Herdeep Natt, insight director,
Tequila\
Q: How does Tequila's planning differ from that in other agencies?
We aren't traditional DM planners, though we have those skill sets within our team. Tequila's planning team is called Customer Insight, and is a collection of planners covering different disciplines (DM, CRM, Brand, Strategy, Intelligence, etc).
Q: What's the best way of describing what you do?
We work towards understanding consumers and translating that understanding in a way that brands can use to connect with them, in order to sell their products and services.
Q: And if you were asked the same question at a dinner party....
I'd say we worked with brands to connect with consumers. We're most interested in what motivates people, what they think and why they think that, what their behaviours are, etc - and how we can use that understanding to translate it to a brand's benefit (ahead of their competition, of course).
Q: Where does your job begin and end on accounts?
The insight planner should be the one leading the strategic direction of the project, with the input and participation of the other team members (account management and creative), but we're always the ones tasked with delivering the leading consumer insight - and I consider myself the champion of the consumer and brand in the ensuing debates and discussions.
There isn't really and end to the job as even when the piece of communication has gone out, we work with the client to measure and understand the responses, and work that into the next task.
Q: What's a typical day in the working life like?
No such thing. When in the office we spend time talking to people about work - creatives and account management - to help provide direction, reviewing creative work, discussing options for new work, briefing in new jobs and catching up on campaigns going out.
We also write a lot - presentations to clients and for clients, brand documents, measurement and evaluation reports, campaign strategies, etc.
And we also spend time out of the office, either in meetings with clients discussing their business issues, collaborating on insight development and receiving/delivering on briefs, or running workshops for our clients.
Q: Your favourite piece of planning?
On a financial brand we used a mix of old-fashioned DM principles with new insight that talked to consumers about their relationship with their money.
The leading insight was that the money wasn't in fact the financial institution's money but the consumers' - but that the brand was able to help them with their issues.
It wasn't so much a case of changing how they did DM, but rather what they said within the DM principles that work so well. That's the benefit of looking in from a consumer perspective rather than looking out from an organisation's perspective.
Q: How has digital marketing changed planning?
Digital is another way of connecting brands and consumers in a way that opens up more opportunities and possibilities for conversations. It's made those conversations more open, allowed more interactive opportunities to evolve and put brands and consumers more closely in touch with each other - but hasn't changed what we do.
If anything, it's made what we do far more interesting.
Tony Effik, chief strategy officer,
Publicis Modem
Q: What's the best way of describing what you do?
I see myself as the guardian of effectiveness.
Each time a client commissions a campaign they are taking a calculated gamble. My job as a planner is to make each campaign less of a gamble and more calculated by reducing the uncertainty.
For me that's not just about coming up with a strategy, but also about helping ensure the final work supports the strategy. The planner uses information, data, tools, intuition, insight, and imagination to help guide the creative team, and then uses data to help optimize the campaign with the creative and media team.
Q: Where does your job begin and end on the client's brief?
The job starts usually when the account man gets the brief in, and then usually ends when the work goes live. But with digital channels, increasingly the job now continues through the measurement of effectiveness, and then optimising the campaign with new advertising, media choices, or site designs.
Q: What are the common misconceptions about your role?
The main misconception is that planners take away the fun parts of the job from everybody else, and turn account men into bag carriers, and creatives into machines. Another misconception is that planners are smarter than everybody else.
Q: What's a typical day in the working life like?
We still unfortunately spend too much time of a typical day in meetings, and too much time sat in front of our PCs producing documents. On a good day we are in the field, so to speak doing research, analysing data, talking to product people, and talking to consumers.
Our four basic outputs are strategy documents/presentations, creative briefs, and ultimately with our creative colleagues the final creative execution, and of course the results.
Q: Your favourite piece of planning?
A key success of mine in the last year or so, was with HP's imaging division targeting enterprise clients.
The brief was simple: top-decision makers did not find printers to be a strategic or even sexy. Our job was to change that so we could create leads and drive sales.
We created a programme centred on events, online, and DM called Printonomics that produced around $50m in revenue in its first six months alone. It has changed how HP approaches its b2b marketing.
Glen Patrick, senior planner,
WDMP Communications
Q: What's a typical day like?
It's both brilliant and scary. Yesterday I wrote a brief for a financial services client, agreed a strategy positioning for a web site re-launch, worked with our head of data to develop a control cell strategy and dashboard for an international online client, progressed a loyalty programme business case for another and had numerous conversations around work in progress.
Q: Where does your job begin and end on the client's brief?
This depends on the scope and direction of each individual brief varies considerable. For example we are currently handling a number of strategy briefs where the requirement is to deliver thinking and insight only; customer journey planning, online contact strategies for Web 2.0, channel planning.
Creative and campaign implementation may be handled in Eastern Europe or the Far East, or possibly not required at all. In these situations my role is business consultant.
Q: Can you tell us how your role has changed thanks to digital?
We are dealing with more channels and more touchpoints now and we have to embrace them all to build customer engagement effectively. WDMP has recruited word-of-mouth and advocacy, online and social media specialists to deliver a more relevant service offering to clients. We are constantly examining our offering to make sure we can embrace and engage the customer wherever they are, whatever the latest media phenomenon.
Old fashioned DM and working in a silo is no longer viable.
The big challenge for clients and planners from all this is of course, how do you measure it?
We've been working on that too.