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    • Fast Strategy Event

    Did something interesting in my lunch break today. I teamed up with the Planning4Good AllStars who were competing at IPA’s FAST Strategy event today.

    Ok, explanations first: Planning for Good is essentially a club of Account Planners all over the world that tackle strategic problems for good causes and non-profits. Members include Gareth Kay, Planning Director of Modernista!, Aki Spicer of Fallon, Mark Earls (author of Herd) and many more notable names from the Plannersphere.

    Anyways, Mark Earls was team leader of the Planning4Good AllStars (him, Jon Leach, Chris Forrest (The Nursery) and Ian Tait (Poke & crackunit)) to work on the brief as the P4G Allstars, one of three teams competing in the three hour battle for the title Fastest Strategist.

    Mark additionally called - through the power of the Internet! -  the combined brain power of Planning for Good people who could spare the time. So my lunch break was 30 minutes of furious typing, reading and searching at once, trying bring in as much thinking, ideas as possible. The Brief was about creating a strategy for a dog owner’s registry in the UK.

    What I learned today (apart from “30 minutes is not much time”) for doing strategy in a team online and fast:

    Mark Earls posted that they just made second place. Bugger. Still was fun.I hope I can see the presentation they gave.

     

    Apropos, presentations. In my Vodpod there is a splendid presentation Mark Earls gave at the ARF conference in New York (via Gareth Kay). He talks about Word of Mouth, decision making in our connected lives and how to best influence those processes. Intriguing stuff. I think I will get his book.

     

    Well. No interesting2008 for me.

    The tickets for Russell Davies’ interesting2008 conference went on sale today 9am GMT. This should be an interesting thing again. But not for me. Tickets were sold out in less than 3 hours, when I got around to log in from work. Sigh.

     

    Account Planning Tools Workshop Day 2:

    This was good. I have not seen a planning process in a team like this in action. I had exchanged mails with George prior to the workshop and he had mentioned that this was rather about “strategy being about ideas that are stimulated and confirmed by research rather than strategy being something that emerges from research”. I get what he meant with stimulation.
    It really was about laying out as many potential routes as possible before deciding where to go. Getting ideas for brand values, ideas for consumer values, ideas for consumer insights, ideas for propositions and spot the route through that multitude that hums best. The hardest part about the process is probably turning off your filter that keeps trying to cut away things.

    I believe this can be exciting with smaller clients and companies to produce a useful platform for communication in a day or two. It takes an experienced planner to facilitate the process, keep it running and spot the nuggets. And trigger lateral thinking.

    Another nice aspect of the seminar was meeting some of the few Account Planners in Austria. I can now safely assume that there are no more than 20 people that have Account Planner or Strategic Planner as their job title. And all sit in the network agencies lik TBWA, DraftFCB, Ogilvy, BBDO et.al. or work as independent consultants.
    The bad news of this: the job situation is pretty dim. The good news: there is potential for Account Planning here and especially for the agencies who embrace it.

     

    notes notes notes notes George attempting to pose as a strict teacher. Me and my Baileys Group Working in groups, everybody obviously thinking hard. 

    Workshop Account Planning Tools – Day 1

    First day of the Account Planning Tools Workshop with George Shepherd in Vienna. The few times an opportunity for training comes up in Austria, I have to be there. Even if I pay the whole thing myself.
    George, who worked with Y&R, the Leigh Agency and Red Spider, is introducing us to his Account Planning Toolkit, a blueprint and set of templates for a planning process. A lot of hands on work in groups, with a lot of brainstorming and thinking. With his templates I found you can move the results to promising routes without limiting the broadness of ideas. So far, I find this especially useful for teams that have to bring up results in a very short time.
    I assume that whole thing works a whole lot better in the real world compared to five advertising people in a hotel lounge, when the client is involved and the agency has done the homework.

    The LeMeridien is pretty chic, the room with the name “Eternal Black” not as dark as it’s name. Just the typical hotel conference room. No photos, yet. Hopefully, I will get around to post some tomorrow.

    Account Planning in Austria: I am Number one.

    I still can’t tell whether this is a good or a bad thing.

    So I want to search for account planners in Austria, maybe find agencies that have planners and planning departments. What to do? Start up the Google engine and type in “account planning österreich” and here is the result in unretouched screenshot glory:

    And ranked at five: me. The link actually goes to a report I wrote for university about my exchange year at the University of Oklahoma (where I had my first real exposure to account planning).

    So the first Google results for “Account Planning” bring up an Account Planning Workshop in April (for which I have signed up already) and then me, some guy who tries to keep in touch with Account Planning in his free time. What does this say about the state of Planning in Austria?

    I mean, face it, the largest non-network agency Demner, Merlicek & Bergmann calls Red Spider for planning duties when clients request it. And the general quality of advertising … oh well, let’s not get into this.

    But there is a handful of planners in Austria. FCB, TBWA and other network agencies have planners. One sent in a reply to Heather LeFevre’s Account Planner Survey 2007, there is one Austrian in the Plannersphere (but he works in Hungary), none found at LinkedIn, one at Xing (German equivalent to LinkedIn). I haven’t checked StudiVZ yet, but it can’t get much better.

    * The search results are bound to change: I will add some posts about planning things I did in the last half year or so in order to fortify my spot at the forefront of Austrian Planning.

    APSotW Winning entry: Me. Yay!

    This week started with a pleasant surprise:
    Rob Campbell posted Paul Colman’s reviews on the presentations for the assignment on Extra gum. After short disappointment because I wasn’t able to identify my presentation from the feedback (see whole story here) it turns out the winning presentation is my entry.

    SlideShare | View | Upload your own

    To sum this up in short: Extra is the everything else gum of Wrigley’s. The brand is spread out to appeal to everybody, and also the vehicle for new products. My recommendation was to define Extra by leaving innovation to a new brand, and putting focus on Extra as functional gum that aids concentration, focus etc.

    Personally, I knew that this would taken two more slides, but ten was the limit. I REALLY would love to see Assignment “I”: “Mental Hygiene” is perfect, sums up my positioning thoughts much better. In fact, I would love to see all the other presentations. It was always great to see where all the other minds went.
    BIG Thanks to Paul and Rob for taking the time to a look at the work.

    But, alas, back to work. The new assignment is up already online.

    Hm, I can’t help it, but I still have a suspicion that there has been an error and Paul Colman will ask me to return my price.

    APSotW Assignment Feedback

    Gareth Kay, planning director at Modernista!, posted his feedback on the last assignment of the Account Planning School of the Web. There were 6 entries discussing Mr. Clean and Gareth has taken the time give useful critique to all. Brett and Hayley were named winners.

    Here is my entry:

     

      

    SlideShare | View | Upload your own

    And here is Gareth’s feedback:

    Visually I think this is the best presentation and kept my interest levels up – good way of showing competitive clutter, etc.  I like the implicit call for brand humility.  But here I had a real problem in understanding your recommendation – I see the issues you raise but don’t get a sense of what the recommendation is.  What are the things you would recommend the brand to do? Just saying make better product is not the answer.  Some seeds here, but I would have loved to have seen the flower.

    Yeah, when I put the finishing touches I pretty much knew this was not complete. I guess it is a limit of the format: 10 slides without any written coming with it. You just can not add everything that swings between the lines.

    The recommendation really is that Mr. Clean should try become part of the process of cleaning. Right now, people spend more time with brooms, buckets, cleaning cloth than any cleaning detergent. The P&G Swiffers of the world come with those special brooms, while Mr. Clean just handed out a license to a broommaker in the US to produce Mr. Clean branded cleaning utensils. So you see what caught my attention.

    I figured that a “New Formular!” would not really help. But a brand that would start saying “We work to improve cleaning!” and does everything to relieve us of the nuissance would have impact. Instead of that magical thing out of the bottle that never cleans like on TV, Mr. Clean should become a strong, physical support. Does that make sense?

    Thanks very much to Gareth for taking the time.

     

     

    the deer now have guns…

    the deer now have gunsDuring the Planning seminar in Retz Oke Müller of TBWA mentioned this quote when discussing how Web 2.0 is changing the marketplace. The image above has been in my head ever since.Of course, the obvious thing of Web 2.0 are cases of corporate bloopers. Company X tries to silence a blogger who dared complaining or pointing out a major error of their product. The Streisand Effect should tentatively be taught in Public Relations 101.On the other hand, my observation is that those beloved brands envied by their competition for their passionate followers are more and more becoming the prey of their users. Especially those companies that have been able to create a passionate user base. Of course I am talking about Apple here. The iPhone is a perfect example: Apple’s users DEMANDED a breakthrough piece of perfection. No less. The pressure on Apple was immense (in fact, so immense that they preferred to push back the development of Leopard). Compare Microsoft’s Zune. Who cares about the quality of that product? Who cares it sucks?Greenpeace’s Green Apple follows the same pattern. Users were informed, they cared about the issue. Anybody seen outrage on other bad performers on the list? Steve Jobs had to act.The more passionate consumers are about a brand the more they will demand.Your best consumer will be your worst enemy. The whip that pushes you forward.