The truth is, as a planner, it’s often hard to know what to do to improve your skills. Each project has the possibility of teaching something new about the work you do, if you’re open and receptive during the process. On the other hand, it could teach you nothing. The position that planning and strategy holds in the process of developing creative work often makes it hard to know how much your work led to the success or failure of the output. Was some aspect of the data gathering where the break happened? Or was your interpretation of the data wrong? Was it your creative brief that failed to get the right kind of work from your team? Or was it the restrictiveness of the client’s demands? Or was it that the creative team just wasn’t up to the task, heaven forbid?
There are ways to improve your skills outside the hands-on learning of the job. You can read books about planning. You can read blogs written by other planners, senior members of the field that you respect. That being said, I can count on one hand the number of books about planning that have universal acclaim, and both books and blogs are typically written by working planners that may have personal or professional reasons to not give away all of their tricks. Even ignoring those two weaknesses, this kind of material tends to show you various tools that can help you with your work, but often do very little to teach you how to get better at the core of it. In other words, they teach you how to get data and how to organize it, but give very little help in learning to better interpret it. And, of course, interpretation is 90% of job.
Being skilled at interpretation is such an allusive concept that some planners talk about it the same way some talent scouts talk about future sports stars: you either got it or you don’t. Malcolm Gladwell and his book Outliers would quarrel with such a viewpoint. It’s all about training, and after ten thousand hours of hard work, in the right structure, almost anyone can become an expert. The million-dollar question then becomes: how do you create the correct structure for yourself, so that when you put in the hours, you can actually become a great planner? The question gets even tougher when you consider that success and failure can be such amorphous concepts within the field. You can train to kick a ball with amazing accuracy, but knowing you’ve got the “right” insight is not as obvious.
Absent any other advice, it seems the best thing you can do is flex your planning muscles whenever and wherever you can. Find lots of ways to enrich your mind. Read more books, magazines, and blogs, and not just about marketing and advertising. Watch lots of movies and television. Go see stand-up comics. When you’re out on the town, take some time to just watch all the people around you. This kind of thing shouldn’t be hard for planners, since the field naturally attracts the kind of people who enjoy people watching and cultural trend spotting. It is no surprise that, according to a UK study, the number of hours of media consumed by people in the advertising profession is significantly higher than the average person. But is there a way you can take it even further? Is there a way to step your game up to a higher level? I believe the answer to that question is to travel. In fact, I believe so much in the power of travel to improve a planner’s skills, I think agencies should give their planners the time off to travel, and even consider footing the bill.
So what about traveling makes it such an effective way for a planner to hone their skills? It is certainly true that people in the advertising profession already travel a great deal for work. They travel to meet with existing clients. They travel to pitch new business. They travel to oversee research, like focus groups and in-home interviews. They travel to different regional offices of their agency for various tasks, from lending their expertise to difficult projects to scouting new talent to getting a new office up off the ground. They travel to conferences like SXSW and festivals like Cannes to stay on top of the cutting edge of communications technology and marketing thought leadership. In the documentary Art and Copy, Weiden and Kennedy both lamented that it felt like they were on the road more than they were at home. But that isn’t the kind of travel I’m talking about. I’m talking about going out and seeing the world: what the Brits call ‘going on holiday.’
The CEO of IDEO, Tim Cook, wrote a piece in which he offered three pieces of advice to new graduates which were, paraphrasing: to be multidisciplinary, to value the culture of your work as much as the work itself, and to travel. In his words, “It might be cliché, but getting out of your own culture makes you more mindful and observant. You question everything you once took for granted.” That sounds pretty ideal for a planner looking to improve their skills. In truth, the kind of traveling I’m talking about isn’t simply a vacation. A term like vacation implies a level of relaxation and lack of mindfulness that is not at all what I mean. Simply taking your friends, significant other, family, or even going by yourself on a trip to sightsee abroad doesn’t achieve all the benefits I’ve discussed. The kind of traveling that will make you a better planner is a very specific way of traveling. It’s not enough to simply go places, you have to go places in the right way.
Taking this from theory to application, consider the cultural anthropology aspects of the planning role. By traveling, you place yourself in a position to see and experience how a different culture functions, and think about why it might be this way. When I was working on my Harley Davidson brand audit for this very blog, one of the resources I drew upon was my own experience traveling around Italy and seeing how popular motorcycles were there. Of course, all the anecdotal observations I made during my journey were verified with data before I published a single word, but those observations did act as inspiration for many of the points my audit eventually made. Sure, you could read an article or watch a documentary about why bicycles are so popular in Amsterdam or why manga is so popular in Tokyo. But if you actually go there and observe people interacting with the products, it gives you a much better understanding of what about this different culture makes things more or less popular than at home.
The take-aways from this mindful, observational travel don’t have to be immediately applicable to the clients you are currently working on. Instead, it functions to broaden your horizons and put more arrows in your planning quiver. If you found yourself in a position to pitch Schwinn, you wouldn’t necessarily have the time to fly to the Netherlands and see how people there incorporate bikes into their everyday lives. But if you had been there, you could call upon those memories for the pitch. Similarly, by doing the same kind of people watching you might do at home you have the opportunity to compare the behavior you see abroad with what you see at home. How do people act differently? Why do they act differently? These observations aren’t just limited to the locals. Tourism is a multicultural, multinational interest. Tourists are drawn from all around the world. Even comparing how Chinese, American, and German people behave at the same famous site can lead to interesting observations. On my trip to Italy, I would take the time now and then to play a game with myself where I tried to guess where people were from based on observing their dress, behavior, and attitudes. Obviously I couldn’t always verify my guesses, but I found it to be both a fun and useful exercise to get me thinking about the people I was observing in a planner-y way. To get the most out of traveling, think up your own little games or ways to pass some down time that engage your planner muscles by observing the people around you.
Often what you are learning or observing is much more subtle than the differences between American car culture and foreign motorcycle culture. Learning about a location’s rich history might lead to interesting connections that eventually relate back to your work. For example, during a trip to Germany you might find yourself visiting important sites from the 14th century and learning about the power of the German trade guilds, and their influence over German economic, political, and social policy stretching into the modern age. While on its face this might seem like it has little relevance to advertising, drawing connections between the old German system and the modern struggles of new graduates looking for a job could lead to interesting insights for the right client, like an HR SAS company, or for your role at your agency, if you are ever called on to be part of the talent recruitment process.
This kind of mindful travel doesn’t have to be limited to trips to far away countries. Even though most of my examples have been countries foreign to me, like Germany, Japan, and Italy, there is still a ton for me to gain by traveling from my home in San Francisco to Chicago or New York. How are the attitudes of people here different than my home city? Are there chain stores here that aren’t in California? What makes them different than what I’m used to? And, of course, visiting any famous place gives you tons of multicultural people watching. Even spending the day exploring a smaller and less famous big city like Milwaukee or St. Louis can open your eyes to the different ways people think within your own country. Being able to put yourself in the minds of consumers and think about what problems in their lives you could help solve, is a crucial skill for planners to develop and maintain. Domestic travel, while building different muscles, is still intensely valuable.
One final benefit of traveling, and one more specific to travel abroad, is that it lets you see foreign advertising in its native environment. It isn’t that hard these days to use the Internet to find and study advertising in foreign countries. However, I maintain that this isn’t as effective as seeing it in the world. For starters, you are seeing it where the brand and agency intended it to be seen. In other words, you are getting the holistic impact of the ad, from the creative strategy, to creative execution, to media strategy. Just like “non-commercial” art, advertising is best appreciated, and analyzed, in context. Another important aspect of context is what language it is written in. For example, what if the ad is written in English, in a country where English isn’t the primary language? That circumstance raises useful questions in the inquisitive mind of a planner. Like: Why did the agency choose English over the native language? Who is this ad’s target, locals or tourists? Did the placement of the ad suggest it was one or the other? And if it’s not in English, that leads to questions like: Do I understand the message of this ad even though I can’t read it? Or: Can I guess what the creative strategy behind this is based on my understanding of the culture and history of the people this ad is targeting?
When observing an ad while abroad, it’s also worth asking the questions you would if you saw the ad at home. Does this ad work for you? Why or why not? Foreign ads also let you ask questions like: Would this ad work if it were run in your home country/state/community? Why or why not? Why might this ad be successful in its country of origin but not elsewhere? All of this might not be immediately useful, or ever useful, but like all mental exercises, it is about getting your brain in the habit of asking the right questions. It is about training yourself so that insights can flow naturally as you think about all of the different things that go into the planning process. I’m not the only person that sees it this way. In an article published in the November 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review, entitled “Where to Look for Insight,” they list their seven routes to breakthrough. One of those seven is: ‘A Voyage.’ Travel can free your thinking and help you make the connections that lead to a truly great insight.
Traveling isn’t only about professional development. It helps fight employee burnout. Advertising has a reputation for burning through its employees. The high stress and long hours wear most people down. But now, more than ever, advertising is facing a serious talent problem. Ad Age did a feature in March of this year that laid out why advertising talent is leaving for greener pastures. In essence, advertising finds itself recruiting from a similar talent pool as big tech companies and advertising struggles to compete. Both big companies like Google and Facebook, and smaller start-ups, put an emphasis on hiring creative employees, which pulls away from copywriters, art directors, and designers; and gifted programmers, which pulls away developers and UI/UX experts. They typically offer better salaries, benefits, and work/life balance. This is true for brand strategists too. People from a brand strategy or planning background may find themselves courted by such firms for their ability to research and understand consumers for new products and services, like the kinds these tech firms are typically developing. If advertising wants to fight to keep talent, it has to change the way it functions, and one place to start is to curb employee burnout.
So how does that fit with traveling? Tamara Murray, a communications consultant and writer for Brazen Careerist, is a great believer in the mid career break. The reasons she lists for people, of any profession, to take a mid-career break include: “Taking a break helps you generate more ideas. You’re more creative when you’re exposed to other cultures. Equally important, travel helps combat burnout, which is common in ambitious young professionals, and provides a necessary recharge.” This belief in the rejuvenating properties of travel is found all over the place. A study, reported on by the LA Times, suggests that traveling regularly could actually make you healthier. Stress is a key component in a number of health issues, and traveling for something other than work causes that stress to drop away almost instantly. Tamara Murray advocates for taking as much as a year off to reset. This is probably a big ask for an agency. But if you want to keep your agency’s rank and file from losing their minds, maybe letting them take more paid time off will keep them fresh. Some agencies, like the small San Francisco shop Argonaut, already offer unlimited paid time off for exactly this purpose.
You don’t have to go as far as unlimited time off to get the benefits I’ve been talking about. But without the help of his or her agency, it will be very hard for a planner to get the most out of their travel. In addition to freeing their schedule enough so they can actually have time for a trip, an agency should consider picking up at least part of the bill. I know this sounds ridiculously self-serving, but bear with me. Agencies routinely spend money to expand the knowledge base of employees in other departments. For example, developers are given trips to SXSW and creatives are given trips to Cannes in order to see talks, network, and the like. This would be a similar kind of investment, but for improving planners instead. Sure, maybe the agency isn’t going to front the full cost of a month long vacation to Switzerland, but covering the cost of the plane tickets there and back might not be out of the question.
On a related note, a great way to give planners some time to explore their world and recharge their brains, without spending big, is to expand a business trip into something more. This could be done by flying the person in early, or scheduling their plane to leave late, and letting them use those extra days to go out and see more of the world than just the inside of a hotel, a client’s office building, or a room for focus groups. I’ve talked a lot about trips abroad, and while this concept applies there, it is mostly applicable to domestic travel (at least if you’re from the United States). But I don’t think that decreases its value. As I mentioned earlier, while there are commonalities across the U.S., there are also distinct cultures in different areas and the way in which someone from Maine, Ohio, Florida, or Seattle looks at the world is going to be different. It costs more time than money for the agency to budget a couple of extra days, and the resulting insights could mean big money in new business or client retention.
Of course, part of the problem with this model is that it is hard for the agency to prove that their planner traveled the right way. The working vacation has no deliverables. If it did, it wouldn’t be as good for staving off burnout. It also doesn’t bring home a specific skill set, like a developer would who learned a new coding technique while at a conference. And, worst of all, with the rate of churn a lot of agencies face, sending planners on these working vacations could be investing in great employees for someone else. Still, professional development is done for lots of people within the advertising business. There is no guarantee that the team you send to CES to get inspired won’t do the bare minimum and spend the rest of the time getting wasted, gorging on Las Vegas buffets and gambling/partying the night away. Why should planners be any different? If planning is an integral part of the advertising process (to quote Jef I. Richards: Creative without strategy is called ‘art.’ Creative with strategy is called ‘advertising.’) then the development of planners as employees should be given equal weight to that of other positions. And travel is a great way to accomplish that.
Howard Gossage, legendary grandfather of San Francisco advertising, was as much a brilliant strategic thinker as he was an exceptional creative talent. He was also a big believer in travel. Before he became an ad man, he used funding from the GI Bill to pursue graduate work in both Paris and Geneva. After becoming a notable ad man, he took his family for an extended stay in Ireland. During that time, for no other reason than his own intellectual curiosity, he studied Irish literature. It was this pursuit that later informed one of his most famous campaigns, which he wrote for Irish Whiskey. Traveling makes for good advertising. Traveling makes for good strategic thinkers, too. It opens you up to new experiences and new environments that broaden the mind and help make strong insights. In my opinion, all planners should make room in their lives, both professional and personal, to see the world. And, if their employers are smart, they will help them do it.