Guerrilla thinking

Intelligence matters. We don’t know what you think about it guys, but this little sentence sounds a little bit obvious to us, isn’t it?

Come on, intelligence always matters.
And if you just don’t bother putting some of it into a creative communication work, then you are bound to fail and you’d better consider a different career.

Yeah right.
This should be taken for granted. Unfortunately it is not.
And the evidence of this is that strategic planning is slowly losing its role within the agencies and some of them start to think they can dispense with it.

At guerrilla thinking we instead think this is nuts. Pointless. And here’s why. 

1) CLIENTS DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY WANT

we anticipated this in an early post. Clients are dull, lazy monkeys with money in their pockets. They most of the time totally ignore what they are supposed to do, until someone unload a pile of paper on their desk and asks for results.
In order not to disappoint the boss they will call 5 to 8 agencies and ask them to propose what they will call “communication strategy”.
Too bad they rarely are able to provide a detailed view of what they really want.

It is therefore an agency task to identify clients’ needs and expectations.

2) MANY CREATIVES DON’T CARE ABOUT CLIENTS GOALS, THEY CARE ABOUT BEING COOL.

People within the agencies are too much focused on their roles to be able to see an overall picture: accounts are mainly busy saying yes to their clients, talking on the phone and smiling and/or time sheetting (yes the spelling is correct), copywriters are writing and art directors are photoshopping.

95% of the times art directors and copy writers work on a pitch without reading the brief and without asking more information to do the job at the best.
(The accounts do read it. More on that in point number 3)

Should some thoughts about goals, strategy and perspective ever make it to the table it will be from the client service director and/or the managing director.  Apart from planner of course.

 3) CLIENT SERVICE DIRECTORS AND ACCOUNTS THINK THEY CAN DO STRATEGIC PLANNING BETTER THAN STRATEGIC PLANNERS

It’s sadly true.
Because they know the client, they think they can do the thinking for the game.

But strategic planning is something else. You don’t have to just know some marketing guy in the client’s team. You have got to be able to envision a path. To set up milestones and get the client and the agency to reach them.

And in order to do so you must think outside your client perspective and from his own angle at the same time.
It’s a game of reasoning and identification that is way deeper and harder than reading our clients’ email and believing we know what’s best for them.

This third reason is the most important one to let you understand why you need planners.
Right because there are people like client managers who think you don’t.

Like they can do the job.
We don’t have anything against client managers, trust us. They’re good guys and many times good looking girls and it’s nice to have them around.

But they tend to mimic clients approach too much and to identify themselves with their clients at the point that they wind up to be unable to identify an idea to break through and make the difference.

And after all, that’s not their job.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

Times like these agencies tend to save money and increase revenues.
No frills, no wasting of time. Maximum results.
And strategic planning is sadly sacrificed on the altar of money and revenues.
But doing so unloads agency weaponry and in the end outcomes a dishomogeneous work that won’t make the client happy.

Don’t get rid of strategic planners. Let them do what you pay them for: the thinking.
And on their thoughts build up a world of creativity. Don’t do it viceversa.
In never really works and ultimately it will lead to awful results.