planning - the new year

Just read Ed Cotton's post about old vs. new school planning at Influx. He makes a great point about the discipline evolving, learn from the past, but be forward-looking.

The advertising environment has changed so dramatically, that unless Planners have an understanding of both content and context, they will be hopelessly lost.

As always, the idea for content, or the creative proposition can come from anywhere, even sales reports, but we now have access to a lot more material these days, beyond the focus group, to find these ideas.

The challenge for planners is to come up with platforms for ideas that have power in today's communication environment, they have to understand the context in which communication now works, without that, all the discipline in the world counts for nothing.

I hope to see more teamwork between planners of all disciplines: media/connections/brand in 2009.