‘The truth is our client’ Saatchi & Saatchi strategy boss tells planners at Google event

These are wise words.
If only they would be taken up by those to whom they’re directed.
The advertising/marketing business has for too long fostered a culture of narcissism, while rewarding sociopathic behaviours.
“Oh look, someone with a beard and up-himself attitude – hire him!”

More rigorous hiring processes like some advanced by corporates practise would be a start. Some of the global leaders require 6+ interview stages, and on-the- job monitoring in order to weed out the narcissists and the self-important.
Less talk on this, more action. It may mean firing 50% of the people in the advertising industry, but it’s worth it.

Wow! I don’t remember ever reading an article that makes so little sense. Seriously, have a look at any qoute in the last half. I’ll get youse all started…

“The assumption is you’re going to evolve it, you’ll be open to feedback because you haven’t killed yourself or extended so much effort to make it perfect.”

And then there’s…

“In our planning department we force ourselves to come up with things, we turn everything into a thing. Words are cheap, you have to codify it, have a name for it, turn it into something real, something tangible.”

Surely it’s a pisstake of seudo intellectualising. If not, it confirms what a lot of people have been thinking about the highly paid planning and strategy industry. .

“…asking creatives to say something gets you to ads and that’s a terrible thing.”

What if an ad brilliantly solves the business problem? Yes, let’s be open to the wonders of technology, but for such senior planning leaders to be slamming advertising because it’s not trendy at the moment is irresponsible.

I really like the sentiment of truth being a client, but surely a client’s business problem is what we should be ultimately serving.

Being so biased against one communications output, makes the promotion of other outputs less credible.

Two comments to previous commenters:

-yeah, it reads funny on the page, because it was people speaking, not writing. But it all made sense if you were in the room

-there was also a lot of talk about being focussed on problems… just not reported here

If every chat he’s having with his creative department is leading to ads then they are not really doing the job.

It’s also going to be quite hard to chat with them from now in, given his lack of love for the art.

And Gohil – people do talk about strategies – bold, new, interesting ones.

And ads too. either the really good ones or the really shit ones.

No talks about the in between. I’m guessing that’s what you’re referencing?

Just for clarity, given that this is a short article excerpting a much longer and wider conversation:

For the record, I love our art, which is why I am passionate about preventing our industry sliding into irrelevance (no one wants to be the colouring-in department).

I was not saying that ads are always the wrong thing to do, nor was I “slamming advertising”. But I am saying that it is deeply f*cking dangerous for us to start from a position where we assume that advertising is always the only/best solution.

As Sudeep said on the night, the days of people clustering around the family TV and obediently watching our broadcast messages are gone. We need to create things which are more about entertainment &/or utility, and less about interruption. Yep, sometimes these things may be ads, but sometimes they’ll be something else entirely.

My point has always been that planning needs to look at how we as agencies can use creativity to help solve the real upstream business problem, as opposed to just taking the easy path of only ever trying to solve the problems which can be solved with ads. You’ll find that client CEOs rarely lose sleep over brand awareness or engagement metrics.

When I see articles or talks such as these, I just feel compelled to call bullshit. So bullshit. It just misses the point. Lonsdale says ‘Our survival depends on our ability to adapt, to evolve’. Spare us. The question shouldn’t be ‘what planning should be doing to stay relevant (and paid inflated salaries, I might add)’ but ‘why it even exists in the first place?’

Fortini-Campbell’s definition of planning – ‘Planners are involved and integrated in the creation of marketing strategy and ads’. Isn’t that what the marketing departments should be doing? The birth of planning, it seems to me, was not out of necessity but laziness on the part of marketing departments. If planners are supposed to be ‘obsessed with the truth’ as the panel of industry leaders surmise, then you need to at the very least know how to get there.

Let’s get real here. The truth is marketing departments should and are better equipped at having all of the information at their disposal on their business. So solving their internal business problems with a marketing strategy or whatever you’d like to call it, is their job. But it seems that at some point in the 60’s, marketers palmed that off. And now everyone’s a planner, everyone has a strategy. More bullshit just layered onto bullshit.

It’s simple. All agencies should be doing is coming up with creative and account managers should be project managing and ensuring it stays on strategy. As provided by an informed, skilled and intelligent marketer. In fact marketing departments in EVERY company should have a planner or better yet how about they just do their jobs.

So again, I struggle to understand why we even need planning departments in agencies anymore? This is 2015. Let’s move on and in the process save some time and money.

Hi Graham,

Er, I think you’ve answered your own question: agencies have a planning function because clients don’t, and someone needs to do the strategic thinking.

But, you know, feel free to jump back into your time machine.

Hi Mr Obvious,

There’s a word for that.. what it is again?.. oh yes a rhetorical question.

My point on strategic thinking – maybe clients should be doing it because I don’t see planners being very effective or impactful.

But, you know, feel free to continue taking that massive salary for watching youtube videos all day.