The wedding day

So here’s some of the stuff that was talked about during the connection planning conference in New Orleans.  As I mentioned before keep your eye on the polygamous marriage site for a plethora of content that will hopefully be up soon.

The first chunk of the day saw presentations from Robbie Vitrano, Demian Brink and Lisa Seward.  There seemed to be a common theme among these presentations that we have to stop getting hung up on job titles and descriptions and instead recognize that really the role of connections planning is to being a catalyst for the industry as a whole in developing ideas that have relevance and power in today’s very different landscape.  Lisa talked about the ‘new creative’ (a great reframing of and riposte to ‘new media’) and the importance of invention over collaboration, while Robbie used a great quote by Bruce Mau to define the need for communications today: “create utility and delight in interesting sustainable ways”. 

Following this opening salvo was Jim Elms of Barkley who was one of two presentations that gave us an inside look at some of the tools agencies are developing to help instill media thinking into the creative process.

Michael Jager, one of the founders of the great design shop JDK, spoke about the need for brands to create emotion and devotion and was perhaps the bravest speaker of the day using a video projection while talking from the floor and not the pulpit.  He talked about how design needs to make brands feel as emotionally charged and memorable as your first kiss, and took aim at the crass way the industry talks about customization and personalization – yes, Nike ID gives you more options but you still have to conform to a very limiting set of rules. He compared this to the Patagonia DIY shoe that they worked on where a basic kit can be put together in millions of ways.  Very kindly, Michael had also designed a T shirt for everyone.

After Michael came the ‘Account Planning Power Hour’ (a pretty awful title, and as we talked about the night before may have been better called the BBC World Service given the British accents of the three of us speaking).  I’ll post a little later about what I talked about, but Adrian and Ed were great. 
Adrian Ho (of Zeus Jones) gave a great, engaging presentation about how communication thinking needs to change in an era of demographic, cultural and industrial transformation.  A lot of what he talked about is captured in this post but the key thing to me was that we have to develop new ways of thinking and doing as we now live in a post industrial society yet all our tools of thinking about and doing communication were born in the industrial age. He argued that planning has to move from designing communications to designing interactions, and that we need to make marketing less mechanical and more human.  Here's Adrian's deck:

| View | Upload your own

Ed Cotton (of BSSP and Influx) talked about the birth of Planning For Good, the results of the first brief and what’s been learned so far.  He talked about how it’s an example of what he believes is Planning’s 4th wave, using our brains and talents to help good causes.  (If you’re not already a member please join up on Facebook here.  There will be a new brief going up this week and a new way to get engaged through the development of a network of coffee mornings in cities (currently 30 and counting) around the world).

After a fantastic taste of New Orleans over lunch at either Herbsaint or Luke, Paul Woolmington  of Naked kicked off the afternoon and talked about why Naked came into existence (to liberate communications from advertising) and the culture inside the company. 
John King of Fallon, one of the initial trailblazers of the discipline, followed Paul.  He talked a lot about what he believes connections planning is and why connection planning has to exist as a discrete discipline going forward.  What hut home for me most was his call to focus on developing new, better metrics designed for each campaign rather than trying to measure the new world with old instruments.  (By the way, John rocked a tuxedo well).

Following John was Scott Lucas of Dosage who talked about a classification of media he’s developed and that I won’t share as I sense it was pretty proprietary stuff.  Scott was followed by what I thought was one of the best presentations of the day from Rob Perkins and Sidney Bosley of Goodby,  They shared why and how Goodby has melded together its planning and media departments into one strategy group and how they are developing deceptively simple tools to create collaboration and communications full of depth, nuance and interestingness.  I really liked their definition of the media planner as the architect of opportunity and the account planner as the architect of the story – gives very clear roles for each discipline and how they can best collaborate.

Last up was Rob Walker, who writes, among other things, the Consumed section in the New York Times and the blog Murketing.  He talked about the genesis of the notion of murketing (murky marketing) and some of the stuff that’s going to be in his new book.  Great guy and very funny – he poked fun at the Goodby guys presentation’s use of a day in the life timeline and said at least you lot haven’t worked out how to market to me when I’m sleeping.

Great day, and hopefully there’ll be a repeat next year.  Thanks again to the guys at Trumpet, especially Robbie, Pat, Mike and Debbie.

Comments

[Oakie]

Thanks for sharing. They re really useful.

[lily poe]

i want to be your member, thank you...

[Royalty Bridal]

Very interesting read, thanks for sharing.