Planning club at founded.

Founded prides on planning being at it’s centre of gravity. This article gives readers a sneak peak into the coolest department of founded where I had an opportunity to intern and learn from great minds in the business. (You either love it or hate it and I happen to be obsessed with it past two years.) The interview was with two planners - Joanna Uniwersal, who has a remarkably great amount of experience of working across a range of brands and campaigns and Richard Phillips who has succinct insights would be invaluable to any fellow planner.

These days, there’s a trend about audiobooks I though it’d be fun to have something of that sort on the blog website. These audio clips are accompanied by a short transcript. Have fun tuning in!

Q1) One thing I always struggle with, is to explain to my grandmother what I do. How do you explain to people when they ask you this question?

Joanna: I try to explain that I’m a planner but then it’s very difficult for some people to grasp an idea of what planners do and specially in our industry, planning isn’t something that’s shouted about. Some people know it really well and some people have never heard of it. So I say I’m looking for human truth.

Richard: In the 6 odd months that I’ve tried to explain to anyone who doesn’t know what it is, I say I’m a catalyst, a spark for the creative people that’s gonna allow them to do something magical.

A planner is as good as the creative solution. You have to have good creatives. There’s no point having great strategy and somebody who's not going to translate that.

Joanna: I feel strongly about it and APG starts every presentation with this quote that “Creative without strategy is called art. Creative with strategy is called advertising.” So we have to be in sync with them and we beautiful things come out of that.

Q2) Only a few people know from the beginning that that’s what they want to eventually do in the ad agencies. All current planners have a really interesting path on how they got there. This makes me really curious about your individual paths that led you to your current jobs as planners at Founded.

Joanna: When I was 16 I knew I wanted to be in advertising when I saw ‘What women want’ with Mel Gibson - the scene when they’re pitching to Nike. I’m creative in the sense that I like to paint, but I didn’t want to be that person who stands on the screen and asks people for money and I definitely didn’t wanna paint any nudes. So I got into advertising, although in Poland strategy isn’t as big as it is in UK. I did accounts services for 3 years and then went to Miami Ad School where I was introduced to Planning. It was like a cupid struct me - Love at first sight. I think a lot of businesses and agencies are hard to get into. We should have more schemes, and give people a chance to see what planning is about and more planners to preach and talk about planning because with junior planners.

Richard: I got into it because I was dragged on a careers day (not very willingly), and a guy called Rory Sutherland I think was a creative at Ogilvy then (I think Vice chairman at the moment) and I was completely hooked on to every single word. Anyways then I completely ignored my interest and went into finance. After that a couple of years in finance got frustrated and got back to my calling and definitely want to stick to planning within an ad agency and not accounts management or creative.

Q3) I’m sure you’ve gotten opportunities to work on a range of very different clients. So, its humblebrag time! Which of your work made you really happy at the end of it? Also I’d like to know what’s next on your planning bucket list.

Richard: I can’t go there yet (work that makes me look back with pride in advertising).

When it comes to what I’d like to do, currently I’m looking after Russell investments and I’ve had experience in finance and I know the people and what they stand for. I would love to do some sort of work that really disrupts it somehow. Everyone in that field likes hiding behind words and feel safe by the stigma that they know what they’re talking about but their audiences don't know what they’re talking about. I’d like to change that in a campaign and see what would happen.

Joanna: The first thing that comes to mind is a charity campaign that I did for Red Cross where the biggest question is how do you move people in a way that you get them to donate. That worked quite well for us. Another one was FT just because of the limitations and struggles of the CRM team because it’s very niche and narrow and segmented. I had to really dig my elbows into the data and that was a nice challenge. The last one probably - Bon Marché (a store which sell clothes for elderly women) just because the insight was beautiful, powerful and not really tackled by others in the category.

And if I had to work on something in the future, I would probably like to work on the client side and have a brand underneath me make sure I will build something lasting for the brand. I don’t know if it’s building a community or if that’s repositioning but at the end of career I would like to say I helped shape the brand in some way.

Q4) I think, whenever a campaign does great, the credit first goes to the creatives then their immediate point of connection - the suits. Planners rarely get mentioned and get sandwiched between the two. What are your views about this?

Richard: Seriously I don’t care. I don’t prefer to have the limelight and would rather just know that you’re a part of of it and don’t need an award to say ‘well done’.

Joanna: I’m an extrovert and love the lights pointed at me. I’m glad awards such as the FE awards (effectiveness awards), APGs and IPAs which are important as you get to hear about how a strategy used in some campaign shifted the whole category, they shine a light on the brave thinking and are much needed. Although we’re not like creatives who need it all the time and we don’t really brag but its nice to have those awards. Recognition is always nice. It depends from agency to agency, some don’t care about the awards, some do.

Now, we come to the juiciest bit of the chat for me starting off as a newcomer.

Q5) Which is one of your most favourite ads ever and why?

Joanna: The best one for me would be Sony Bravia by Fallon the with the balls. If it ran now, I’m not sure but at that time it was a game changer. They dropped some thousands of balls down San Francisco, not using technology (how they’d probably do it today). It shows how the client and agency had the guts, how they had a bigger vision.

Richard: Just something that really hits the nail on the head, like Heineken reaches places that other beers can’t. Like some of the lines from back then are just genius and can be rolled out today. So the ones which were relevant back then and can still be done now. Like Southern Comfort advertisement, from Wieden + Kennedy is ground braking stuff thats never been done before. The transformation you can see form how advertising was done in 1990s and how it changed when CPD came along and a lot of how agencies are set up today.

Joanna: One more, ads that make you feel something, over and over the 10th time you’re gonna cry. Overtime I see the Procter and Gamble one with Mothers for Winter olympics, I cry like a 5 year old. It was quite unexpected for Procter at that time but the insight was beautiful.

Q6) If you were to choose a 3 people dream team - living or dead who would you choose?

Richard: David Attenborough would be definitely be one of mine and John Lennon.

Joanna: I have my three - Frida Kahlo and Picasso would be the creatives, and Elon Musk - he’d be the physic planner (what he’s done for Tesla, his vision and where he wants to take technology. Also how as a business man sees the future is very fascinating.)

Q7) Advice for wannabe planners?

Richard: Go out to random places, take a pen and paper and just observe, talk to people. Come back and say - “The other day when I was in North Birmingham or some Cornish village or something..” that’s interesting. That’s not narrow minded, it’s first hand that I assume would give you some sort of an edge.

Joanna: That’s especially relevant when the industry has been talking about there being far too many google planners who’ve been stuck in their ivory towers and have been shocked about trump and Brexit.

One of the planners at APG said he had an interview with a guy who used to work in Australia and when removed to Britain he said, how can I be hired as a planner if I don’t really know what UK is about? So he traveled to 20 cities in UK and talked to different people and recorded all those discussions and then went into the interview and hiring strategist was so impressed that he said he actually isn’t sure that all his other planners knew as much as the Australian knows now. (He got the job.)

My other tip is to carry a notebook and if you observe something, some ideas might seem silly at the time but if you revisit them, you never know when something you thought of might come in handy.

Some links to nice things mentioned in the interview and others worth a look.

Books/ Resources -

• IPA - http://www.ipa.co.uk/about

• FE awards - http://www.tesfeawards.co.uk/tesfeawards2017/en/page/about

• APG - http://www.apg.org.uk/apg-aboutus

• 98% Pure Potato - https://unbound.com/books/98percentpurepotato this book was recommended to me by David Adamson Senior Planner at Saatchi and Saatchi during a planning boot camp.

People -

• Rory Sutherland - Vice Chairman at Ogilvy. https://ogilvy.co.uk/people/rorys

Ads -

• Sony Bravia - Bouncy Balls Colour like no other.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_bx8bnCoiU, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vysuzs4xM1U

• Southern Comfort - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MEdhm0LRHw

• Thank You Mom - P&G Commercial (Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SwFso7NeuA SaveSaveSave