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”.

14. I helped cast “very small and sick-looking” babies for a painkiller ad. Closest to a diplomatic incident I have ever been.

15. I went to Leicester to interview retirees about breakfast options. Living the dream.

16. When I was working on personal care, I visited quite a few consumers for face to face interviews. Nothing like taking several pictures of a stranger’s bathroom, at 6pm on a Friday.

17. I did ethnography for a pizza chain, and the father who was hosting us opened the door wearing nothing but a towel and a quite dirty t-shirt. But that wasn’t part of the brief task. I hope.

18. I conducted 30 interviews with Mums and Daughters and Dads and Daughters at a coffee chain in Cincinnati where we discussed girls’ periods.  Fascinating, awkward, all the emotions. Also didn’t help that my two male clients insisted on hopping from table to table to “listen in”.

19. My delivery client asked me to fly on the jump seat of a delivery plane to Leipzig and back in the span of a night to better understand the journey of a parcel. It worked in that I pretty much felt like a parcel.

20. I had to run a WebEx in Italian pretending to be my client, who is Australian and could not speak Italian (at least she is a woman).

21. I went “undercover” around the bars of New York for two days, chatting with bartenders about the best equipment / retail materials they receive from brands – e.g. towels, coasters, bottle openers etc. Our beer clients were trying to better understand what undiscovered “brand swag” opportunities were out there. I made loads of bartender friends in Manhattan and ended up riding a mechanical bull at the last stop thanks to a dare by my 56-year-old client. #america

22. I had to be the official translator of the director and producer of a tech brand video shoot in Milan: English speaking director, producer + crew, filming Italian fans who had no idea what to do/how to move/ what to say and were not fluent in English.

23. I worked on a supermarket brand where we had to work at the store for two full days. I ran the cash register, stocked the back room, cleaned the floors, etc.  It was the hardest two days of work I’ve ever experienced.

24. I dined alone on a nearly empty Casino/hotel boat on a Tuesday in November. Sounds glamorous, was actually a bit weird and sad. Would make a good setting for a melancholic Bill Murray film.

25. I helped run a kids’ STEM workshop with Wallace and Gromit.

26. I had to spend some afternoons drinking Gin & Tonic for research purposes. Apparently we needed to better understand and distinguish flavours. I didn’t complain.

27. I’ve toured a shampoo lab in Ohio where they test products on real humans with dandruff.  We put shampoo samples under microscopes to better understand how the various formulas work. At the end of the day, I got to meet NFL Hall of Famer and brand spokesperson Troy Polamalu.

28. I had awkward chats with mums about a thing they were passing on to their daughter which was called “the system” and was a wild combo between a pad and cotton.

29. I interviewed old Brits about their body pains, which turned out to be quite fun.

30. I had a brand immersion day driving all different types of a brands cars out in the middle of Oxfordshire. There was a corporate events bloke there to facilitate and he was going out on some of the drives with team members. He seemed very boring so I tried to avoid him on most of the drives. I ended up with him on the last drive of the day in one of their performance cars and it turned out he was completely insane petrol head. He made me hit 100mph down a country road and I almost soiled the fine leather upholstery whilst he was shouting at me about horsepower and torque.

31. I ran qual interviews with American boat owners to find out more about their use of fish finders.

32. I pretended to be a uni student to get BMW, Merc and Audi dealers & drivers to bitch about competitor brands on camera for a piece of pitch theatre.

33. In my first year in London, for a social media campaign, I had to go to surf festival and camp with a client and the brand’s social media influencers.

34. I signed up to a medical social media network to better understand a doctor’s daily routine. I forgot to unsubscribe and now every morning I get sent a photo of a different rash to diagnose. I’m good at psoriasis, but always trip up over dermatitis.

35. When I did a planning bootcamp in Germany, I had to pretend I was a “lost” Italian customer and ask strangers in the tomato soup aisle for suggestions on “the closest thing to the original”. At several different supermarkets.

36. As part of a global Instagram project, we were flown from all over the world to San Francisco. The golden moment – having a whiskey with legendary Martin Weigel.

37. I worked on a sports brand and as part of “ethnographic research” I saw MANY random strangers work out and play their sport – which also included them opening up their closets to show their fave brands. I will never forget some of the things I saw in those teen boys’ collections.

38. I once went to a textile factory for a whole day to better understand how they made beach towels.