Hej Stockholm!

Ramblings from the Black Wolf

Creativity + Planning + Planning for Creative Campaigns

Heidi Hackemer / @uberblond

a little about my path grew up in the woods of Wisconsin amongst a von Trapp-esque family of musicians, Bach and pigeons, wanted to be an astronaut, ran a lot, studied Advertising and English Literature, came to NYC, waitressed for two years, started at FCB as a copywriter, two years later I flipped to planning, went to Fallon London, decided I liked the sun, came back to NYC to BBH, loved it, quit my job, bought a big black truck (the Black Wolf), drove around the country for four or five months, slept in the back of the truck most nights, met a spiritual guru in the swamps of Louisiana, came back to NYC and now I’m a freelancer. got it?

after the journey of the past year, the good news for me is that...

I love planning

the obviousI love culture I love people I love cracking a problemI love working with creative, smart people

but the real reasonplanning is a wide playground where, once we get our core craft down, we get to define what we’re all about professionally... and many definitions are valid

we’re a motley bunchbeyond the craft, great planners seem to have something in common: they are brave enough embrace who he or she really is. that leads to a pretty diverse and insane community

I love that

planner megut instinct plannervery inspired by primal human truth and culturelove the big story of a brand + culture; love making it worklove the possibility of digital (it’s so human)love the creative processlove winning

*this will be important-ish in about 15 slides

it’s a great time to be a planner

why?we’re neededthe problems are much more complexthe solutions can be ridiculously relevant

so let’s get into it creativity, planning

and all that jazz

three muses tonight1) Steve Jobs2) Dumbledore3) Judy Garland

Steve Jobs

In the past I’ve talked about the Mother Effin’ Wolf Pack*...

teams of smart, amazing people bouncing in and out of a collaborative environment, all working together to slay the problem at hand

* yes I have a thing for wolves.

wolf packs work when each individual brings something unique to the process and has an output that they’re solely responsible for

account person wolf

planning wolf

creative wolf

production wolf

and media wolfand digital experience wolfand legal wolf... you get it.

let’s be incredibly simplisticaccount peeps uniquely bring an understanding of process as well as the client’s/biz POV...creatives uniquely bring the capacity to turn a strategic solution into magic...and what do planners uniquely bring to the table?

we bring the divergent thinking in from the outside

divergent thinking helps us create provocative lenses for problems

divergent thinking is the oxygen that fuels exceptional creativity

this is ridiculously important, especially now

why?creation has been democratizedanyone can put an idea out therethere are more ideas fighting for attention than ever beforeas ubiquitous computing rises, this is only going to be more acute of an issue

now, more than ever, we as an industry have to be really, really good at what we do: making ideas that people pay attention to and are motivated by

creativity isn’t cutecreativity is how we win and our clients win (read Sir John Hegarty’s book)

I don’t believe we can be truly creative and win when we’re all working off of similar, processed inputs

we have an industry problem

institutionalization

Black Wolf Epiphany #1

I was very close to becoming, if not already, a fraud

(wyoming)

planner meremember this?

gut instinct plannervery inspired by primal human truth and culturelove the big story of a brand + culture; love making it worklove the possibility of digital (it’s so human)love the creative processlove winning

feeds, back rooms and Mintel reports had become 90% of my cultural understanding(pretty arrogant)

personally, I was losing my perspective, my gut. for my teams, I wasn’t authentically bringing the oxygen

Terminal 5 & MoMA were the primary brain stretch venues (they’re about five avenues away from one another btw)

how terribly divergent of me

this happened largely because I was succeeding in the institution of advertising

advertising values a linear path. I did itI stayed in the advertising walls and steadily moved upjr planner > planner > senior planner > planning director

advertising values the 60 or 70 or 80 hour work-weekyeah, I’ve done that too. a lot.

advertising values being busy, hectic & doing advertisingthere’s something really noble about busyness culturally and especially in our industry

creativity doesn’t value these things so much

not only was I not bringing the divergent perspective, I had a hunch that I wasn’t living a

life where creativity could really happen

so how does that make me good at what I love, ie planning?

Black Wolf Epiphany #2

it’s in the dots stupid

(south dakota)

the south dakota crisis“It’s been two months on the road. what do I have to show for it? I don’t know what I’m doing with my life... should I be blogging more? writing more? tweeting more? instagram’ing more? networking more? will I ever work again? will I have to leave NYC? will I be homeless soon? will I really have to live in the truck? maybe I could be work in a meat processing plant. I can’t work in a meat processing plant!! Maybe I should get just my shit together and get back on that advertising path. or I will end up toothless and living in my parent’s back yard in Florida... in a truck.”

{very attractive, heidi}

when I was in South Dakota having this

moment, Steve Jobs died. and I, like everyone else, spent some time going

through his life

“The minute I dropped out (of college) I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting...

Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on...”

“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Steve Jobs

this was a huge moment for me

I had been living the linear, advertising lifeand was anxious because I wasn’t still on it

but reading about dots made me question the linear

a dot life is differentit’s varied. it’s defined by the individual, not the institution.

the life & mind seem to meander more, have more space

I became obsessed with this idea of “living the dots” + and its relationship to creativity. what I learned...

creativity values space, exploration

space

“Daydreaming and boredom seem to be a source for incubation and creative discovery in the brain and are part of the creative incubation process.”

Jonathan Schooler professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara

if I owned the world versionBill Gates schedules regular Think Weeks - times where he goes off in seclusion, shuts down and allows his mind to take in varied creative inputs and wander

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible”

Picasso

reality versionJosh Linker / Blogger for Fast Company

5% Creativity Challengeschedule 5% of your time for thinking (2 hrs/week)companies that have done this reported zero drop in productivity, a “flood of new ideas into the organization” and happier employees

exploration

“Being able to step back and view things as an outsider, or from a slightly different angle, seems to promote creativity. This is why travel frequently seems to free the imagination, and why the young (who haven’t learned all sorts of rules) are often more innovative than their elders.”

Jonah Lehrer, author: How Creativity Works

Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine presses into an idea for a printing machine capable of mass-producing words.

The Wright brothers used their knowledge of bicycle manufacturing to invent the airplane. (Their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings.)

George de Mestral came up with Velcro after noticing burrs clinging to the fur of his dog.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the search algorithm behind Google by applying the ranking method used for academic articles to the sprawl of the World Wide Web; a hyperlink was like a citation.

from “How Creativity Works”

Dalai Lama talks about our thinking as paths. Go down the same paths too much, and they turn into ruts. Ruts aren’t good. Awareness helps people divert out of ruts and mentally explore new spaces.

reality versionfind your dots, the things you’re just curious about explore and invest in them, even if it doesn’t make sensetake some time to think about your own ruts - do they need to be broken?

net netI don’t believe you can plan for breakthrough creative work

if you don’t ruthlessly value creativity in yourself

my net net

right now, I’m more valuable to agencies if I keep myself out of the agencies

it gives me spaceit gives me divergent inputs

I’m more creative, more focusedI’m more energized when I’m in

I’m better at my job(that makes me happy)

after Droga, back on the road for a few months this summer

better, richer, fullerexploring the American Dream in 2012

this is scaryit’s scary to walk out of an ad agency at 6:00 (I do believe we call this the “half-day”)it’s scary to stare at the ceiling or go for a walkit’s scary to not take the next big, logical jobit’s scary to trust the work will come as a freelancerit’s scary to take off for a few monthsit’s scary to not be one of us

I’m not advocating for everyone to quit their jobs, become a freelancer, buy a truck and travel around

I am advocating for more personal thoughtfulness:what do you believe in?why do you do this job? are you creating the best conditions to make that happen?

your answer may involve being in an agency; that’s okay

if I were one of the bigger badasses in the industry, I would more eloquently put it like this:

we need to blow it up and start again

1) identify what you love doing. be ruthless

2) identify the conditions under which you love doing it

Then design an agency, a job, a life around it

Cindy GallopIfWeRanTheWorldmake love not porn

Dumbledore

shit planners say

“my brief is so fucking smart.”

“um, that was in the brief, you idiot.”

“that isn’t on brief.”

“I haven’t seen the work.”

(day before meeting)

STRA

TEGY(

CREATIVE

(

ACCO

UNT(

PRODUCT

ION(

MED

IA(

these grumbles more often than not come from a culture of hand-offs...

STRATEGY(

CREATIVE(

ACCOUNT(

PRODUCTION(

MEDIA(

CLIENTS(

...rather than a team culture of synchronized flow

shocking observation from my experience

if we let creatives into our process,

creatives are more likely to let us

into theirs(done thoughtfully, this usually helps the work)

in the long list of deliverables that the process of making work requires, planning has the first big one - the brief

we set the tone

what kind of tone are you setting for your projects and teams?

when setting the tone, remember space & create a rhythm

space for individual creation, a culture of building, respect for

ultimate responsibility

getting practical

if Dumbledore would have told Harry everything that Harry ultimately

needed to know on Day One, Harry’s head would have exploded

the constant conversation, however, made for a deep relationship

the iterative briefrooted in the immense complexity of the communication landscape today -

but it also, nicely, creates a lovely rhythm on a team

do the planner thing: dig deep, read a lot, research

define the problem you’re trying to solve. define brand and marketing goals. gather a slew of emotional and behavioral insights. make some hypotheses

make a wall of your thinking/hypotheses/interesting stuff. set out a nice cake. invite team members to come round and chat

write a brief. lay out the emotional story. have some engagement planning thoughts. get some media suggestions in there. make a tumblr

(this brief shouldn’t surprise anyone because of step three)

if it’s modern, the solution will probably be complex. nod to the complexity. promise more cake and discussion once they’ve cracked an idea

wait.wait.help.wait.wait.idea cracked. yay.

feed bits of thinking, inspiration, deliverables - shoot for something helpful to give them every day. build, shape, make better. every day

build the strategic fortress. sell it

net netopen your own process upbe respectful of the space that everyone needsfeed, think, talk, be present

word of caution: don’t collaborate to death

“The most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according

to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re

extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as

independent and individualistic.”The Rise of the New Groupthink, NY Times

Judy Garland

being a creative is really hard

pressure is intense

hours are really long

it’s tough

I believe we really need to be sensitive to this as planners

as @mrbsmith so beautifully articulated and @EMMACNYC got super excited about so she and I talked about it a lot and thus I was influenced

positivity is one of the strongest planning tools that you can build... especially when it comes to

working with creatives

be positive, be into it(if you don’t feel it, fake it until you do)

think about creative reviews as building sessions not winning sessions

when you’re giving feedback, lead with the bits that you thought were good/smart

keep venting sessions short and move them away from devolving into bitching sessions

speaking of venting...if you’re a director, find someone off the team to vent to; coach your planning team to vent to

you and not at the team

keep it about making great work

sound simplistic? naive? a bit touchy-feely?

the Positivity/Negativity (P/N) ratioin a 2004 study, high performance teams had a P/N ratio of 5.6, medium performance teams a P/N of 1.9 and low performance teams a P/N of 0.36 (there was

more negativity than positivity)

net netgrow upmake it about the work, not about yoube someone that other people want in the room

wrapping it up...

divergency & spacefuel creativity

what kind of planner do you want to be? what do you value?

make it happen

you set the tone. own that, respect that

be positive. it works

thank you