What does a planner even do?

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about the role is how every day is different. Different categories, clients and contexts with novel problems, practises and proposals.

As a result, the role you play on each project is often different, even within the same agency. Sometimes you may be used as a specialist, sometimes a generalist. Sometimes leading, sometimes supporting. Sometimes dealing with functions and frameworks, other times propositions and platforms.

If you like investigating strange behaviours, solving tricky problems and uncovering new solutions then strategy could be a gig for you.

If you don’t believe me, I asked my department about the different roles they have taken on to get the job done. Enjoy.

38 things you can expect to do as a planner

1. I boxed against my detergent clients and then smelt different BO types out of a jam jar.

2. My client was a billionaire geek who’d made his money shorting the market before the crash. He was building a radio telescope in the Arabian desert. Its signals were to be trained on stars with newly-discovered earth-like planets in the hope of sending messages to other civilisations. The kicker was that he wanted to sell these messages as media space. He was convinced that global brands and others would be interested in the ultimate market growth opportunity. I had to write a brief for a mailing to go to individuals he had identified as potential clients. Which included the pope.

3. I once spent a day in Leeds with Moisturising Scientists learning about how the skin works and why moisturised armpits are important.

4. About 1 week into a new job, I spent 3 hours in a studio hugging my account director for a photoshoot after the client refused to sign off the ad because they didn’t like the female model’s arm & hand. They used my arm in the ad. Great way to break the ice.

5. Last year in November I spent a day with our supermarket clients in a broccoli field.

6. I worked on a petrol brand where we spent a 10 hour day driving around different petrol stations in the Leatherhead area. Specifically, they were concerned about their hot food offerings. This meant we had to try the hot counter petrol station food at almost every stop. It pretty much turned me vegan.

7. I had to find out whether there was public demand for getting medicine injected DIRECTLY into the eyeball.

8. I spent half an hour trying to open a jar of pickles using boxing gloves to understand the struggle of living with arthritis.

9. I Interviewed an elderly lady at a car dealership in Derby about car servicing. She was absolutely chuffed to get a £25 gift card and only too happy to tell it like it is, praising the former team and slagging off the current staff to their faces.

10. I talked to menopausal women about their vaginas.

11. I spent a whole week living in a hotel in Illinois, doing 2-hour in-depth interviews with people about their portable speakers and soundbars, and what they’d improve about them. The hotel was in a sprawling commercial wasteland. It took 25 minutes of walking along highways to get anywhere. I was with a colleague who got sick. So I basically lived a solo life in the hotel, using the gym and making trips to Whole Foods to avoid going mental.

12. I’ve met the man at FMCG company who invented a new technology” which is basically a cotton-based product that is flexible and 10x as absorbent than other pad materials. He’s white-haired and has his own lab…he’s an institution at the company, been working tirelessly to innovate pad products for over 30 years.

13. I flew to the middle of the Amazon jungle on a non-commercial flight to learn how to extract petroleum from the forest soil in an “environmentally friendly way”.