08/12/06

Planning & Job Titles

I never know, exactly, how to describe what it is that I do. I still don’t.

I fudged it at my dundee talk by decsribing what I do by using a word other people have given me - a ‘producer’. At Dundee I qualified this by saying that what I do is (1) make stuff happen and (2) have ideas and run with them.

And all of this has been rolling around my head for a while - not in a major way, but when you get asked to describe what you do (to a bunch of students who may or may not be interested) and you don’t know it becomes an issue.

A couple of months ago I read a post by Iain Tait (an old University acquaintance now at Poke) that resonated with me. It said something like, “i used to call myself a creative director, now I call myself a strategic & creative planner’.

I’ve worked a bit with some ‘planners’ at an ad agency, as they seemed to be the brainy ones - although I couldn’t really tell what they did other than conduct and analyse market research and use it to give a steer to the creatives about what will work. And, talking to ex-adland people I knew, they also revered ‘the planners’ - so I wanted to find out more.

I often descibe myself to clients as doing the ‘planning’ for a web site, but by that I usually mean working out the objectives, defining the strategy, and then, literallly, planning the web site to a lot of detail. Planning in advertising doesn’t seem to mean that - and despite reading hundreds of posts (by the hundreds of planners blogging) and listening to podcasts and buying books - I’m not that much clearer.

Anyway, I have two points. The first is that in the latest of Russell’s interviews, he speaks to Martin Cole, a planner, who said a couple of things that I really liked.

The first was (at 14m 30s or so) paraphrasing Chris Riley (?) along the lines of, ‘why should a client risk giving a creative person money to do a project’ - the reason being that they are bound to do the best job they can, as they’ll end up hating themselves if they deliver something less than perfect. Which I thought was a perceptive answer.

The second was more subtle. They talk (16m+) about Martin’s TV programme, and how the job definitions in TV of writer, producer, director are subtly different to adland’s titles. From their conversation, it seems as if advertising has a very delineated world where a baton (the job) gets passed from one team to the next, and at the point of passing the passer relinquishes responsibility from that point on. They also describe how a ‘producer’ in TV seems to be like a ’shepherd’ responsible for everything pretty much to do with the project. (The same role is apparently called a ‘mother’ at Mother.)

Nothing particularly profound in this post other than some people call something one thing, and other people use another word. I still don’t know what to call myself. But I do like droppping into other people’s lives - and you might enjoy the audio.

Martin Cole vs Russell Davies

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Personal, Quotes.