Re-thinking account planning to focus on complexity

Ana Andjelic a strategic planner at Huge, gives a provoking case to  how advertising needs to move to be more complex, and that the creative brief should not be an end result, but a live process.

She explains that today, advertising is a “simplification machine.”  That account planning’s role is to distill a complex situation into a simple solution.  This involves developing a single big idea that is  translated to a consistent message across multiple channels.  This approach makes it easy for consumers to process.

She puts forward a compelling case to instead make the process more complex.  Creativity should not just be a product, but a medium.  She cites examples of how brands like Pepsi, Best Buy and Uniqlo are capturing geo-location, crowd sourcing and community to create and evolve brand based behavior.  And how Old Spice could have done it better if they adopted this thinking.

She introduces the concept of ‘Briolage,’ a loose, iterative and collaborative process for developing communications in a more digital-led media world.

She writes “The first step is not to try to simplify complexity. Instead, build things that can in this complexity thrive. Instead of awareness, acquisition, products, sales, media buys, prices, promotions, budget, and ownership, change deliverables (and language) into connections, generative relationships, interactions, new combinations, systems, renting, etc.

The best online creativity is alive – it’s a medium for a ton of other things, not the end result. Sticking to thinking about creativity in terms of the creative talent, creative agencies, or creative deliverables is bound to make us seek results that are efficient and repeatable (and, in fact, it is this repeatability that accounts for efficiency) – which in turn is bound to disable us, organizationally, from solving complex problems.”

Below is a link to a video of her address at the “Conversations On The Future of Advertising,” hosted by Tim Brunnell and Minneapolis College of Art Direction, her charts on slideshare and a description on her blog.

… An excellent and challenging perspective on planning and communications.

Video of Ana’s presentation Creativity & Complexity at MCAD.

Presentation on Slideshare.

Ana’s summarizes her views in this piece Unknown Unknowns.