A Valentines Message to Planners

It’s time for a little less brain and a little more heart.


Matthew Waksman
Planning Director Karmarama
 

Whether you hate Valentine’s day, are a full blown romantic, or are just hoping for a way to make once a week happen twice (for those of you who don’t know what I mean, good for you), it’s a day when many of us end up thinking about who we love, and how to show it. 

 

An experience I had last week made me think that the agency planners of tomorrow are in danger of forgetting about who and how to love in order to have the greatest impact.

 

Let me explain, like many of my validation-seeking contemporaries, I enjoy getting messages on LinkedIn from young grads trying to get into planning wanting to hear about my career journey, so when I got one of these last week I did what I usually do and invited them into Karmarama for a coffee and a chat. 

 

I always give the same piece of advice, but the surprised reaction I keep getting recently is making me concerned.

 

The advice I give isn’t about skilling up in data or delving deep into cultural trends.

 

It’s about building relationships and respect across the agency.

 

It’s not the sexiest thing to say in the industry, but building strong relationships needs to be reaffirmed as a core focus and skillset for planners:

 

  1. We cannot be the only experts anymore

 

It’s been a nice and comfortable narrative for planners that as clients’ marketing plans become more complex, the strategic resource needed is getting more and more important every year.

 

Whilst that’s true, it also means that a single planner cannot be the sole font of knowledge across all potential solutions. It’s far better value for a client to have a planner who has cultivated relationships with experts from data/PR/influencer teams and bring it all together in order to forge a strategy than a planner who just wants to be the only one with the answer sitting at top table.

 

  1. Brave ideas, not just brave briefs, comes from partnerships

 

Brave work doesn’t just appear from a perfectly crafted brief. Unless you have partners around the agency, you cannot hope to secure the right team, the right time, the right budget, and the right open environment where the idea is given its very best chance to grow. 

 

None of the above is outside a planner’s job description, if you write the brief, you know what it needs. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an agency to raise an idea. Unless you have partners in all corners of the agency you lose say in how your child is raised. 

 

  1. Other people decide how fast planners grow 

 

When we start out in planning it might seem like the most important place to be is in the pub with the edgiest creative team.

 

And don’t get me wrong, at times it is. But they are not the people who decide what level planners are going to be pitched at to clients, and what briefs they end up working on.

 

It might seem mercantile, but if more young planners understood the pivotal role that everyone from client servicing to new business plays in their career trajectory, it would help planners rise faster into leadership positions and take a much more central role in agency life. And that would be a good thing. 

 

We need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid of being “the brains” in the room and reject that descriptor. Otherwise we risk becoming lobotomised brains in jar. A brain in a jar might be good for a science experiment, but it can’t actually do anything. 

 

And strategy that ends up doing nothing isn’t a strategy. 

 

This Valentines Day, let’s remember that to have an impact we need our brains, but we also need a heart. Let’s make sure we’re using both to build the relationships we need to keep planning at the top of its game.