Planning for the future

 

Weber Shandwick made an important announcement last week. The appointment of Leo Rayman from the adv agency DDB as European Head of Planning. Leo sent me a book over Xmas – Pollitt on Planning.
Stanley Pollitt is considered by some to be the father of modern day advertising account planning. I believe his story holds important lessons for the PR industry.
Stanley introduced the role of “strategic planner” to the ad industry as “someone who would decide when research would be done and what information was relevant to the creative development process and would remain independent of the pressures of the client and the creative directors”. Fundamentally Stanley saw the role of the strategic planner as the data literate consumer champion who would ensure that the agencies output was always kept on track.
The PR industry has transformed itself in recent years, by putting measurement at the heart of its agenda. Today insight is increasingly being adopted as the new agenda as clients provide increasingly complex challenges that require much deeper insights into the influences behind today’s customer behaviours. As a result we are commissioning research reports, buying into new consumer panels and uncovering new streams of data in a way that never happened before. And this of course is the issue. Does a fantastic publicity person, also have the necessary skills to sift through all of this data and identify what is relevant or not? Can a creative guru, always separate dreams from reality? Can the slick account man, say no?
Historically the PR industry hasn’t divided its roles in the same way as the ad industry. But as clients see the growing importance of advocacy within their marketing mix and recognise that PR is best equipped to deliver against their needs, things are changing. Every agency man knows that clients buy on trust and for the PR industry that trust is coming from demonstrating, consistently it’s ability to navigate client brands through an increasingly complex and cluttered world. It’s an exciting time for the industry and an exciting time for my company. Welcome on-board Leo!

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Super Crunchers

Some experts in the UK are estimating that 17% of shopping was done on-line this Xmas, beating all predictions. It’s another sign of how fast things are changing for brands and I was fascinated therefore to read an article in the Times Magazine today, looking at predictions from leading commentators for the year ahead. Supercrunching grabbed my attention …

Ian Ayers has written a book called Super Crunchers (named using Google Ad-words to test various titles to his book, to identify the one that generated the most clicks).

Supercrunching is the analysis of huge quantities of data to make predictions about the real world. He claims it is the future of marketing – identifying what consumers will buy next, based on masses of collected data on past behaviour, external influences and probabilities etc. He says it will replace intuition in many situations.

Data is being collected from us at every source today– search terms, shopping purchases, location records etc. Piecing these together does give marketers the opportunity to create fantastic predictive and targeting models. The issue historically has been one of cost – it’s simply been too expensive to adopt this approach across a wide range of decisions. As these costs reduce, as they will, Supercrunching will clearly become an increasingly important component of future advocacy strategies. 

                                                                                                                                                                         
I also liked The Times article on the Terabyte.

Fewer than ten years ago a matchbox sized 64 Megabyte MP3 player held a CD’s worth of music. The current Ipod has 160,000 Megabytes (160 Gigabytes). Even the Gigabyte is close to obsolescence according to one commentator – as we move towards the Terabyte (1 million Megabytes). Soon gadgets will contain tens or even hundreds of Terabytes. They will be pre-loaded with masses of information to reduce the reliance on slow Internet connections and we will have the opportunity to store everything we have ever produced, seen or heard. It’s yet another new space for brands to think about.

The future it seems is data!

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