Week 9: Abraham Lincoln

My challenge from last week was to write a new joke.

Result: partial(?) success.

I worked on some jokes, but I won't say I really met the spirit of my challenge. I got a little derailed by having a show this weekend (tonight), so I spent some of my joke writing time building out a solid set for that. But I got some new directions together, and hopefully I can get a more complete joke worked out for another show I have this month.

Anyways, here is where my joke is (being accountable here):

"I think it's pretty uncool that Abraham Lincoln died. I feel like that guy had a lot going for him, including that world's best trump card:

'Abraham Lincoln! Are you still in bed at this hour?'

'Yes, Mary Todd. I guess I'm just still exhausted from FREEING ALL THE SLAVES.'

Can you imagine having that trump card today?

'Excuse me, sir, but do you know why I pulled you over?'

'Excuse me, sir, but do you know how many slaves I freed?'

'...My apologies, Mister President, I didn't know it was you. Looking back, the top hat probably should have been a giveaway. I guess I just didn't think you'd be able to fit in a Prius.'

To be honest, though, the whole "death" thing feels a little irresponsible. People get shot for doing a lot less, Abe really should have seen that one coming.

See, I'm the exact opposite. I live in constant fear of assassins. Like if I'm driving and the car behind me follows me through two turns, I automatically assume they are following me home to kill me."

Anyways, that's my joke so far. I obviously have a long way to go, but I feel like there are spots ready to be expanded. The point (and hope) of this is that as I try to stretch my creative ability, I will also be prepared to stretch my account planning ability. It was a fairly successful week at work, so maybe it's working?

I will still work on this challenge, because I have a show the end of May I'd like it to be finished for. I am, however, also starting a new challenge this week. I let a friend pick the next book I am going to read, hoping that it can also expand my thinking by introducing me to something I never would have read/considered otherwise.

It worked. This week, I'll begin to read "The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde.

-Aaron

Week 8: Caught

This is probably the most successful week of this blog so far. It's not that something really interesting happened, but the opposite-- nothing interesting happened. I sat down to think about my week and what to blog about, and I realized I had nothing.

I did

nothing

new

this week.

Which is a waste. One of the reasons I am in advertising is because I love the dynamic, constantly evolving nature of the work, and I love the constant quest for creative expression that is encouraged. Yet, given all of that, I did nothing new this week. I did my job, I went home, and I did just usual home stuff. Boring? Not entirely. Fulfilling? Not at all.

One of my personal values is growing and learning and doing something unique and different with my opportunities, so obviously this week represents a failure. BUT, importantly, I realized that. I've heard a quote that said the fastest path to improvement is measurement (or something like that, I'm more than willing to misinterpret a quote for my personal benefit here), and I think this is a good example. By taking the time to try and blog my progress weekly, I discovered the need to change something in my process.

Of course, this is only part of a successful blog. Taking this lesson, and finding a way to do something different this week, is critical to transform this lesson into a victory. So, this week, I'm adding a new challenge that will make me explore a new creative direction-- I am going to write a new joke. A long joke. I haven't done this in months as I've contemplated whether or not to continue with stand up, but this week I'm going to do it anyways to make me stretch my creative faculties.

And, hopefully, turn this lost week into an opportunity to pivot and better align myself with my goals. I'm thinking I might make this weekly creative adventure a part of my blog, and determine my new creative stretch every week on here. We'll see how it goes.

-Aaron

Week 7: USP

It is key for marketers to understand that there are two categories of features every product/service has: points of parity, and points of differentiation. When you are trying to build credibility in a market, you focus on your points of parity, or what your product/service has in common with market leaders. When you are trying to build consumer loyalty and advocacy, however, you focus on points of differentiation, or what makes your product/service unique from competitors'.

Perhaps the biggest turning point in my advertising career (however short it is) was the day I realized that these two qualities are equally important when you build your career.

The day I realized this was the day I was interviewing for my first agency internship. The strategy director interviewing me asked me, "If you could give me one writing sample that shows how you think, what would you give me?" I was prepared for something like this, and had a small stack of papers I had written to prove my qualifications. The problem, though, was that he only asked for one. I had several that I had written for advertising projects, like research summaries and media plans, but, when I had to pick one, I chose an essay I had written in a creative writing class about a funeral I had visited. That strategy director made it very clear that that decision made all the difference.

Other candidates interviewed had either 1) been unprepared, or 2) given him something like I had considered-- a marketing research paper. My decision had won because my decision had immediately separated me from the rest of the candidates. (It also helped that he really like my essay.)

What I didn't realize at the time was that I had already proved my points of parity, that's how I got the interview. He had seen my resume and my job application questions, he knew I had met the qualifications needed to compete in this category. What he needed then was to know that I had an added value, a point of differentiation that separated my offer from the competitors in this category. Because I had something that proved my point of differentiation, I got the only strategy planner internship for that summer.

Now, as I'm preparing my career goals and plans moving forward, I know that I need to keep my Unique Selling Proposition in mind. The act of doing my job and building my resume will prove my competency in this space, but to be really successful I also need to prove what makes me different from any other planner of equivalent experience. Developing my personal differentiation is as important as developing my actual job skills.

I guess you could call it branding.

-Aaron

Week 6: Client Calls

It seems to me that the biggest, most pervasive problem in advertising, is poor communication between client and agency. And it is so hard for me to fathom why.

There are two consistent problems I see: 1) Lack of listening, 2) Assumed clarity.

One-- I think the root of this problem is, really, a lack of patience. Which makes sense in advertising and marketing because both sides live in worlds of short deadlines and quick turnarounds (and unfortunately so). And it happens on both sides, though I'm pretty sure both sides assume it is the others' fault. Nothing makes you feel more dumb as a presenter than to have your audience ask a question that you literally answered one slide ago. Another symptom I see often is the audience commenting on a part of the presentation you haven't reached yet, making it very clear that they have an agenda and the rest of what you are going to see is irrelevant until it is answered, and this, obviously, cheats the presenter out of setting up a proper context.

Two-- I think this is an extension of problem one, because it is what happens at the end of the meeting when we all agree on next steps only to find in the follow-up meeting that we never really did. And that is disheartening, too, because we always feel so empowered by having next steps, actually knowing what to do next; and feel equally wasted by learning none of that work will be appreciated. Again, I think we rush that end of the call because we were so impatient about the rest of it, and it often results in a lot of wasted effort.

I think the solution is simple-- marketers need to trust the agency more. They need to trust that we will get to where we need to and we will give them what they need, so that they will take the time to listen.

BUT, more importantly, that means agencies need to better develop trust with their marketing counterparts, because I think that responsibility rightly falls our way in a client-agency relationship. We need to prove that we can be reliable and give them exactly what they're looking for. And to do that, we need to take the first steps of being invested and engaged with the client's presentations to us. We need to show them that we are taking their requests seriously, and we need to put in the extra effort to make sure every call is effective and that we all really do agree on and understand the next steps. And we may hate it because doing that will require a lot of redundancy, but I think it would all be worth it in the time we save in between reviews.

So, in short, I think we all need to dumb down our conversations a bit. I think we all get a little too-caught up in flashing our big marketing words like "gamification" and "omnichannel" and, as a result, we all waste a little too much time not actually understanding one another. So my personal challenge, coming out of this week, is to take the time to review my communications and ask myself how I would say it differently to a 5-year-old. This doesn't mean treating people like children, but it means communicating with clarity as the first priority.

I think a little bit of clarity can take you a long way.

-Aaron

Week 5: TED Talks and Briefings

This was a slow week at work, which I think is a thing in advertising. I had a few of them as an intern, and I have an occasional one now. I think this is especially true when you are in an entry-level position, some projects just need a higher pay-grade so you move in and out of them for the areas in which you're relevant. At least that is what happens to me.

Anyways, this came up during my internship. One of my mentors brought it up with me; he said something like: "I don't always give you something to do, because I think this job requires a lot of personal initiative. You have to find ways to be productive on your own." (That's 100% paraphrased, but it gets the idea of it)

The real foundation idea, I think, is autonomy. As an account planner you get a lot of freedom and trust, or autonomy, and so I think an intangible job skill is learning how to use it productively. This week, I decided to use my free time to focus on another intangible job skill-- leading inspiring presentations.

As I've mentioned before, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can lead a more effective creative briefing. One of my concerns is, "How can I become more inspiring?" An inspiring briefing is a scary goal to set and go for, because it isn't a measurable goal. Like I said, it's an intangible. So I was left with the problem of how I can improve. My solution? I started watching TED Talks, specifically, the most popular TED Talks of all time.

And, conclusion: they are awesome, and they are great benchmarks to try and shoot for. But, so far, I haven't seen a strong pattern emerge. These people all crafted incredibly inspiring briefings, but they all did them in different ways. This is both promising and disappointing. Disappointing because it would be so much easier if there was an easy equation to implement; promising because that leaves the door open for any idea to be made into an inspiring presentation (it doesn't have to fit the mold).

The key, I think, is that each idea needs to be presented differently. Finding the right way to present an insight is as important as finding the right insight. Sometimes an idea (or a creative team) is good enough to survive a sub-par brief, but the role of the account planner is to remove that margin of error as best we can.

-Aaron

Week 4: Stand-up Comedy

I like account planning because I feel it is an amalgamation of a lot of things I enjoy and can do well. I've been told something like, "Find a career in something that you're passionate about and you'll never work a day in your life." I don't believe that. I believe the act of having to do something for a living automatically sucks some life out of you. Work is work, and you will always have days that stink; however, some work is more tolerable than other work. For me, account planning seems most tolerable because much of the work is something that I would do in my own free time anyways. It's not quite as fun, and it isn't in the same proportion of activities, but it is easier for me to make account planning fun than any other job I've encountered.

Which is important, because I believe if you aren't having fun, then you aren't doing it right. But that will be a different post.

I think stand-up comedy is one of my free time activities that has prepared me the most for account planning. I bring this up because my experience of the week was going impromptu to a comedy show in downtown Salt Lake, and it got me thinking about my own comedy experience. I won't pretend I have some great insight into comedy (I've done very little stand-up outside of my college comedy club), but I think the practice has a lot of overlap with account planning.

I've noticed it has a lot of overlap with advertising in general. A lot of my comedy friends are pursuing ad copy writing as a career, another large chunk of them are going into graphic design, and I've met enough former-comic creatives that a failed comedy career seems like a resume pre-requisite for getting a full-time position in a creative department. I'm a little disappointed I haven't seen similar trends in account planning.

To me (and, bear in mind, I'm an amateur in both fields), the most central skill in both account planning and stand-up is lateral thinking--the ability to take something mundane and inflexible and bring it to life with something new, unexpected, and seemingly unrelated. I've never made a breakthrough punch or a powerful strategy statement without a successful lateral thinking twist. From there, as a comedian, you can build out the joke with your presentation and supplemental punchlines (and that is where I think comedy and ad creative have their overlap), but I think the real fun of both processes is that moment of discovery. And I think that is where the real excitement for both stand-up and account planning is for me.

Now, lateral thinking, in my opinion, is also the hardest part of both fields as well. I don't think there is such thing as a "lateral thinking formula" and that is a little scary because I'm trying to build a career out of it. I also believe, however, that it is a talent, and the more practice you put into lateral thinking, the better you'll become. And that is why I think my stand-up comedy experience has proven invaluable to me as I prepare for my career in planning.

The practice of staring at a premise, reworking and rewording it, and talking it through to the real anchor-punch (that's my working term for the strong punch that I build my joke on) has taught me at least some tricks that help spur lateral thinking. Here are a few of them, connected to related jokes of mine, for reference. I'm hoping to build out my list of tricks much, much further. If you have advice for other techniques, I'd love to hear it in the comments.

1) Expanding the world of the premise. For this trick, I look at my premise/insight, and I ask "If this is true, what else must be true?" My comedy example is Cat-god. My beginning premise was that it was extremely lazy for ancient Egyptians to worship cats as gods. It was, in itself, as underwhelming as worshiping a house pet as deity, but then I expanded the world around it. How does worshiping a cat compare to worshiping a more creative deity? This was the result:

2) Building unrelated connections. For this trick, I take one small piece of the premise, and connect it to another idea that is related in only that one piece. From these small, obvious relationships, you can often find deeper, more powerful connections that give new life to an idea. My comedy example is my joke about hiding from an assassin by going to Disneyland. One of my reasons to believe for this premise was that movie assassins are always dressed up way too nicely for Disneyland, so they'd feel uncomfortable, but my joke stopped there. To try and build it out, I said, "Mormon missionaries also wear suits," and that connection unearthed a variety of new punchlines for what became one of my most successful bits. It's long, but you can see how the twist works here:

3) Thinking and sheer force of will. Is this really a trick? I think so. I think most people working in creative industries will tell you the importance of subconscious thinking. Your subconscious, it seems has a lot of untapped creative ability, and the only consistent way I've found to take advantage of it is sheer force of will. You think, hopelessly, on your premise until you're sick of it. Then you walk away, do something else, and, if you've thought on it hard enough, I think your subconscious takes on the task as a favor. Then, surprisingly, it just comes out. For me it often happens mid-conversation. I'll be with a friend, doing something unrelated, and then the finished premise will fall out of my lips. It is very exciting, but it's not something I quite understand. For this comedy example, I have Worm Butts. I had been trying for weeks to write a joke about how weird I think worms are, and nothing fit. I had all but given up until one day, talking with friends over dinner, the whole joke popped out in its entirety:

So that's my current list of lateral thinking techniques. I don't think it is a coincidence it is closely related to my three favorite jokes. I think that moment of discovery when lateral thinking reaches its tipping point is one of the most rewarding experiences a person can have, and it is what gets me so excited about planning and comedy. Hopefully, moving forward, I'll find new ways for my list to grow.

-Aaron

Week 3.5: Credibility and Responsibility

Three weeks in and I've already missed a week. Shameful.

Usually I write these posts on the weekend, but this last one was unexpectedly busy. I promise it will be the exception, not the rule.

Anyways, today I want to talk about a really interesting situation I've found myself in. Due to the amount of work going on (and hopefully the quality of my work), I've been trusted with a lot of responsibility recently. Which is fine, and I'm very happy about it, it's just more than I had expected.

For example-- We got a (relatively) small project, and I was given a charge to do some product and category research around it. Then, as other projects escalated, my scope of research grew and grew until I was responsible for all of the preliminary research findings. I wasn't given free reign by any means, and I was careful to consistently make reports to my strategy supervisor to keep him in the loop and get his feedback, but I owned the project. It was a great experience, and it was very rewarding to have my insights and research validated in internal meetings and client calls.

I guess what I wasn't prepared for, however, was the scope of credibility and responsibility then assigned to me. Since then, I have been the expert for this product and its target audience. I'm sitting in meetings with people who have decades more of advertising experience and acronyms like VP in their job title, and they are looking at me to settle debates on the audience and the messaging. And this isn't a first for me, either. I've had a creative director to the same thing to me during an internal review. It's a little intimidating.

Luckily I have had great strategists to work under, and I've invested a lot of time into that research, and I know it well enough to answer the call of duty and whatnot; but it is very humbling to see the amount of confidence and trust that is put into the strategist position.

So I guess the lesson is that even at a junior level you have to take this job very seriously. It's still a very creative position and you can have your fun, but you had better do your due diligence. When the questions start coming you'll always wish you had had more time for research.

It's amazing to me that advertising ever got anywhere before account planning was a thing.

-Aaron

Week 2: Creative Downloads

The most recognizable deliverable of Account Planning is the Creative Brief: a synthesis of all your research, insights, and creative assignments. I feel horribly unqualified to talk about what makes a good creative brief (at least at this point in my career), but this week the responsibility of writing an inspiring brief was overshadowed by my responsibility to present one.

I won't say that presenting a creative brief is more important than writing one, but I feel really strongly that that aspect was under-served and neglected in my education and career preparation. I feel this way for a number of reasons, but here are the biggest ones:

1. Most agencies use a formatted creative brief. While a lot of effort goes into making the format effective, that also means that your creative team has seen variations of the exact same document again and again and again. The presentation is an opportunity to breathe some life and excitement back into an old process for them.
2. Only half of your creative team prefers to think in language. This isn't a factual observation, but a thinking point. One half of your team is an art director, and, in that position, they're probably trained to respond and be stimulated by art more than words. A well-written brief will probably do a lot of good for a copywriter, but how can you make it inspiring for an art director?
3. Otherwise, it's just another meeting. How many meetings does everybody have everyday in an agency? I think we've all been in enough to say that a meeting can quickly stifle the creative process, and I think it is an account planner's responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen.

Now, an important caveat, is I'm a junior planner at a primarily B2B agency. When I'm writing briefs, they aren't for massive branding efforts like the next "Most Interesting Man in the World." To this point, my creative downloads have been for small, execution-based projects like direct mail pieces or digital banners. I have limited time and resources, and creating a ground-breaking, experiential download process might not even be appropriate for meeting a client ask. However, I think it is also the perfect format for me to experiment with my process--a little bit here and there--to develop the tool set that will allow me to captivate and inspire creative audiences when I've earned that opportunity.

Most of my efforts, so far, have been about trying to find ways to introduce the creative team to the target audience, and creating a more sensory experience help put them in the audience's shoes:

• For one brief I was able to find a TV clip on YouTube that perfectly matched the audience's pain point.
• For another, I compared the target audience to personas the creative team would be more familiar with and could possibly relate to (Apu and Dr. Nick from the Simpsons).
• Most recently, I created a target audience music playlist that I left playing throughout the creative brief.

First, the success--the account team has been very vocal that they enjoy my multi-media additions. From their remarks I feel very confident that I'm at least addressing point 3 in making the meeting a relief from the workday. I've also successfully managed to get laughter from the creative teams in each download, which is at least an outward expression that they were engaged.

My biggest success, I think, was on the first tactic. It was my first download and it was, unfortunately, rather dull. I could feel it and it was reflected in the way the creative team was participating. When I introduced the video, however, the art director immediately opened up and began not only began commenting about what he saw in the video, but began asking more engaged questions about the assignment and the audience. I think that was my most effective download because familiarizing the creative team with the audience pain point made them care more about both the audience and the brand's solution to it.

(Also, a plug for the old-time planner maxim to always be observing and absorbing the world around them: I knew where and how to find that YouTube clip because of a show I had seen maybe three times on the Food Network from passive curiosity. You never know where you'll find the information you need to make an audience more relevant.)

Next, the improvements--the most glaring hole I see in my downloads, so far, is that I don't create space for interaction and collaboration. I'm tempted to blame that on the fact that most of the campaigns I write briefs for are fairly prescriptive, and don't demand high-level collaboration, but I know that won't suffice as an excuse in a dynamic, competitive industry like advertising. I have to improve.

As is, I think I've done all right, but I've been depending on the creative team to interact on their own initiative and to ask questions and invite discussion. Frankly, I think I should be more responsible for that as a planner. I hate lectures, and I don't think they inspire creativity, and I think my download process would be much more effective if I can get the creatives talking outside of just asking questions. The easiest solution, obviously, is just to switch that around and to begin asking questions to the creative team instead.

All right, that's enough of an essay for now. To summarize, my next step for becoming better at creative downloads will be to find ways to incorporate questions into my briefing process to encourage more creative engagement; and to combine this interactive aspect into my continuing efforts of creating a multi-sensory experience for the brief. Please let me know if you have any other ideas for how I can make downloads more engaging in the comments!

-Aaron

Week 1: Beginning

For my first week, I figured it would be helpful to explain what I'm doing and why. I'd call it a manifesto but then I'd have to admit that I'm taking myself way too seriously.

My name is Aaron Johnson. I graduated with a degree in advertising in December, 2015, and have since been working as an entry-level strategy planner at MRM//McCann West in Salt Lake City. As a junior planner, my goal is to stop being a junior planner-- I love my job and my position, but the point of any job (I believe) is to learn and grow and prepare yourself to move beyond it. I started this blog with that goal in mind.

I'm a firm believer that the quickest way to improvement is to measure it, and that's what I plan to do here. I plan to sit down once a week and reflect on the experiences of the week that are relevant to my job. My posts won't mention any clients or specific projects in detail (because a lawsuit sounds like a terrible idea), but will be general reflections on anything that I thought was an important lesson from the week. Something like, "I did a creative briefing this week. I tried to make it more engaging by doing A, B, and C; but looking back I think B and C would have been better if I did X and Y instead," and so forth. It will likely cover a broad range of topics and ideas, but the variety is what makes this career-path so exciting.

Over the course of this blog I hope that:

1. I will accelerate my learning and growth as a planner,
2. I will be able to refer to this blog as evidence of my continued growth and ability when the time comes for me to move on, and
3. I will create something that can inspire and assist other junior planners on their own journey.

So that's me, and that's what you can expect from my blog. I still can't believe how fortunate I have been in pursuing this career as far as I have, and I hope this blog will help me to make the most of it.

-Aaron