Reason #2: Darrin is the very model of the modern creative

The insight: Our Director of Research + Analytics Michael De Cicco brought up an interesting point recently about the oft-discussed millenials. As we’ve heard, they’re inveterate multitaskers, blogging while they watch TV, texting while they email, cutting videos on iMovie whilst they watch Gossip Girl. A great point, and one to be kept in mind when making ideas that work today.

What’s interesting beyond multitasking, however, is a related change that has serious implications for the humans as the only resource in business and specifically the role of planners and other creative strategic thinkers.

This is a time for championing new and fresh hybrid models for how we as individuals work and think, and PR is maybe already there.

Where we’ve been: The last fifty years was an era of specialization. Doctors became internists or cardiologists or otolaryngologists… Modern (capital “M”) technology improved how jobs got done, but built capital intensive structures that required highly specialized jargon and means of production in medicine, in manufacturing and elsewhere, and this was a good thing…

The world of communications (advertising, design, PR, whatever) went through the same. For 50 years margins were made and empires built an increasing specialization and categorization of people and skills. Multiple levels of account services, copywriters, art directors, promotional specialists, DM specialists, online DM specialists, list specialists, party planners, florists, graphic design, etc etc etc.

And in what always struck me as odd, even the planners themselves specialized: connections planners, DM planners, quant planners, qual planners, experience design planners and so on.

“What kind of planner are you?” we were asked. “Are you business planner or a creative planner?” Which stereotype did you conform to?

No Comments | Read More...

I promised Stephanie Smirnov I would answer this question since I joined DeVries late last year: why would a strategic planner with roots in advertising take the challenge to work at a PR firm and help start a Strategy + Innovations practice? What role could planning play in a PR environment? In other words – why now – why did I leave advertising and does it really matter?

This is first in a series …

Reason #1. The Rise of the Snack: It’s been happening since I started in the online world in 1998, but with the growth of social media and lives of continuous partial attention content consumption has become more like snacking, and less like a meal (and when it is a meal, it’s often ad-free). And what has that done?

To steal economist Hernando de Soto’s term out of his context, the articulation of brands’ values and value via television advertising and other traditional forms of communications (including most web sites) has become “dead capital“. In other words, brands and their advertising avatars have become assets that cannot be used to their fullest.

And so, the value and values of brands need to be unlocked in new ways.

That’s where the question of craft comes in to understand who is best able to make ‘dead capital’ regain its currency in this environment. We hear that ‘Great ideas can come from anywhere.’ or ‘There’s only one job in advertising’ (and why use that word, ‘advertising’ anyway, Alex?). It’s true in theory, but does it hold in practice? Have most constituents of the brand-er ecosystem really contemplated what The Rise of the Snack means and the impact continuous partial attention has on what we do?

At the last Account Planning Conference, I was struck by the dichotomy of the optimistic view of the brand new world (or is it the New Brand World?) and the great malaise a lot of the (really really good) planners I spoke to there felt. Why is that? It was more than just envy for that guy who quit planning to found Method, right?

It’s likely it has something to do with the pressure that Snack-sized content culture has put on the context and utility of the tools and teams most agencies use to solve the problems we’re paid to solve.

It would be arrogant to say that any one agency or type of agency is positioned better for this change. But…bringing together the craft of planning with that of PR is wonderfully poised to unlock brands’ capital. Others (and that’s only one example) have discussed how planning has changed recently. This is just the start for us…

The next few posts are going to talk about why the ground in PR is especially fertile to lead new directions for strategy + innovation and why I’m here: the new ways brands work (not exclusive to PR, but think molecules, not pyramids!), what Darren from Bewitched has to do with it and how a business model makes a tremendous difference. I’ll probably cook up a few more things too as the writing goes on…

Making things that work in a snack-centric world doesn’t mean thinking small, nor does it mean creating only massive efforts that people have no alternative to ignore. The onus is on us to craft ideas that live on both levels, as morsels consumed quickly, with other dishes, some bigger than others, all of which add up to rich, tasty narratives.

Lee Maicon
Director of Strategic Planning

No Comments | Read More...