One thing particularly fun, as someone working for an online agency, was seeing the opulance of successful above the line agencies. Blimey.
Anyway, I did some scribbles for each talk, so i thought i'd stick them up.
Week 1: George Bryant - What is planning?

He gave a cool example of how Sainsbury's 'try something new' was inspired by a slightly sideways way of getting round some massively ambitious targets for the advertising.
He railed against lazy planning, saying it's tired/rote and formulaic. Often because people often turn into Presentation Creaters, rather than Idea communicators.
His top tips:
- Don't just say something about a product, show something about a project. The web makes this easier, and much more powerful.
- Don't be an island - your ideas will be better, and will be more likely to get used/accepted. Probably his most important message
I like the message about not being an island. It's quite easy to do in both IA and Planning - overintellectualise something, then create a presentation about it, deliver the presentation/documentation, then consider the job done.
I also liked the message about focussing on the Business problem behind a brief, then trying to solve that, rather than taking assumptions of a solution loaded into a brief.
Week 2: Malcolm White - The changing value of brands

Brands are complicated - we try and simplify them into stooopid diagrams which are prescriptive and inhibit creativity. He then delved more into what it is that makes up a 'Brand' - ironically summing it up with the most simplistic brand diagram possible - that of a peach, the pit being the product, and the flesh being the 'brand' that makes it attractive and different.
He made a good point about 'Brand' being something that is not cared about by most people Planners deal with - which leads to planning becoming a variety of roles. Author / Evangalist / Translator. A brand needs a 'vision' - a reason for living. Profit and money are just a given, like oxygen & blood.
Very enjoyable talk indeed.
Week 3: Vanella Jackson - Developing a great strategy

There were some nice ideas about having a variety of comms strategies of a single brand strategy, and how a brand promise must change over time as circumstances change around it.
A shame - i think she should either come earlier in the list of talks, or take a slightly different topic. Something like details on those two ideas above. eg, how to manage a brand over time, to evolve it around circumstances.
Week 4: Tom Morton: Creative Briefs and Creative Briefing

Another really enjoyable talk with some ideas that have really stuck with me. Particularly the sentiment that "The Clearer the Problem is > The bolder the solution can be" and Be useful to your creatives - that's the best way to be a good planner for creatives.
his blog
Week 5: Rebecca Munds: The role of the planner in the creative development

Best quote:
"Don't be the Devil's Advocate, he's got enough advocates"
Week 6: John Owen - What does digital mean for planning
I couldn't make this week, as i was skiing, so instead I met him for lunch and he talked me through it. I thought it a bit rude to sketch him over the dinner table, so instead we just chatted. Much more interesting one-on-one and the conversation roamed outside the presentation.
The presentation itself was more of an intro to digital for above the line planners so less useful for me as a digi-boy, but chatting with John did create lots of thoughts. Many thanks John!
Week 7: Alice Schaffer - Evaluating advertising effectiveness

She highly recommended a book called the Hidden Power of Advertising. (£45 though) which, i think, is about how much more we're affected by messaging than we actually think we are.
As with some of the other speakers she rammed home the importance of defining the problem - as then you can figure out the best ways of deciding how well it addresses that problem.
Week 8 was the presentation, but that's a whole other post.
Read about it on mega-blogger Vincent Thomé's blog
Great course, absolute bargain and really interesting speakers.
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