment thread is always going to be longer than the article that sparked it.

It’s one of the things that killed the old model of “Interrupt and argue.” We’re no longer in an era where your brand can merely get in the way of a favorite TV programme or magazine article, state its case and hope to have won you over. Instead we’re in a world where people demand the right to argue back; and where they have the ability to do it. And it’s an unfair fight because while brands are monitored and restricted in their communication (they have to tell the truth or a version thereof) the people that they’re arguing with have no such restrictions.

Of course brands have tried to monitor and control these online debates. They’ve demanded the right to approve all comments before allowing them to be posted, they’ve hired moderators to answer the worst of the criticisms and they’ve hired Blog Lobbyists to ensure that not only is blog content favorable but blog comment is regulated too. Some of it works, but ultimately this is the wild west (or modern Russia) and ‘the law’ don’t go down too well ‘round these parts.

An aside. A friend of mine took some time out to travel. Like a lot of people who did this he took a Lonely Planet Guide. Well the problem that you have when everyone has a Lonely Planet guide is that the bits of the Planet that they recommend soon aren’t that lonely at all. Everyone is there. Add to this a sharp practice by savvy traders – on one street in Tibet there were four cafes all with the same name” – all claiming to be the original one recommended by Lonely Planet. All crammed with backpacks and their dreadlocked wearers.

Anyway he wrote about this on his blog. Two days later he had a comment from a Lonely Planet moderator, paid to monitor the buzz on the brand. They thanked him for the thoughtful way he’d written about the problem and assured him that they were looking for solutions. Unable to help myself I dived in with some solutions of my own – and three days letter got a ‘Thank You’ from the Web Watcher.

A couple of things to take from this. It pays to be watching the comments out there, amid the dross may be some solutions to problems – or better still a highlighting of problems that you didn’t know you had. You need to be careful in how you deal with the people that are writing about you, or they freak out and get all ‘They’re Watching Me!’ and finally when you do decide to intervene make it an invitation to a dialogue, not a ‘cease and desist’

Back to the point though. As I’ve lounged in various coffee shops and listened to a 1000 treadmill conversations I’ve come to the conclusion that calling what we have a “Culture of Comment” is a little too flattering. What we actually have is “Amplified Ignorance”

Now those of you who know me will know that I tend to trace America’s hatred of nuance back to an educational system that tells you to circle the letter corresponding to the ‘correct’ answer and ignore the others. It’s a system that deals in absolute certainty, in black and white at the expense of gray and it leads to statements like “You’re either with us, or you’re against us” (try telling that to Sweden, or Switzerland)

In the UK the system tells you to take a side and argue it persuasively. In France to take each side and argue one against the other. I think it’s why the British make such good comedians, the French philosophers and the Americans such good Christians.

But “Amplfied Ignorance” is of course a wider cultural phenomenon. What the internet, comment boxes, twitter, text messages, facebook status boxes and ‘press one if you agree’ polls have done is two things. Firstly they have handed the bullhorn to anyone who wants it. And the people who most want to be heard on an issue are usually the people shouting about it. So it’s governed by the extremes. Secondly it’s condensed the space and time for response, so you can bang out any opinion in seconds, publish it and be pretty much certain that nobody is going to take the time to offer a thoughtful refutal. No harm, no foul you may say. But….

The internet is an amalgamator, what it does is take all of the data out there, weigh it and offer it up to people without editorializing. That’s how Google works, straight numbers. And when you have people shouting at the extremes and at each other, all of the time what happens is that the bullshit rises to the top of the search engine and becomes ‘fact’ – why it’s only a half step away from being on Wikipedia.

It’s this kind of thing that allowed the Republicans to ‘Swift Boat’ John Kerry. The facts were that Kerry was a decorated war hero where Bush had dodged going to Vietnam and may well have actually deserted his post in the National Guard (the records were missing). But through an ad’ that generated comment, that sowed doubt, that generated more comment that became the established orthodoxy somehow Kerry was painted as the less heroic. And he allowed it to happen, because he misunderstood the culture of ‘Amplified Ignorance’… he thought that having the facts on his side would win the argument for him. Big Mistake.

So how do you ensure that your brand doesn’t get ‘Swift Boated’ – that people don’t think that your burgers are made from eyeball and gristle and that the holes in your jeans aren’t individually scratched in by an Indonesian orphan?

How indeed.

I think that you have to start by going back to the basics of a brief. If you remember most good briefs wouldn’t ask “What is it that we want to say here?” instead they’d ask “What do we want people’s take away to be from this communication?” And the two are different. What you say and what people hear can be wildly different – as I found out when I did a campaign for a food that “Kids will love” and got back data that what people were hearing was “Not good enough to serve an adult” and therefore “not good enough for my kids either”

These days the planner has to ask a few new questions

i) “What responses will this communication provoke”
From the point of view of both the Brand Evangelist (out there to sell your brand to every person that they know) and the Brand Arsonist (out there to burn your brand to the ground)

ii) What ammunition can we give Brand Evangelists to help them argue the case online? What can we send them? What can we embed in the communication? Which links should they be cutting and pasting?

iii) To what degree do we want to acknowledge and neutralize the Brand Arsonists? Do we want the communication to address them head on? Do we want it to have a counter-argument embedded? Do we want to deflect them onto another issue?


A quick example. In every US Domestic Car focus group there’s an asshole. He’s full of technical ‘data’ and ‘facts’ that aren’t true, he’s really loud and at some point he WILL say “Found On Road Dead.” or “My Chevy wouldn’t make it as far as the levy” You can show him a campaign that shows that Ford’s are the most reliable cars in America, that they whup Toyota’s ass or that the new Malibu is the best build car on the road and that every independent source says so and he’ll brush aside the fact and restate the stereotype.

Internally agencies working on Domestic Car accounts got tired of hearing this and tended to discount it. But it was actually a huge problem out in the world. Everyone knew a Domestic hating asshole and his harking back 20 years to a stereotype that people knew was actually damaging the brand and stopping it moving forward.

The US companies took the high road here and decided not to attack the guy. Sticking instead to the data, the facts and 3rd party sources and hoping that they would get through eventually.

But it would have been an interesting exercise to look at work that either gave Domestic Loyalists a giant bandaid to slap over Asshole’s mouth or to look at work that took the guy head on – a “Hey Asshole” campaign, or an “Are you a domestic racist?” campaign

It worked for Skoda when they showed people running from the badge. The risks are high, it’s not always the right strategy, but it’s worth looking at.

Not a lot of answers here but something to think about. Whatever you do, someone is gonna hate it. And that hate will be based on prejudice. And that prejudice will fuel a lot of comment venom. You need to decide whether or not you want to deal with that. It needs to be a choice, not an oversight.

More on Brand Collaboration

Collaboration needn’t be the exclusive preserve of the French during wartime. In a world where people are assembling a patchwork of brands around themselves in a bid to show the world who they are and what they believe it pays to know who you’re being lumped in with – and on occasion to force those connections.

Of course there are different approaches to collaboration between brands, and those approaches depend largely on the situation that you find yourself in.


Model One. Media / Content Partners

Take for example the relationship between the Star Wars franchise and the US post office. Star Wars needs to achieve ubiquity – universal awareness. The post office is part of the fabric of every town in America, it has real estate, it has installations (in the form of post boxes) and of course it has collectibles (in the form of stamps)… what the post office needs is injection of interest and of cash. That can come in the form of exclusive stamps. What Star Wars needs is visibility – that can come from painting mailing boxes as R2D2 and from the PR you get from having your own stamp. Done well it’s a win-win. Post office used as media vehicle and rewarded with profit from a one-off product (stamps) – Star Wars even more entrenched in popular culture.

Perhaps a better example, certainly one that feels more modern was the collaboration between ubiquitous convenience chain 7-Eleven and The Simpson’s Movie. 7-Eleven agreed to totally rebrand a dozen of their stores (I know it seemed like more) as Kwik-E-Marts (the convenience store in the cartoon)… in addition to the rebranded stores all 7-Eleven’s would carry some of The Simpson’s most famous fictional products… Buzz Cola, Krusty-Os, Sprinklicious donuts and Squishees. Throw in exclusively designed point of sale and you have a PR stunt that generates yards and yards of press, a movie that opens ahead of estimates and a store that sells out of all proprietary products and more than 3 million bits of Simpson’s shit. Cool.


Model Two. Blurring the (on)line.

Some brands live online. They have no physical footprint. That’s not an issue, but it does throw out a tantalizing opportunity for brand collaboration. When you throw together two brands, on virtual, one bricks and mortar and add a willingness to blur the lines between virtual reality and actual reality (VR and AR?) you can get something interesting.

Take for example H&M and The Sims. This could have been a case of two brands with a shared demographic coming together and doing a coupon exchange. It would have worked too. Sell The Sims in H&M, advertise H&M in The Sims. What we got instead was a decent blurring of the lines, H&M gets integrated into the new Sims game. You can buy an add on module that allows you to shop in the virtual store, to try on virtual clothes, to meet with virtual friends. This offers H&M the chance to showcase new lines and gives The Sims an anchor store within the virtual world. But then they took it further. If you wanted to you could design clothes within the game, which would be sent to H&M who in turn would make some of the clothes designed in the virtual world and sell them in the real world. Yes it still has the stench of competition about it (why don’t you offer to make anything I design?) but it turns the game into a two way street – and that’s a door worth pushing against.

Model Three. Shared Host, Shared Occasion. Opportunity to Innovate.

Nike and Apple don’t have a whole lot in common. Really. One’s about a celebration of participation in physical activity, the other is about unleashing an individual’s creative potential. One lives on the track and pounding the street, the other in dark bedrooms and glossy graphic design studios.

But the Nike Shoe and the I-Pod shared two things. They shared a demographic and they shared an occasion. The people out pounding pavement were listening to music on their I-pods as they went. Now I’ve worked in Innovation companies and I know that at some point both Nike and Apple will have been approached with this ‘Insight’ (again it’s an observation but in the Innovation world an Observation is worth nothing whereas an insight is a $200,000 project) and told “Nike you should make a MP3 shoe” or “Apple, it’s time for the I-sneaker”

Both ludicrous of course. Apple have no expertise in shoes and Nike none in well designed electronics. But the idea will have been floated.

So it’s to the credit of the companies that they saw the opportunity and decided to go for it together. Nike+ puts a ‘digital pebble’ in the shoes of its runner, the pebble talks to your I-pod, you get all kinds of information recorded – from your speed and distance to your route. Throw in an online community for some competition and you have a collaboration that’s useful to runners, that allows one party to take the lead, that sells additional hardware and that gives both companies more access to their customers (via the website) and consequently extra opportunities to sell (‘hey you’ve done 1000 miles, time for new shoes’, ‘here’s the prefect playlist for your run’)

It’s a delicate balance… and ego could get in the way, but Collaboration for Innovation seems like a place to explore in the future.


Model Four. Trading Credibility and Accessibility.

Your brand has a great product but it’s not taken seriously enough. You want to demo your product. Their brand has a great product but it’s really niche, people don’t know that they’d enjoy it. Time for a brand tie-up.

When HP wanted to demonstrate the quality of its high end printers it got together with the National Gallery. The strategy? reproduce some of the most spectacular National Gallery pieces using HP equipment, and then post those pieces of art all over London, in some really incongruous places. Throw in a phone number by each piece that allows The National Gallery to talk you through it in an accessible way and a website that lists all of the locations of the art and allows HP to talk about the quality of its printing and you have a campaign that brings new people into contact with the National Gallery and gives HP the kind of visibility that it couldn’t buy – especially as the PR cloud turned into a mushroom cloud of chatter.


So – one question to ask when looking at communication on your brand… “Who would we love invite onboard with this one?” and “What’s in it for them as well as us.”

Simple stuff but worth asking.

Orville who is your very best friend?

No brand is an island. It never was and it never will be. But in the past, in the bad old days where the model was interruption and media was used merely as a holding pen (the first part of the Trap and Trip model) brands were defined in opposition to each other.

People bought you because you washed whiter, lasted longer or felt a little bit posher (more upmarket for you non-British folks) than that other guy. You were chosen in opposition to the brand leader / cheaper alternative – which is why taste tests and having Danny Baker show up on your doorstep asking whether your knickers were really as stain free as you might get them with Daz worked.

In ye olden days brands had CLAIMS at their core

But the model is changing. We’re moving from having a unique selling proposition (USP) to a Genuine Reason for Existance (GRE). People aren’t asking WHAT your brand does – they’re asking WHY you started it in the first place.

These days brands have a CAUSE at their core.

That’s a fundamental shift –

FROM ‡ ‘WHAT it does’ (and the manufacturing / marketing version of the question ‘WHAT it does BETTER’)

<- TO ‘WHY it exists’ and the brand / marketing version of the question WHY its existence matters to you

My hypothesis (and I hope that it’s right) is that as brands continue to abandon manufacturing claims and embrace instead their reason for existence the way in which brands relate to each other will also change.

Just as we moved from a model about interruption and into one about engagement so too are brands moving – from a model about opposition to one about collaboration.

One of the questions that we should be asking when we’re thinking about our brands is this – who should our brand be playing with?

Because the way that your brand shows that it’s relevant in the world isn’t by going all Maximus on our asses and destroying the opposition, it’s by finding like minded brands and creating something unique with them.

Sounds like utopia, doesn’t it? Brands being about collaboration and creation, eschewing argument and destruction, having a social purpose at their core – involving the people that love them to most in achieving that social purpose. It should because it could be.

I’m going to go into examples that I’ve loved (and a model that looks at kinds of collaboration) in the next post here but until then just ask yourself ‘Does my brand have more friends than enemies?’ ‘Does my brand spend more time trying to create something than it does trying to destroy something?’ ‘Does my brands have a cause or a claim at its core?’

The brief or the briefing

Today’s coffee shop ramble may well be an exercise in the bleeding obvious.

I’ve long argued against having a creative brief as anything other than a record of intent – an agreed set of objectives against which the client can later judge the work. I’ve wanted the Brief to be a pair of granny knickers – there to ensure maximum ass coverage, to provide comfort and to keep everything decent.

But as a document that is intended to inspire creative people – forget it. Briefs tend to be exercises in filling in boxes. That process has become more ‘collaborative’ with clients, meaning that they get more words of their own in the boxes and given more time to argue over those words. So in most agencies the brief is now a political document, designed to appease each of the parties involved to the degree that creative work can start.

What then happens is that clients and agency alike use the work to thrash out what should and shouldn’t have been included in the brief in the first place and you end up with rounds and rounds of creative work; each round exploring a different strategy, rather than each refining an idea. It’s frustrating – but it’s how things work these days.

What has always excited me the most is the briefing. At its best the briefing is where a good planner gets to inspire people around an idea. It’s where they get to relive the excitement of the discoveries along the way, to talk about the brand, its ideas, what it means to people, where it fits in culture and what its ambitions are. The briefing is a session that’s all about instilling an idea and energizing people around it. My briefings tend to be full of anecdotes and asides and bits of trivia that I found along the way and made sense of as we groped towards a strategy. Other people use graphics and music and tours of facilities. It’s a session where you job is to sell the possibilities of the strategy. One word of warning here – it’s also often the session where the planner tends to try to sell what they think the perfect execution of the idea is. Do try not to… it may be a great idea, but it’s not the time.

So I’ve always been anti-brief and pro-briefing… asking why we archive briefs but never record the briefings that led to great work.

And of course I was wrong. To a degree.

Guy Murphy, a wily planner and man who knows good work pointed out that the brief and the briefing - despite sharing a phonetic similarity - are two entirely different beasts. Like Beavers and Diva (perhaps explaining my life-long preference for the latter)

As he said “The brief should be exactly that. It should be as short as possible and contain only the key objectives and points.”

Whereas the briefing “Should be as long as necessary – and contain as many of the stories, anecdotes, diversions, observations and facts as is necessary to excite people about the brand and the task at hand.”

He’s always more succinct than me, that Mr Murphy.

But he set me thinking. If the brief needs only objectives and facts then what should it look like? Here’s my first stab, I’m sure it exists somewhere, all briefs do.


So here’s my version of a brief

THE BRAND IDEA _________________
This is where we remind ourselves that our brand has a purpose and an idea that’s unsullied by the immediate need for action. This idea will rarely change. Nike has always been ‘an exhortation to participate’ because it has always believed that more people should be out sharing in the joy of sports. That’s not going to change

WHAT IS THE BRAND LOOKING TO DO _____________
What’s the task here? Is the brand looking to introduce a new product? Are they looking to charge a premium? Do they want 1% of Londoners to take part in some sort of sporting activity (the brief for Nike’s Run London)… do they want more young women to continue in sport?

WHY HASN’T THAT HAPPENED ALREADY? ________________
What are the things that have held the brand back from doing this in the past. If they want to increase their share of the 18-21 virgins market why don’t they have the share they’re after already? People give up exercise after it stops being compulsory at school? Young women are determined to keep an intact hymen? What’s up? Basically.

WHO IS THE BRAND LOOKING TO ATTRACT?____________
Brands are magnetic, people are drawn to them. Who is the brand after?
In this case it’s those 18-21 year old virgins who have given up on sport ….

HOW DO THEY RELATE TO THE BRAND IDEA?
Just what it sounds like. “18-21 year old virgins don’t see any need to participate in sport, they get all of the exercise they need burning down abortion clinics… and texting each other snide messages about the slutty girls”

WHAT CAN THE BRAND CREDIBLY OFFER THEM THAT THEY FUNDAMENTALLY DESIRE?
This is our ‘human truth’ – the thing that we all have in common.
“They do like the idea of having a slamming sportsperson’s body, that way virginity seems like a choice.”

WHERE ARE THEY MOST LIKELY TO BE RECEPTIVE TO THAT MESSAGE?
Where can this message be most culturally and personally resonant? Is it a billboard, a magazine that they read guiltily and in secret or do we need the local church to endorse “Hot bodied virgins for Jesus”?

WHAT ELSE DO WE KNOW THAT COULD BE RELEVANT HERE
Is there a piece of trivia, a case study, a seemingly loose connection that can make all of this really make sense to somebody looking for a fresh way in. “During the research we noticed that a lot of the girls had posters of _____ on their walls; they liked her ______”

SUM IT ALL UP_______

We’re a brand that’s all about getting more people to play sport.
We want to attract a certain group, 18-21 virgin girls
They gave up on sport after school
But haven’t given up the fantasy of a slammin’ athlete’s body
They’re most receptive to messages from their pastor

WHAT WE NEED________
We need a campaign that gets 50,000 late teen ice queens to take up some form of regular exercise.


Okay – snarky example but I think it works as a brief.
That may of course just be the way my mind works
Or the way it works today
Really need input on this I think.