Account Planning School Of The Web

ego gratification 

things I've done that might conceivably be useful

campaign essay

There's a link on this blog entry to an essay I wrote for Campaign once, about the place of planning in communications and branding. My basic premise is that good planners are increasingly valuable in these fragmenting. deconstructing, consumer driven days - and that all the advertising agencies refusing to change to recognise this new reality are going to lose them if they're not careful.

homework assignments

I'm running a little free correspondence course on my blog. I set an assignment, people respond with thoughts, I write some comments. Everything gets posted. It's an opportunity for junior planners to test themselves in some hypothetical scenarios and for me to pontificate wildly about stuff. The link above is the first task. Here are the results - batch one and batch two

And here's December's assignment - thinking about target audiences.

And here's the third task - with all the results. Interesting stuff.

Here's the 4th one with visiting prof - Grant McCracken. And here are the responses.

Here's the fifth, responses here, and the sixth. With guest judges - The Design Conspiracy. Here's the feedback on 6. And here's assignment 7. Here's the feedback on 7. Here's the 8th task.

hunt. not gather. notice things

A short blog entry about two tangental ways of thinking about planning. One from the FBI, one from Neal Stephenson's The Confusion

blink links

a quick review of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. With some useful, associated links.

smelly briefs

a good example of a bad brief

10 things i hate about planning

well, actually, just the first thing - over-simplification

be the planner

a blog entry on the kind of person you probably need to be, to be a good planner

so you're a trainee planner

a little piece after someone asked me for advice on being a trainee planner

draw a triangle

Five minutes of video about the perfect way to begin a strategic conversation - especially when you don't know what to say - draw a triangle

detach yourself from the idea

Five more minutes of video - about how to influence creatives and get your ideas into the process

polyphony

Some more video - about the idea of brands and polyphony

videoblogging time

My plan for 2006 is to try and do more videoblogging - one a week. And my goal is to answer questions people send in. This is some more details on that, and a slightly frivolous bit of video.

more video

A little piece about finding appropriately scaled metaphors for brands

building a long tail for ads

A little post about trying to find ways of enabling long tails for ads.

Dylan Williams interview

More video - Dylan Williams of Mother shares various piercing apercus about planning.

video - making presentations 3D

5 minutes from me about trying to get your presentations to involve a few more senses.

Interview - Stefan Bucher

An interview with the splendid graphic designer Stefan Bucher of 344 Design. About creativity, freelancing and the scientific study of Donald Duck comics.

business emotional intelligence

5 minutes of video about the small things that you need to get good at when you first start work.

jim riswold

Interview with Jim Riswold about leaving advertising, his art and the sad lack of stupidity in both advertising and art.

think do think

More video from me - about the different types of planner you might choose to be. Sort of.

podcast sizzle

I've experimented with a podcast which includes discussion of US vs UK ad cultures, and the effects of scale. And some vinyl contributions from Elmer Wheeler - of sell the sizzle not the steak fame.

good stuff to steal from the web 

APG Top Tens

Go to this page on the Account Planning Group website. Scroll down a bit. You'll find a whole bunch of Top Ten tips on all kinds of subjects. Dead useful. Infact the whole APG site is a treasure trove of useful stuff.

Testing To Destruction

Testing To Destruction is a little book written more than 30 years ago about the dumbness of pre-testing communications. (I paraphrase a little.) It's, shamefully, no longer in print but there's a link to a free download of a pdf at the top of this page. The page itself is a thoughtful commentary from Stuart Smith of W+K London about why Testing To Destruction is still true and relevant today. You must download and read these golden words. (Alan's not Stuart's. Though Stuart's are good too.)

Planning Above and Beyond

John Griffith's is a freelance planner and thinker who's been ploughing the planning website furow longer than anyone else. The site is full of interesting stuff - written with an appealing sense of humour.

Audio - demographics 101

Here's a link to some audio on IT Conversations. A great easy to listen to presentation from the UN's head of demography Joseph Chamie

presentation zen

I'm getting addicted to this blog about presentation design. Maybe you should try it to.

Designer Toolbox

Brilliant lens about graphic design. And all his advice would serve for planners too.

relatively essential reading 

borrow or buy

Eating The Big Fish

Adam Morgan's essential book on Challenger brands. This book introduced a lot of the language you're going to end up using

Truth, Lies and Advertising

Jon Steel was Planning Director at Goodby for a thousand years. This is a great introduction to how to do really good planning.

Brand New, Brand Thinking

Great thinking about brands, from, for the most part, actual practitioners, not just theorists.

Welcome To The Creative Age

Mark Earls does provocative thinking about bananas, business and the death of marketing. With lots of good stories

All Marketers Are Liars

Seth Godin lives up to his call for remarkableness. (Remarkabliity?)

Interface

This is ostensibly a science fiction book by Neal Stephenson set in the context of a US election. But really it's a provocative piece on the uses and abuses of research.

Murder Must Advertise

This is Dorothy L. Sayers' finest Lord Peter Whimsey mystery. Set in an advertising agency in the 1930s. Read it to see how little advertising's changed in the last 80 years. Wonder whether it's going to change much in the next 80.

Pattern Recognition

Any decent planner secretly spends some part of their day pretending to be Cayce Pollard.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

A dull title for a gorgeous book. Tufte is clearly a nutter but his drive to ensure beatifully clear data is one we should all respect.

Blink

Malcolm Gladwell is the uber planner. He synthesises all kinds of stuff, from all kinds of fields, tells really compelling stories which everyone finds incredibly interesting - and ultimately you're not quite sure what to do about it. Typical planner.

The Tipping Point

You should read The Tipping Point too.

How to Move Minds and Influence People

A quick easy read about brands and stories and life.

planning blogs 

adliterate

Richard Huntington's blog. Marvelous. He doesn't update it often, but when he does it's always worth it.

blurb

luca vergano's blog (the english version)

brand new

Gareth Kay is planning director at Modernista in Boston

planningblog

'Carol in England' blogs about life and work and stuff

planning from the outside

Mark Lewis blogs from Detroit about his thoughts and life as a planner