Survey. How much can you actually earn as a Planner?

August 18th, 2010 • View Comments Work
Tags: Agencies, Jobs, Money, Planning, Report, Salary, Strategy, Study, Survey, Truth, World

Finally! An interesting analytical paper about the status quo of planning salaries in planning. My colleague Heather LeFevre from the colleagues at Strawberry Frog here in Amsterdam has just published her Planner Survey 2010. It tries to compare salaries of strategists worldwide to bring some light into the dark. The data was collected via an online survey with 1570+ participants from all over the world.

The effort definitely was worth it. You get a pretty good understanding about what you can expect to earn in NYC in comparison to London. But as usual – salaries don’t say much as long as you don’t integrate real costs of living. Earning and spending 100$ in Frankfurt is a very different thing to earning and spending 100$ in Amsterdam or London.

Anyway, great work, Heather. Thanks a lot.

Big Ideal. Ogilvy’s Brand Platform Revisited.

März 30th, 2010 • View Comments Strategy
Tags: Agencies, Big Ideal, Cool, Ogilvy, Philosophy, Planning, Prediction, Presentation, Strategy, Tools, We like

On my way to explore the best of both worlds (traditional vs digital) I have – once again – come across Ogilvy’s ‘Big Ideals’ concept. And I think it’s a philosophy worth taking a look at, if you’re a (non-Ogilvy) Planner.

It is a planning platform defining an overarching aspirational thought. The objective is obvious – to provide consistency in brand positioning and tone by defining what a brand strives for. Basically in how it wants to make the world a better place. This is a meta objective which is pretty free for all concepts and ideas supporting the Big Ideal. And indeed it may be even a good planning platform to build upon in a more stressful, social, 24/7 marketing environment. Simply because it is free, even though it stages a clearly defined, hypothetical, final condition for a brand.

Thanks to Giles for the video link.

Connections Planning. What is it actually?

Oktober 20th, 2009 • View Comments Allgemein
Tags: Agencies, Analytics, Connections Planning, CRM, Definition, Ideas, Media, Planning, Presentation, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy, Tools, Trends

Since the beginning of 2009 my employer Neue Digitale / Razorfish has integrated all strategic disciplines in one Connections Planning team. As Social Influence Strategist I am part of it together with with different strategic backgrounds. I admit, I did not always feel comfortable in properly defining the different Planning Concepts. And the rather ‘new’ Connections Planning idea adds just one more label to the different strategic disciplines which can exist in an agency.

Our concept of Connections Planning integrates the work of Account and Brand Planners as well as Media and Analytics, and Social Media. Its core idea is to engage customers where they are and not by putting the customer’s media use into the center of attention. Its goal is to use the strength of data-driven marketing activities and integrate all other disciplines to strategically interact with the user and maximize value for all stakeholders.

Connections Planning is a young term. And there are some definitions around and some agencies might find different approaches for the same term. The reason for this post is, I found two interesting decks lately which revolve around the term ‘Connections Planning’. And both are pretty insightful and definitely worth to take a look at.

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Digital Strategy. Let’s start the discourse.

August 14th, 2009 • View Comments Underway
Tags: apgdigital, Planning, Presentation, Strategy, Underway, Workshop

You know how these things start.

You discuss with friends, you drink wine and finally you’re convinced you got a ‘really good idea the world definitely is waiting for’…

About 6 months ago, the people on this picture asked themselves what digital strategy is. Is there a digital planning? If yes, what makes it different to what we did since the 1970s? There were a lot of question marks.

The only thing which was clear was, none of knew if there is a real genuine digital planning approach. We knew we did something different…but we didn’t exactly know what. And I believe this open question made us structure a workshop for traditional account planners which took place last friday and saturday: An open discourse in which we asked

As I said earlier: This workshop wasn’t only about ‘teaching’ digital to traditional planners. It was about defining something for us. About understanding challenges in nowaday’s traditional agencies. Simply because we don’t believe digital planning (if there is one) is ‘winning’. But because we think traditional planning simply evolves and turns into Planning +, 2.0, XP, Vista or iPlanning (you get the idea) as digital turns into mainstream.

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