Adventures In Digital Marketing

How many times have you heard a creative director, MD or other senior manager say in an all agency pep-rally meeting “We’re all creatives in this agency – no idea is a bad idea”?

Quite a few times I’ll guess.

Well, I want to add to that.  Expand on it if you will…

We’re all planners in this agency. No strategy is a bad strategy.

Now, I don’t mean literally we all sit around blogging all day waffling on about the planosphere (vincent! )- no, what I mean is that in some ways, planning is as much a group activity within a healthy agency environment as is creative thinking.  As is good client relations.  As is wanting to make a profit.  The list goes on….

I was chatting with a planning colleague of mine, and we were talking about the relationship between different departments, and how, to borrow from Logic+Emotion a bit, we all need to overlap, not be silos.  Planning and digital, for example, can work amazingly well together, and insight into the ways people use digital in their daily lives really is something both “departments” can add to.  There’s a lot going on right now about combining creative and planning.  Everyone is merging them together again in some way or another. 

For me, the best results on any project happen when you get excited, passionate and informed people together from the start and they all input into the big idea. 

Something I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently is that, for me, digital strategy in terms of planning a campaign falls into two distinct phases.  The first is the more traditional channel planning phase, overall marketing strategy – what is it we’re trying to do, who are we talking to, what’s going to fire them up, all that stuff.  The stuff that helps good planners and good account teams write creative briefs that really help creative teams come to life.  The kind of brief that creative teams so often complain they don’t get. It’s during this phase that it’s driven by planners but with others adding value.

The second phase, is the one where we look at digital itself and the whole host of different channels and executions it can contain (see the previous digital ecosystem chart I made which is, quite probably, already out of date!).  This is where digital teams, planners and creatives can all add value, working out what specifically it is in the digital field that is going to best address the requirements identified in phase 1 – the part where we already worked out we want to use digital, but were not sure how exactly.  It’s in this phase that it’s driven by digital specialists with others adding value.  See the subtle difference?  Both (digital?) strategy phases, but with slightly different drivers.

Phase 1 – what are we doing and, by association, do we want to do it in digital?

Phase 2 – what bits of digital do we want?

To many people these stages can appear to be one and the same – often, when I talk to people about marketing strategy in relation to digital, the distinction isn’t clear for them to make.  But make it I believe we must.  They do two different tasks. Both of them essential to good creative output.

We’re all planners in this agency.  No strategy is a bad strategy.

Doesn’t mean we’ll use yours though…

Howard
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Tags: digitalmarketing advertising planning planners planosphere silos overlap skill sharing communication