CHAPTER 14 | PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T

PLANNERS, THE KNOWERS OF ALL THINGS

Planners can be creative strategists, media strategists, research architects or academic generalists who brief multi-disciplined teams on what is necessary to tackle a brand or campaign assignment.

Planning became a thing when Ogilvy/London started winning all sorts of business in the late 1960’s when it merged with a New York agency. Immediately big agencies all over the world had men who spoke with British accents that pontificated about human emotions.

The American version worked like the cable series Mad Men. Seriously. Ogilvy is what Mad Men was based on.

Planners are marketing alchemists. In the United States they evolved to be the nerds in school that could do algebra but not geometry, who quoted every line on every situation comedy on TV, who read comic books and connected with cultural trends before they became cultural trends. Which was the point.

The discipline morphed into a one-stop-mind of researcher, sociologist, psychologist, student of the past, predictor of the future and the Night’s Watch of cultural marketing faux-pas.

The planner is responsible for representing the prospect. They are they voice that says, “Hey, women/men don’t think like that” when male creatives create expressions for women, and/or women creatives do expressions to target men.

For instance, when Axe body spray was preparing for launch, female planners literally rode around in backseats with men in their late teens and early 20’s on Friday nights to listen to the emotions behind the content of their conversations.

Spoiler alert: Guys wanted to smell good to pick up girls.

The planner is the empath, the chameleon, the shapeshifter, the undercover agent who feels prospect pain and parrots their voices.

Which all leads to the infamous INSIGHT that helps differentiate the company or product from its competitors, and theoretically compels trial.

Planners write creative briefs. Briefs translate and prioritize information into what is relevant and potentially actionable for the creative team.

Truthfully, the main job of planners is to make sure that the creative gets sold. Because great creative, creative that interrupts the subconscious and leads prospects to illogical preference, doesn’t work if it first doesn’t get sold to the client.

Great creative people are storytellers, and often feel insights intuitively. Planners point them in a direction, and show that the process of creating has basis.

The next chapters will cover psychological heuristics, fallacies of logic and basics of behavioral economics which all cause chaos in the minds of unsuspecting consumers.

Yes, advertising is scary.