A planner looks to solve, clarify and discover what problem a client is trying to solve, getting the client to trust the approach and give an agency space to go about producing the best possible work that achieves the greatest return on investment. This is achieved by asking the right questions to get answers from the right places, inspiring the client and agency teams to develop ideas, finding new opportunities and being the catalyst for change for the better. This is what I see planning as at least; everyone will have a slightly different view.

When I first immersed myself into the advertising industry and found where my role was within it I saw the planner as the intrepreneur within an agency, I still believe this and it acts as the foundation for how I’m mapping my career. This is however an approach that I don’t believe fits with many agencies, as it may involve pushing back repeatedly to the client, discovering that some solutions actually aren’t profitable even though they may have got thousands of Facebook likes and not being scared to step out of your specialism for a solution.

This approach works in the same way it would to starting a business: Take data where you can take data, immerse yourself in qualitative research, build an idea, overlay the data, share and develop the idea with as many people as possible, calculate an ROI with appropriate metrics, hone, sell in, implement, evaluate and optimise. If you were to approach an investor with a business proposal the hard value would need to be known, yet so often business problems are ‘solved’ without this and that doesn’t seem right.

Over the years as I have shared this thought with a variety of Planners, Heads of Planning and CSOs I hear a lot of chat about wanting T shaped planners. A T shaped planner is someone that has a variety of shallow skills with a key specialism in which they are experts, with the thought being get a wide variety of T shaped planners and you’ll cover all the bases. As a planner though you are likely to be incredibly curious, a curious individual however won’t keep those shallow skills shallow for long as they will no doubt develop. I therefore don’t believe planning is about the T shaped planners but U shaped planners, with a constantly developing stack of skills.

A brief will never be solved exactly the same way across multiple T shaped planners, it will however likely be solved by their expert field in question. The HoP or CSO may have therefore given them the brief as their specialism is required in this case. It won’t however always be that specialism that is best though as you examine it and as that T shaped planner is blinded by their experience in their specialist field they are unlikely to see that. A U shaped planner aka an intrapreneurial planner would be unlikely to be blinded by this as they don’t hone in on their niche they are experts in and their bias to promote that field throughout the agency. There is no point starting from a set solution over and over again as the results will continue to be much of the same. 

The industry is constantly evolving to try and solve the problems that the modern world continues to throw at it; I’m excited to see how planning and agencies continue to solve them. I just can’t see that T shaped skill sets are the way forward to do this, as a T shaped planner may just think of this,

 or this

and that would be a real shame for creativity and the future of business.