The future of planning.

Extracted from Campaign Live:

From Context to Communication Planning, the evolving consumer and media landscape has spawned a profusion of planning specialisms; an abundance of smart, new media, new era rhetoric and opinion.

The logic goes that a more complex world requires more niche expertise: Bigger teams, made up of more specialists, for more complicated challenges.

Is this necessarily the case?

This paper describes a global project for Nokia delivered by a small, multi-skilled team.

A hybrid combination of creative strategist and strategic creatives.

Planning produced a Communication Design to deliver:
- Strategy based on Fitting in, not Standing out;
- Understanding of emerging cultural behaviour;
- Ongoing monitoring and tactical direction;
- Fluid development of creative output -planning & creative responding to consumer involvement in real time.

A strategic approach that produced more interesting work, better results and significant added value for Nokia.

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Globally, advertising giants will soon find it hard to compete with smaller set-ups that remain small for a strategic purpose. They're lean and can be mean and they're fast in ethnographic immersion, intense in cultural understanding and they're apt in building on each other's idea collectively to build a new hybrid of thoughts (that probably could not be put together by the wisdom of one. Goodbye Einstein, hello Wiki). In big agencies, there are too many furnitures, cold storages, baggages, whatever you want to call them - duplicated by the dozens, running the ad business like an automotive production line. Reminds me a bit of George Orwell's Animal Farm.

We need to be small because we need to ensure that everyone in the team brings a value to the table. There will be no hostages when there is passion. There will be no freeloaders when there is accountability. There will be no simplicity when there is a strict focus on strategy and craft. Everyone should know what he or she is doing. Running the ad business should evolve into an 'open source' kind of platform or it will fail. Why? Because, collectively, Consumers are light years ahead of the thousands of Suits and Creatives combined. We are doomed until we do something about it. Fast.