Jon Steel's Advice For The Future Of Planning

Jon Steel: Planning at 40: Solving the wrong problems from JWT on Vimeo

Ed shared some sound thinking last week on the whole "Old School vs. New School" planning debate*, based on Jon Steel's speech from JWT's "Planning Begins At 40" event held back in mid-July. I happen to agree with Ed and believe that the balance for the future of planning lies somewhere in the middle of the extremes of this debate, but I don't really want to focus on that here.

Instead, I want to call out the core of Jon's message as it's very smart advice. Basically, he says planners need to:

1) Help the clients set the right objectives, not just for communications but for brands and for business

2) Find the right problems to solve instead of just doing what the clients asked for

3) Find new opportunities for our clients to exploit and grow their business

The base for all three of these things comes lies in digging in and doing your homework - knowing the facts, doing the right research, understanding people, etc. along with constantly consuming a lot of information and letting it roll around in your head. If you're doing this well, then coming up with insights, ideas and answers to these three things will come a lot easier.

He also has some very piquant things to say about the current obsession in the business world, and thus among agencies, on the short term and the need for all of us to take a stand against this, with planners taking the lead on fighting the status quo.

Rather than setting our sights on the short term to see something, anything, move a little, we need to be focused on building things for the long term. Instead of being accountable to whatever can be measured, no matter how insignificant, we need to be accountable to doing what is right and setting big, hairy, audacious goals. And even more importantly, we both (agencies and clients) need to strive for greater partnership in moving business forward instead of just going through the motions as they are at most places now.

Set smart objectives. Find the right problems to solve. Uncover new opportunities. Stand for doing what is right, not what's easiest in the short term. All in all, very sound advice for the future of planning and for business for that matter. Too bad he had to close with another sucker punch at blogging.

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*This isn't the first time Mr. Steel has taken a jab at planners and blogging. It is very clear to me that he sees the problem with planners who write blogs as being that due to writing a blog, there is a loss of rigor and focusing on facts. His basic contention is that if we're writing a blog, we must not be taking in abundant amounts of research and information that will help us do the three things above. He believes that we've taken the hallway conversations from planning conferences that tended toward intellectual and philosophical debate to a forum that puts our focus on these things every day rather than solving our clients problems.

In some instances, he may be right. There are posts that tend toward these things. But overall, I know from my personal experience that when I'm busy writing here, I'm consuming far more information (both fact and opinion) than when I'm not. All of this comes to bear on work for my clients when digging through the facts of their situation and helps get to the three things he calls out.

Comments

[tom]

I like the planning blogs, as they act as good aggregators of intersting stuff.

But apart from that, he's bang on the money.

Thanks for sharing... and don't stop being a wanky blogger.

[Olle]

For many bloggers, blogging is the "rolling around in the head" but with an additional input variable, from other thinkers. It's all good. For me, however, blogging doesn't happen very often. It's not the best way to "let it roll around" for me. And that's it - not everybody "roll information around" the same way. Why is that not a good enough answer? The bigger problems bit is so true - but a new position for planners and agencies to take, for many of us.

[Adam Kmiec]

Those three are great, but they assume one big important thing: your client has enabled you/the agency to do the right thing. How often do we see the situation of the agency being hired for their strategic thinking, but then the client shackles them, but directing what they should do.

Very few client-agency relationships are setup in a way that the client trusts the agency to do the right thing. Once you have that in place you'll be able to set the objectives, focus on the right problem/solution, and be empowered to seek out new opportunities.

[Amelia]

Agree - I know Jon very well. He used to be my PD in New York. Interestingly he and Jeremy Bullmore (probably the two folks in the ad-world who I respect the most) are really anti plogging, planner-blogging.

If I am honest I am not sure that they have seen some of the good, smart, collaborative blogs out there and instead have focussed on the more destructive car-crashesque blogs, which ironically are more likely to be written by Creatives than Planners.