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.
It means we need to recognise when it’s time to step forward, and when to step back. As a planner, it’s tough to admit but there are many stages during the development of advertising ideas and executions when my view is really just another subjective opinion – these are the points where my skills aren’t adding value to the process.
At those times the most valuable thing I can do is to step back so I don’t get in the way of others adding their value to the process. As a planner you have a loud voice in the process and so it’s tempting, when in the room, to feel you need to steer the process and provide ‘input’, sometimes informed by research, but inevitably complicating discussions, while adding another argument to the mix and disempowering others along the way.
There are many times when the planner’s voice must be loud and taking a lead in setting the direction – this is early in the process while conducting research, developing strategy and agreeing the brief. Its key planners are passionately engaged in refining that thinking and expressing that brief as that’s the point when the knowledge, insights and perspective the planner has built up, really can make or break the creative direction.
Likewise, the same sense of responsibility to help lead and guide the creative process which planners feel in these early stages should also compel them to step back and recognise when others need to steer the collaboration that set the direction.
The irony is that this approach is an example of the good strategic rigour defined by: Don’t jump to solving the problem, define the problem first. That is the mantra planners need to come back to always. Our job is to define the problem and the support the team of people who will develop the solution. So inevitably that means that during the problem definition stage planners have a responsibility to take the lead, but that also means they have a responsibility to back off.
That’s hard when you are invested in the thinking and want to be part of seeing it through to the end, but it’s a necessary part of a strategist’s role within the development of a plan. It’s also more important than ever in the increasingly iterative and collaborative and fluid creative development environments we are all now working within.
Ultimately this comes down to knowing when to let the creatives loose; when to have the confidence that the brief is a springboard for new, inventive, disruptive, brilliant ideas which are developed with the confidence that, however the brief is met, the work will be strategically right. It’s always timely for planners to remember that the best way to collaborate is to know when to get out of the way.
Andrew McCowan is strategy director of The Core Agency.
