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What is comms planning
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Bowl Leader
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Spent most of my career as a brand planner before moving to the media side and into a comms role. Consistently hear from creatives on the other side that they value my team more than their brand planners. Worry less about your insecure coworker, and more about whether you are helping to advance the output of your creative and media partners, which is the work that actually makes it out into the world, not your brand planner's strategy slides
@sd1 That's what my guy says. And I get it, it's new, it's uncomfortable and doesn't seem to have the strategic rigor as the traditional approach. But our new biz wins all have at least a partial focus on Comms...when we leave it out we lose. I've also produced 10x my salary in upsell revenue using Comms.
Like it or not, clients value it. So does the rest of my agency. What's the disconnect with traditional brand planners?
So it’s not new. It used to be called experience planning in the early 2000s.
Honestly, all of the comms planning I’ve ever seen feels extremely obvious and belabored for how obvious it is... it just adds another framework where none is needed, and it’s often based on fairly superficial research and lacks a deep and strategic understanding of the long term picture. I remember it being more substantial back when naked was getting started but the those coked up loonies got a bit carried away with it.
So it sort of feels like a smarter version of a media plan that’s tailored to the creative. It’s not threatening. It’s just boring and feels like it could be an email attachment.
And the media agency usually won’t buy against it anyways because it fucks with their buying.
And it feels less valuable everyday as the social platforms become more sophisticated in addition to programmatic.
It’s also always so rational and lacking in nuance in how it reduces people to barriers and tasks. An oversimplification. Probably not your fault since that usually begins with the segmentation but it’s reinforced.
And then we’ve also got UX and design thinking which feel like more sophisticated and quantifiable versions of what comms planning is.
So, overall I just find it kinda meh and something we should all be thinking through anyways.
That’s not meant to be a personal attack on you. I’m sure you’re quite smart and add lots of value. But you’re not your discipline. The discipline leaves me underwhelmed
SD1 I hear you 100%. I hear about connections planning and comms design and it all usually comes from old media people. That's not how I was trained on it...at (pointless name drop big client) it was used to inspire media and creative to invent new ways to reach people to drive a very emotional response. Never rational, that is the #1 rule. And it should be very creative. The moment I get a "sure, whatever" from a CD, it means it's a piece of shit and I need to push it hard. They should be telling me I'm getting too close to an idea and reigning it in.
I hear you though, there's some shit Comms plans out there. Boring and obvious. But there's also shit creative, and shit insights and shit media. Doesn't mean there's no value.
I’ll be honest: I’ve never seen value come from comms planning
So what you describe just feels like strategy to me. Might be specific to a touch point or what have you