When planners have to get out of the way
Strategy director of The Core Agency, Andrew McCowan, suggests that sometimes the best way to offer direction is to allow unfettered exploration.
Planners like to feel like they are pathfinders – cutting through the deluge of information, subjective opinion, half baked theories, research findings and assumptions that an agency must process when taking on a major new brief. One of the key skills for a planner is to lead the process to find the way forward and express that direction in a clear and simple brief.
In the old school world of “baton-passing”, there was a time where many planners felt like the writing of a brief meant “job done” for them. It led to a tendency for prescriptive and over-thought briefs, on the basis that the only way for the planner to impact the creative direction was through the brief. This mindset ignored the importance of teams working together at every stage of the process and evolving practice for many has brought creatives into research debriefs and planners into executional discussion. This way of working can be far more fluid and creatively empowering for everyone in the agency, but it also can be a real challenge for planners.
