Category Archives: Strategy

Planner says what

Feb 2, 2011

It’s been great being a planner. I love being a planner. What’s that, you say? What the hell is a planner?

I got a request from a random college student to explain:

“Right now I’m having a class project that requires me to interview at least two account managers/planners. Most of the account planners and account managers I know are not working in the U.S. market. Another reason why I wrote to you and asked you for help is that as the leader of advertising business, I think you would somehow feel responsible to enlighten and influence the college learners like me. Please help me out by answer the questions listed bellow. I really appreciate your help.”

1. How would you describe your job? Please be specific.

I’m an account/ brand planner. I represent the consumer and stay informed of popular trends/ consumer statistics in order to benefit my client’s business goals and help creatives make great, relevant work.

2. Do you think account planner/manager fits into the whole marketing communication process? If so, how?

Absolutely! If you don’t know who you’re talking to, you have a boring, useless piece of communication.
Qualitative research is one of the most important pieces of your job. Know how to develop plans, schedules, budgets, proposals, screeners, discussion guides, etc.
Build a network of partners: recruiters and research companies.

3. What do you think of the flux of the advertising industry?

Personally, I love change and progress. Advertising is at the forefront of innovation (or at least it should be).
The practices we develop, funded by brands, can tomorrow be used for nonprofits to benefit society on a more positive note, compared to simple capitalist gain. Above you see me and a fellow advertiser horsing around at an event we brainstormed for UNICEF’s Tap Project, a collaboration between ad agencies and UNICEF to raise clean drinking water funds for disadvantaged children around the globe.

4. How do you cope with the change of the industry as an account planner/manager?

The magic of the internet. RSS feeds, content aggregators, and blogs.

5. Can you please tell me what are the tools that you use in marketing communication?

Simmons/MRI, Mintel, Nexis, Marketing Charts, Nielsen, Pew… and many more
Human tools that will always be needed: curiosity, flexibility, and common sense.

6. What do you think of the media planner and account planner?

A good media planner & account planner are the catapult to the giant rock of creative. When you have those team members functioning at their highest capability, you have the base for a great campaign. It takes a lot of people to create a good ad.

7. What do you think are the important skills, training and education for an account planner/manager?

Experience watching an agency at work. Take an internship.
Listen. Learn. Research. Compile notes. Watch people. Read sociology books.
The cool thing about planning is that you can go to school and learn how to do it, or you can work really hard and intern and learn and suck it up and convince someone to hire you. I did both via WK12, a one-year ad school that I highly recommend.

8. What do you think are the unique qualities that an account planner/manager possess?

Be flexible. Here’s me doing research in New York City. Our cab driver was new, freaked out, didn’t know the way to Brooklyn, and paranoid about driving around a stalled car. So I jumped in the driver’s seat and did it for him. This kind of thing can’t throw you… planners have to be prepared for the unexpected.

9. What are your suggestions for the college students major in advertising?

Don’t worry about drinking too much. It’s just practice for the future.
Did you like free time? Say goodbye.
Don’t create stupid little ads for fake companies to build your portfolio. Go find internships and solve real problems, or take on a non profit challenge, like the UNICEF Tap Project or Right Brain Project. Create change! Be bold!
Get used to people tearing your ideas apart! They’re just ideas– you can make more.
Know that while you may have some very low days working in advertising, the highs are absolutely amazing… like presenting ideas to your heroes. In my case, I got the opportunity to present ideas to Devo, a band I consider the ultimate postmodern art project.

You can’t conquer experiences like that… and that’s why I love being a planner. Your brain and a computer is all you really need.

Music & industry

Jan 1, 2011

MusicNIndustry

Reading this Wired article, sad from Limewire withdrawals, made me uber aware of a sincere and unassailable rift in the music industry: the constant clash between businesspersons and the artist.

Read “The Day Steve Jobs Dissed Me In a Keynote,” and you’ll initially feel solidarity with the writer.

He explains his side of things. He made Apple mad and they turned the full force of their corporation against him via shady, covert monitoring of his operations and a very publicly personal dig delivered by Steve Jobs himself.

But Derek Sivers, the author, invokes multiple questions with his behavior. Did our hero really post notes from a private meeting with Steve Jobs online immediately, without expecting fallout? Is emailing vendors a new business plan contingent on an unsigned contract ever a good idea? Was there no reason to suspect hidden fees or rollout glitches somewhere in this scenario?

BAD-IDEA

I don’t know that anyone with business schooling would make such a blunder.

And that’s just it. Our hero was not a businessman. He was a musician who almost accidentally figured out a way to distribute music via a homegrown, word-of-mouth awareness system, but thanks to the growing web, was able to reach a much larger group of consumers and flourish beyond the limits of his homegrown system. It’s like one bartender at a party with an ever-expanding line of drinkers. At some point, you can’t keep up. And when you can’t keep up, people look elsewhere to be satisfied, and others step in to serve them.

Mr_2982bbd03c12e6
Derek Sivers chose the life of a musician, but was smart and ambitious enough to design a website that functioned as sharing center. Yes, he monetized it, but his mentality was not that of a shark, a CEO, a determined conqueror or perfectionist. He strove to be fair by charging artists $40. He took Steve Jobs at his word without a whiff of self-consciousness. He bypassed standard business sense to spread information—his job as head of CDBaby, and likely, the motivation behind becoming a musician in the first place… the spread of creativity and information.

Bale-Jobs

A human who’s found business appealing and invested in business schooling is not going to cover $200,000 themselves simply to not piss off a bunch of musicians the way Sivers did. As a businessperson, might I note that my ilk are combative, driven, focused and pay attention to the bottom line. Commerce is our battlefield. These kinds of people are not evil. They are me. They could be you. They may be on Wall Street, fiercely striving for Bentleys and trophy wives and zillion dollar playhouses in the Hamptons, playing a high-stakes game. They’re not enjoying the Chinese rugs. They’re enjoying the fight, little Machiavellis, every one. This is our humanity.

Musicians are less motivated by the accumulation of money, but more about what’s in the eye on the pyramid on the dollar bill. As a musician, might I note that we may crave the hedonism of the Rolling Stones, but the enjoyment of life and the sharing/ creation/ commitment/ creativity/ completeness that comes from tearing off a crucial solo or having friends sing along by a campfire is the game to be played. This is our humanity.

Please note that I’ve chosen illustrative extremes to illuminate my generalization

And nowhere is the clash messier, more unfair, or more convoluted than in today’s record industry. Similar to the ad game, the industry is comprised of humans that are both logical and sensitive. But the power play of “winning” the money will always fall to the businesspeople. Musicians may choose to monetize music on their own terms, but the suits will always watch the market, plotting a better way to pull it off, a bigger group of people to market it to, and to continue our analogy, putting together a new batch of punch while you watch yourself run out of booze.

Gimme-Gimme
And because the users, the punch drinkers, the downloaders and music fans, are on neither side, they’re just interested in the punch. The party. They’ll take it where they can get it. Example: Limewire’s demise and the growth of other file sharing sites have a correlation.

Humans want music. They’ll find music. And they’re not going to pay top dollar when there’s a discount alternative. Why buy the cow when the milk’s been free? Regulations will always screw the artist out of what they deserve. How are musicians going to thrive in the business world? How will business create a format for artists to survive while feeding the production system and the manufacturers? Music is a large industry. Musicians are a critical creative resource. Manufacturers deserve monetization for their work as well. How to reconcile this issue?

There’s no determined solution. This is a project to attack from all angles.

We are our things

Dec 12, 2010

Behold the Nintendo guitar.

It sounds awful. It’s awkward to play. Looks like it would de-tune pretty easily. The overdrive as power button is clever but not conducive to playing a real song. The guy who makes these is clearly not a guitar player, but a n00b, tinkering with classic rock riffs, poorly designed mods, and 8-bit dynamite: the Nintendo Entertainment System.

I’m not trying to mock this kid. But I have a different connection to the NES. I was a first generation-Nintendohead. Mario-freak. Duck Hunt queen.

Yep, I had the orange zapper– signifier of first-gen adoption and a turn-on for certain nerds of a certain age.

I have a deep connection to Nintendo– something I recently realized by my uncontrollable adult emotions of rage and sadness when I found out a little sibling had somehow destroyed my old box. By hacking an iconic NES to create a sub-standard piece of musical equipment, this kid took a groundbreaking piece of technology off the market.

This post on Geekologie by Annoyed sums it up:

Damn waste of an NES console.

If people keep ruining them for every pointless mod they can think of, there will be less and less original units left. (And before you say it, many units that people think are already dead can actually be fixed.)

There are some (unauthorized) NES architecture clones being manufactured and sold in the Third World now, but there are no more genuine originals being made. At the moment there still may be a fair number of originals available, but not if crap like this continues.

People, stop looking for random things to shove in classic systems. If you’re incapable of actually appreciating them for what they’re supposed to be, what they actually due WELL, give them to people who can.

If you had a Ford Model T, would you turn it into a crude, ungainly rowboat? It’s not creative the thousandth time someone decides to shove [random object X] into a classic system case to make an awkward combination. Anyone who was actually a real fan of the systems wouldn’t do this stupid crap.

I’ve noticed a lot of young people these days affecting a nostalgia for systems they never actually played as kids — the systems’ heydays were actually five or more years before they were born. If your pseudo-enthusiasm gives you ideas like this, just sod off find some other stupid trend to follow.

Would you turn an Eames chair into a toilet? Alter an old VHS or cassette tape to decorate your neck? Wear Legos as jewelry? Maybe not. But these kids did.

Younger Millennials are like this. Instead of the Breakfast Club-esque vision of high school where people were grouped, labeled, and locked into a social identity, we’re seeing a new kind of self-expression, in which kids pull icons of the past together into visually, conceptual amagamations of identity. Items that were formerly used by cliques to represent “in” status, a clear signifier of belonging to a team, now are repurposed to represent a passing interest of a Millennial teen.

So kids are dressing up in the past. What does this mean for the future?

Creativity is the new currency

High schools of the past hosted groups of kids largely connected by the social status of their parents. Preps vs. burnouts. Socs versus greasers. Squares versus drapes. TV and movies reinforced those sterotypes, and due to social class /economic circumstance, some kids could simply not afford to buy into certain scenes. While low-income kids will always have a harder time procuring money-focused status symbols, identity isn’t driven by following a group anymore— creativity drives identity. Full-on Abercrombie & Fitch or even a head-to-toe punk look isn’t cool. It’s the definition of your personal style that every kid is constantly seeking. And they’re using Facebook, Tumblr, and Chictopia to express it.

Dilettante Nation

The Internet gives us access to a wealth of cultures, iconography, and deep subculture in a way no human or teenager has ever seen before. When information is always at your fingertips, why go deep and focus? Most kids don’t. They spread their cultural expertise wide and thin. Don’t be fooled by the term “digital natives.” While Millennials are familiar with consumer technology, most are unsure and overwhelmed when they try to search for information online, streamline their Internet experiences, or understand code. As Wired proclaimed, Web 2.0 is dead. And I see the future of 3.0 as a simplistic app-based connective social function. Who are you, where are you, how do you connect to me? This leads to…

Millennial anxiety

The constant connection to the digital sphere induces a hyper-awareness of “OTHER.” Pressured to be the best by helicopter parents and a desperate job market, Millennials seek to be everywhere at every moment. We’re constantly in the game. The life of an accomplished CEO is now the social evening of a 16 year old: taking calls, managing their online presence, dealing with drama, facing pressures of money and time. This generational nervous shiver ultimately derails production. We’re busy all the time, but nothing seems to come of it. Beware the prescriptions, the Ritalin, the Klonopin, and the generic depression.

It’s lovely to find a simple video, like the one by our Nintendo-modding friend, to illuminate a host of insights about a single generation. But there’s more to the Millennials than a simplistic summary… there’s a host of other implications, and my favorite: the backlash!

Till next time…

Suzy Mae