The Good Energy Of A Good Experience

Today I did things that a regular planner would do. :)

It's for one of our non-profit clients but I'm the only planner on it. We have a meeting with the client tomorrow and I was just brought on this brand about a week ago...can we say nervous?

So I did work on getting to know what it is, what we're trying to achieve, and poured over the brief to make sure it was current and that I knew what was in it. Today, the creatives presented their different ideas. I knew what I was supposed to be doing in that meeting - providing my initial feedback on the executions, speaking to the strategy - but felt ill-equipped to say anything smart at that moment. It's a little discouraging when you know what you're supposed to be able to do and just aren't there yet.

I didn't stop, though. I took time to think about the executions, try to flush them out into real commercials in my head, looked at the brief, looked back at the executions and the wording used, looked at the brief again, and so on until I had formed connections between the executions and the strategy. Once I had pinpointed some possible areas of discussion, I went to one of my creatives to think it over.

It felt really good to have someone understand that I was new to the whole thing, new to the brand, and to answer questions I had about the executions. We came to a consensus on the way we would present the executions + strategy, and then I took the opportunity to ask a few more questions. I wanted to know what planners did from a creative viewpoint and what was most helpful so I asked about what is expected from a planner when creatives present their work, what part of a brief is most relevant to a creative, what is helpful in creative briefings, and what in general is helpful from a planner for creatives. We also talked a bit about the limitations of focus groups to achieve results stemming from people's natural reactions to advertisements rather than the clinical and over analyzed answers that can sometimes come out.

Here's what I took away from our discussion. Creatives will look and look back at one thought on the creative brief - the main idea. Well, duh, but it did still help to know how the brief is used to come to a creative view that is then woven into ideas. Creative briefings can be rich with information that explains how each area was developed - how did we come up with the target, how did we come up with the main idea, what is the research and thought behind that. And just as I work, he said that sometimes a nugget of information will just pop out and seem interesting enough to merit further exploration. I work like that so I can completely understand - inspiration can come from anything. And I found out what I already knew - it's helpful when planners can talk strategy to back up the creative executions...I just needed more time to formulate my ideas. Hopefully with enough experience, I can shoot from the hip on those kinds of things. And finally, focus groups are limiting. (I have a thought-provoking presentation that I can put up about it.)

Anywho, once I had talked strategy with him I took some more time to distill my thoughts into a description of how the strategy related to each execution and then some overall thoughts on what the client may ask us. It's always best to be proactive about what you think the client may ask you so you can think of your answer.

I got a bit of a pep talk from one of my coworkers on presenting to the client tomorrow. That was really helpful. She wished me luck and told me that I could do it. :)

Now all I have to worry about is that our CEO and my director will be in this meeting too. Nervous again.