Hello. Christine here. I’m a new planner at Albion.
On Monday I went to the IPA’s Fast Strategy conference, and thought I’d share my thoughts.
Tim Lindsay of TBWA opened the day, with a quote from Benjamin Franklin: ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over, expecting different results’. Slightly ironic, as he then went on to replay their standard agency creds!
However Tim Hames (The Times), Mark Earls (‘Herd’ guru), Rob Forshaw (Grand Union) and the planning team at Leo Burnett all made the day actually very good. And a brilliant ‘live brief and 3 hr / 3-way pitch’ task did reveal who really could think fast.
Interesting things that came up…
- Tim Hames ‘colourful’ tie. He referred to it 3 times. Oh and talked about his advocacy of the three F’s when working fast – Flat structure, a shared Formula, and Flexibility – adapting to change and keeping things fluid.
- Mark Earls suggesting collaborative beginnings were crucial. By creating a Wiki and posting a link to it on the Planning for Good Facebook page, he completed the fastest ever consumer research / opinion seeking exercise I’ve ever witnessed – and from all over the world. Impressive.
- They managed to play ‘Who let the dogs out’ 3 times at amusing moments.
- Good fast strategy can only ever come from very well defined (or re-framed) business objectives (Cue discussion on worst ever business objectives on a client brief – ‘make our brand cool’ was probably the winner). Sainsbury’s example was interesting – ‘Grow the business by 2.5 billion over 3 years’ was reframed by the team at AMV to ‘get every customer to spend £1.14 more on every transaction’ and then ‘Try Something New’ was born in 30 minutes)
- ‘Light lots of little fires and see which ones work’. Mark Earls turned the debate into a more interesting one – not about fast or slow strategy but about open rather than closed strategy. The idea being, you have a core thought but it should be fluid, evolving and allow you to do several things simultaneously and build on the ideas that work.
- Finally Rob Forshaw talked about making consumers your partners, and moving from push media to pull media, and content centricity rather than channel centricity. I liked his idea that the best ‘fast strategy’ was strategy that was placed directly into the hands of consumers, and allowed them
to continually evolve it (i.e. Boots 17 MySpace community set up for teenage girls to create new products, these products will be featured on their website, then produced carrying the names of their creators, then these create word of mouth, producing a viral co-creation/purchasing/web content generating circle) - A good fancy biscuit AND muffin selection throughout the day.
