Managing junior planners means making sure they find their own voice
For junior planners, the most important thing to learn is how to navigate the agency environment. Without a strong director to guide them through the politics, gossip and daunting presentations, they will fall at the first pay grade, argues Julian Cole.
For junior planners, the biggest challenge is finding your voicebox.
Coming head to head with people who have been in the workforce longer than you’ve even been alive is a daunting prospect. Without a strong voicebox that can convince, critique, and control a conversation then you will struggle to grow as a planner.
Everyone has different challenges. For creatives it’s dealing with creative rejection, account is managing multiple personal agendas, for planners their challenge is the expectation that they have a considered point of view which is consistently respected in a room of subjective thoughts.
This is great mate. And timely. Thank you!
The first ad agency planning role in Australia in 1966 inspired by Unilever Australia included skills and experience in [world-best] marketing,[world-best] market research, [experienced] intelligence, [experienced] planning, [comprehensive] advertising. The role was extremely highly rated by agency chiefs and many very appreciative advertiser managers who classed the role also as a powerful marketing consultancy. What a long way the ad industry has come to have so many junior planners on board offering what, I wonder? And I wonder how clients view this crowded scenario of ‘juniors’?
Thank you Julian for sharing your tips on how to survive as a junior planner as well as how management/senior staff can help their junior ones boost their confidence and improve their performance in the workplace. Yes, politics is everywhere, but how a junior planner learns to respond to it is very important. It’s best that everyone in a meeting try to understand and not put each other down, because eventually what we are doing is to deliver results for clients. If our work succeeds, we will all benefit from it for sure.
Junior planner-chortle.
Isn’t that like a trainee surgeon? Or a graduate Financial Controller?
Some jobs require experience-both breath and depth.
Not just the textbook (or case study) grasp of functional skills.
When I started, planners were coveted positions culled from the most senior of account directors.
When they spoke, CEOs listened.
Many junior planners have barely experienced life, yet we expect category changing insights or profound brilliance from them?
Then the internet came along and they were too old and belligerent to adapt.
They kept talking about brand archetypes while everyone else had moved onto customer experience and data analytics.
The profound category changing insight they’d pull from thin air slowly lost its appeal.
The CEOs stopped listening.
Trade press comment threads became the new domain of the old planner.