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Last Friday in San Francisco Alex Frankel held a launch for his new book Punching In.

An Influx interview with can be found here.

There were drinks, Alex read some passages from the book and on a wall in the gallery there was this board full of stuff.



Since Alex's book "Punching In" is all about the world of a brand from an employees perspective. For the book, Alex worked at The Gap, Apple, Starbucks, Enterprise and UPS over a two year period to learn their secrets and internal brandwashing techniques. 

In the process, he collected a number of artifacts from his experience including; uniforms, badges, rule books, guides and pay slips, some of which were dispayed on the board.

It was a nice example of cultural curation (idea by Grant McCracken) where the physical elements and artifacts that define a culture are collected and understood.

It's something planners could be doing more of. We tend to do a lot of talking to people and not a great deal of looking and observing. If we looked deeper and picked up and documented more fragments it might lead to some richer insight.


Posted by Ed Cotton It's clear that the next big change for ad agencies will be the shift to place digital at the center of the shop.

Euro RSCG has already made the leap and others will doubtless follow.

This move has implications for planners, as demands on them will change considerably.

R/GA has been leading the field in digital development, so it makes sense to take a look at the role of planners at the shop.

Thankfully, Admap covered the topic in May of this year when Anne Benvenuto, Vice President of Strategic Services at R/GA explained the agency's planning system and approach.

The shift is driven by the variety of client needs that R/GA deals with, these range from campaigns to programs and experiences. Each of these had different demands from the perspective of channels and insights.

Beyond the client needs, R/GA is set up differently from a conventional ad agency, with an extended creative team (a "Creative Hydra), which includes both an interaction designer and a tech head, in addition to the "traditional" copywriter and art director team.

The planner's role is to deliver insights to help the team in the creation of brand interfaces and experiences.



The UI and tech heads have critical roles to play, in respectively crafting the experience and defining and developing the technology to make that happen.

This enlarged team places greater demands on the planner, who needs to ensure they equip each member of the team with specific and relevant insights, as well as an overarching cohesive thought.

R/GA looks for its planners deliver insights on four dimensions (perceptions, culture, behavior, technology) and a singular idea that links all of them all together. It's clear, that unlike most ad agencies, at R/GA, media and channel behaviors are also included in the line-up.



This leads to briefs that are both simple and complex; allowing the team to see both the single-minded 30,000 ft idea and drill down into the detaled and specific insights that drives the idea.

R/GA's model marks a significant departure from "planning as usual" approach and reflects the dramatic change that adding a tech head and a UI person to the conventional creative team makes.

However, much more than these personnel changes, it's all about agencies thinking about client’s long-time needs, rather than just short-term campaign requirements.

Quite simply, it's all about ad agencies helping brands to continuously connect with their customer base, by adding programs and experiences to the mix and this big shift presents a brave new world for ad agencies and their planners.



Posted by Ed Cotton The Planning for Good group on Facebook was created less than 12 hours ago and already 45 people have signed up.

We've had a great responses from planners in the US and UK.

We need more people to join us, but we also need help in the following areas:

1. Suggestions for good people to add to the advisory board- ideally people working for non-profits.

2. We need problems to solve- non-profits who could use 45 brains on a problem.

Any suggestions and ideas please add to the group page.

Thanks to all of you who have already stepped forward, amazing stuff. 

Posted by Ed Cotton Reuters recently wrote an interesting story about the rise of quantitative analysis on Wall Street, analysis based on lots and lost of data, that’s gaining preference over the more conventional and qualitative analysis.

“Now complex computerized programs can do all that and more, including employing vast reservoirs of data on historic prices to project how stock, currency or other prices may move. Overlay that security-specific information with macro-economic data, forecasts, demographics, industry statistics and other information, and you get a more efficient trading model, proponents say.”

Shift focus to the marketing world and the movement towards the quantitative is already happening.

As marketing dollars shift towards directly responsive media, the data starts becoming more freely available and complex sets of analysis can be made. Up until recently, we’ve seen a bifurcation of disciples; the direct sell side guys and the brand builders. The two worlds were separated and unique.

However, the rise of web video is changing all that. We now have web- based media chasing after dollars that have previously been bound for television.  This isn’t about pre or post roll, but the brand impact of rich video content designed for interactive consumption.

The coming together of the brand building and direct selling worlds creates new demands on planners. No longer can they be content with being the qualitative insights gurus, if they want to survive, they are going to have get to grips with the emerging quantitative world.

Interestingly, this world isn’t complete, it’s half built at best. No one knows quite what it should look like or how we should measure it. There are some buzz measurement tools, there are cross media optimization tools and other things, but nothing optimal.

It’s a good time to get started.

The Reuters article suggests that equity analysts will still have a job, but it's now recognized there are alternative sources of great insight.

It’s possible that the same development could happen in planning

Joerg Colberg's Conscientious blog has a series of links to photographers who take portrait shots of video gamers in action. It's a fascinating look at the power of gaming and how it can drag mind, body and spirit into an immersive experience. These people look like they are being controlled by a powerful force.

The shot we've included is by Shauna Frischkorn and is titled Todd- (playing test drive 2001).

Todd Deutsch is another photographer who has brilliantly captured the same subject.

As is Philip Toledano

As planners, there's a huge opportunity to use photography and photographers more. Obviously there's the work of Jan Chipchase at Nokia and IDEO who use photography to make observations about how people use technology and stuff, but how about working with a serious photographer to capture the spirit of a sub-culture or a target segment?

Anyone done this?
The California Milk Processing Board’s (CMPB) Got Milk campaign is one of the most enduring and best-loved ad campaigns in history, not the Milk Moustache campaign, but the television work of Goodby, Silverstein and Partners

The mid 1990s campaign with “Planning God”, Jon Steel’s fingerprints all over it, despite being over ten years old, is still loved by planners and creative teams worldwide.

The powerful insight that certain foods are just born to be with milk and consuming these foods without it is perilous, was brilliant and dramatized in some style by great television advertising. 

At the time, it was regarded as AN example of how planning can impact creativity, but over the years has emerged as THE example.



It looks like the campaign has been relegated to the vaults of history as the CMPB comes to terms with a new Internet age.

Goodby gave us a taste of the future with last year’s Cow Abduction campaign, but the  latest work, produced in collaboration with North Kingdom , is something else all together.

It merges the worlds of television advertising, animation and gaming into a cohesive concept that’s stunningly executed.

There’s an amazing level of detail and the attention that’s gone into the work.



Get the Glass may become a  “marker” for the future of the creative internet experience, in the same way that Goodby’s Jon Steel inspired television, now looks like it was the closing chapter of last century’s television age.

For years, the Internet was always playing second fiddle for production dollars to television, but that looks set to change. The level of complexity required in creating an engaging Internet experience demands significant investment, especially as the bar is being raised with video broadband everywhere on the internet and HD in the living room.

The internet’s communication future is no longer about analog “TV on the web”, but instead it needs to embrace multi-disciplinary experiences that exploit the creative potential of internet technologies to their fullest.