Planning: 5 Things in the Day Job

This post is meant to be for Gemma as she put a request around Christmas time but only got round to it now (sorry). I think the theme is around daily responsibilities and duties for account planners rather than reading lists and skill sets to have – a sort of day in the life, but in this case a month in the life. Gemma’s already written 3 posts for graduates who want to go into advertising (1, 2 and 3) so if you want to work as an account planner, it might be a good idea to see what someone working freelance does differently from someone in an agency environment. Some things overlap and we all work pretty hard, sometimes in the realm of abstraction but it’s good to get a sense of what it’s really like

So for Gemma and any wannabe-account planners, here’s some stuff I did around December 2011. At some point, we’ll all have done stuff like Gemma’s mentioned – get meetings going, look for staples and things, rescue some client’s phone from the back of a taxi when they’re too intoxicated to remember but it’s not the ‘daily’ stuff in any case. Good to be prepared though.

1. Every day anxiety and jitters.

This is something I find myself experiencing quite a lot. It may be my sort of neurotic personality and brain firing off in every direction, but anxiety is always there. I worry all the time. Maybe worrying excessively isn’t normal, but there’s always stuff that can change or something you wish you could have done differently. On the job, you realise that when you poke something on one end, something else reacts at the opposite end and culture happens and holy **** how did I go from being in a lecture theatre to telling a room full of people something and them believing me and acting upon it? The realisation that you go from ‘just talking’ about it in seminars to really doing it and creating something that will have an effect on people’s lives is sometimes scary. It’s good scary. I hope it won’t go away as I get old. If I’m no longer worried about having made the right choice, I’ll start to worry that there’s something going wrong and I’m missing something. Which is why I think it should always be there. Planning is never a ‘right vs wrong’ kind of job because brands are very malleable. Something I read much later was that ‘if you can’t make the right decision, make the decision right’. Eloquent, I thought.

2. Social media here and there

I end up doing a lot of social media ‘things’ for clients, including running a small account for a telecoms company. It’s not as exciting as a massive account with big escalation procedures and layers and layers of approvals, timings and plans but it teaches you to be organised, to always look out for stuff that you can contribute and to think as the brand. Because we usually make suggestions for the brand’s look and feel, doing this is only natural in a way, so it’s taking it a level further from just shoving things out there and hoping for a reply; it’s about finer points and actually caring, but not taking it personally. There will be crap, you will read too much into it so I think it also teaches to keep your cool and make notes of what’s happening and then at the end of a longer period (a month, 2, 6, 12, whatever) have an opinion on it all while still making changes on the go. These will be hunches at best and hunches kind of related to no. 1 – anxiety.

3. Things you didn’t even think were skills come in handy

We did a lot of pitch work in December and I found myself doing a few things I never thought I’d do as a planner. I’ve had to make sure entire sections of content on a client’s website looked good and went through a batch of images of astronomical sizes to adjust, tune and crop – and even ended up proof-checking recipes. I did this mostly to save on time because we all expected the images to be ready for uploading and no time had been booked with any creatives or digital people (too busy with other things). Technically none of our non-creatives have macs but I’ve cunningly claimed one as my own – and it came in handy, I could get up and say ‘actually, screw booking people – I’ll do it here and it takes me 30 mins.’

The second bit was rather uninteresting as we recorded some conference call about 1h long and I had to pop into a movie editor to clip all the relevant bits we needed. But I’d like to say that even the seemingly dull needs to look and sound good, so patience to put up with it all is a virtue. And knowing keyboard shortcuts for iMovie and others too. So anyway, learn useless shit (or in other words, learn stuff and stop caring if other people think it’s useless shit). It comes in very handy rather than looking like a headless chicken.

4. Conference calls with other countries

We had a set of conference calls for this pitch, which was unusual for us. It’s a new tool for the network and not many have had the chance to use it, but speaking of no. 3, to me it felt like being on Vent playing World of Warcraft again and speaking to 40-odd people talking over each other. It’s true what they say – MMORPGs can be useful for some things. I wouldn’t say they get you entire jobs, but they can help, especially when it comes to herding large numbers of individuals to achieve one common goal, to get the shy to talk, the loud ones to shut up and give priority. I think cultural awareness is a good thing: some may sound rude when they are being matter of fact. There are books on this subject. But agencies, even the smaller ones, can and should look at other cultures for ideas and inspirations. When stuck for a solution at home, look elsewhere but try to understand how they came up with something.

5. Pile up interesting things. Go places. Pull a Rodi.

For said pitch activity, it was really good that we already had a load of useful things sitting around the agency. But similar to no. 3, things I stole from places (like a magpie, but for flyers) came in really useful: a piece of fabric, a paper with a certain weight, some interesting piece of communications (you’ll see a Waitrose envelope which served as a starting point for a conversation). At the end of a pitch most of it might be useless but I hoard it at home or in my drawers because it comes in handy.

Go places – touch stuff, stroke materials and fabrics. Pretend if you must. Grab a colleague and pretend you’re a married couple looking for a mortgage to see how your banking client’s customer service reps talk to you. Pretend you want to buy a kitchen or a conservatory door and get some dimensions off a forum as you ring with the other hand. Pretend to be more over the top than you are (it worked for a raunchier pitch we had, going into a sex shop and saying ‘I like this, just watched a video on redtube the other day and I want to know how they do it. What do you recommend?’ – even if you may know or something; the shop assistant won’t but it makes them open up to you like they wouldn’t to shy customers: actually, don’t buy this one – everyone who comes in wants it, but it’s not our best. This is where the money is.

Care about what you’re doing, but don’t take it too seriously. Also part of the job – going into John Lewis to look at curtains. Look at that curtain. Isn’t it beautiful?

And last but not least, things on the day job, because there wasn’t much research work or managerial activity for me in December: we demolished a drawer we decided we couldn’t open at all. Lesson for all – if planning ends up being this irrational over top drawer contents, you know violence is a solution. Apply it while you can get away with it.