I visited my alma mater JWT last night to attend its Planning At 40 event, a celebration of the day Stephen King and Stanley Pollitt invented account planning. Industry luminaries, including Jeremy Bullmore, John Grant, Jon Steel, and JWT's Guy Murphy, made speeches on the future of planning. The event was held on JWT's extraordinary Knightsbridge terrace, under blue skies. Drinks and canapes were served, and there was plenty of time after the event itself to catch up with some of the lovely people that have passed through and around JWT in the last forty years. So the whole thing was very nice.
As to the content, well. I'm probably not the best person to judge. I'm interested in a long list of stuff going on in the world, and a lot of that stuff relates to brands and communication. But I have to say, the future of planning languishes somewhere near the very bottom of that list. I suspect I'm not the only one. Several of the speakers seemed a bit bored by their own speeches. I don't blame them.
I wish one of them had reflected on the possible connection between the decline of the traditional agency network and an inward-looking culture that results in agencies holding seminars on their own internal processes, rather than on things that clients - or anybody outside of agencies - actually care about. Stephen King may have invented planning. But I'm sure even he got more excited about brands than he did about planning itself.
Apart from the unimaginative choice of theme, I was struck by how nearly all the speeches could have been made at any time in the last five, or even ten years. None of the speakers got stuck into the intellectual, cultural, and social trends that are shaping the way we all communicate. For instance, the influence of 'wiki' thinking and social networks were barely mentioned. For the most part, 'Planning' was discussed in a kind of timeless bubble in which capacious, wind-tunnel nouns like 'ideas/creativity/strategy' stood in for real thought. There were many fond glances to the past, and few wide-eyed stares into the future.
It's all very well to criticise of course, but what, if forced to speak on this subject, would I talk about? Well, I think I would have at least nodded to a few of the current fields of discussion about how human beings relate to each other, all of which have huge implications for what brands do.
For instance, the burgeoning fields of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which are opening our eyes to the enormous power of our unconscious selves to shape our behaviour; in particular the way in which emotion shapes our rational decisions. There are revelations and data here to delight any curious planner.
Or behavioral economics and social psychology. Books like this and this will shift the emphasis in communications from how we get people to think or feel things to how we get them to act.
Or, as mentioned, the pervasive spread of social networks and social media in general.
Plenty of stuff for planners to get their teeth into. And all of it a hundred times more interesting and important than 'planning'.
