Google APG Presentation Highlights

Recently I was lucky enough to be invited by Google to visit their headquarters in Silicon Valley and New York with the Account Planning Group (APG).  Since then, we have given a series of talks on the learnings for the industry here. My topic’s how are we are too slow in agencies and ways we can speed up. Thanks to B&T magazine, you can now watch it here:

You can see the other presentations, covering things like; why digital needs to be further upstream in the strategic process, not needing to reinvent the wheel every time, effective media creative collaboration and focusing on a vision beyond just profit here, as and when they are released. So stay tuned if you’re interested.

A 100 words on account planning

I’ve been asked to sit on the APG Committee this year, which is a big privilege for me and something I am really enjoying (more about the Account Planning Group here). Part of the invite process was penning some words on what planning means to me.

Here’s what I wrote. I tried to squeeze what I believe, what I love and what I hate about planning into 100 words, so excuse the lack of explanation, but hopefully it makes sense.

‘I believe planning can change the world; I believe everyone should want be a planner and I believe it shouldn’t take 10mins to explain to my granny what I do. I love people. I love ideas. I love both; planning. I really love helping people get into planning. I love Internets (obviously). I hate planning that no-one can understand. I hate planning that ends with a brief. I hate the fact a junior planner just told me he was warned to avoid the “arseholes” in our industry. I hate myself because I’ve done nothing recently that’s really helped our industry.’

On the last point I am obviously on a mission to push planning through the APG and other industry activity.

But, outside of that, if your an aspiring planner, or are thinking about becoming one, I am happy to help in anyway if I can.

So there you go, I’m slowly retreating with my soap box right now.

The future of social media strategy – proactivity and purpose.

I’ve been using this chart a lot recently as I think it shows not just the place corporate social strategists are in right now (the career decision point), but also the place social media marketing is in right now (whether client side or supplier side). The choice is simple, be reactive and become a help desk, or be proactive and push social through businesses in a scalable way. Ultimately brands must have purpose in social media, just being in these channels for the sake of it is questionable from a consumer point of view, dangerous from a PR point of view and empty from a return on investment point of view.

Thanks to Altimeter for this – check out the full report here:
http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/career-social-strategist

strategy is about changing ideas right.. right?

I have been waving this around a lot recently. The IPA Strategy Group’s Game
Changers event – which I missed sadly – saw this presented by Tim
Malbon from Made by Many. Strikes me that in digital sometimes the way
ideas evolve is new and challenging to the big idea creative process.
When they work together, that’s surely what it’s all about
though hey?

get in touch

I’d love to hear from you.

Please send me an email here: benhourahinecontact@me.com