So as I wrote yesterday, I’m in Amsterdam and as international meetings go – even one that took me about 23 hours of travel time to get here – this one was good.
Whilst it was really nice to meet a bunch of new colleagues, what I really was looking forward to was meeting some people who I’ve known of for a while but never actually met in person.
They say you should never meet your heroes because you always come away disappointed … and whilst I would never classify any of the people I met today as heroes of mine [sorry, they’re lovely and all that but they’re still in adland] I can say I held them in high regard so I was very interested to see whether they’d leave me feeling positive about them or underwhelmed.
Whilst it won’t be too hard to guess how they feel about me [that’s assuming they even knew who I was prior to the meeting … or even after for that matter] I can honestly say I’ve been left feeling I want to do more work with them and for them and that is a good thing.
This isn’t some corporatey toady shit – there were things said/discussed that I certainly didn’t agree with – however what I liked was that I was in a room with clever people who happened to work in adland rather than were defined by it – and so the views, knowledge and experience that was discussed didn’t resemble planner love-in bullshit in the slightest and infact we didn’t even look at one powerpoint slide the whole day.
The thing I really loved though was that through our chats I not only got to learn stuff, but some ideas/views came out that I genuinely believe are awesome. More than that, I also know they would have been unlikely to have come out had everyone not contributed or discussed various points leading up to their ‘apperance’ … and that’s when this industry becomes really exciting because even though what came up could sound ridiculously simple in concept, the reality is that sometimes those are the things that are the hardest to spot and it explains why planning should never be a job done in isolation, but in partnership – whether the other people involved are planners or not.
Saying that, I meet Niko for the first time tomorrow – here’s hoping he doesn’t come away feeling it was a couple of hours he’ll never get back. To minimise the chance of that happening, I’ll be paying for the coffee. [I’m counting on him being a cheap bastard]
Finally, this is for Kevin – a man who swears as much as me, but loses some cred points for linking them all together with words that sound suspiciously like they came from an Oxford education. That and he supports Stoke.
PS: As usual Andy you were right, I did write another post this week. Damn you.