Following on from yesterday’s rant, I thought I’d post something I wrote for the lovely folk at WARC a couple of weeks ago.
They’d asked for my view on planning in Asia because they’d just run a competition to identify – and celebrate – some of Asia’s best ideas and wanted a counter-perspective to the views written by one of the competitions main judges … the wonderful Gareth Kay.
The reality is that I wasn’t going to end up writing something that made Gareth’s opinion look daft because:
1. I’m not clever enough to do that.
2. He is stupidly smart and Worldly and summed up his views with clarity, not prejudice.
3. I’m not some blind advocate of Asian planning – infact I’m pretty bloody critical about the state of the discipline here.
4. I don’t believe Asia is better than the West, I just don’t think it’s – as many seem to think, especially in adland – worse.
So with all that in mind, I wrote a little piece that – I hope – conveys what any planner thinking of coming to this part of the World should expect to find and what any planner currently working in this part of the World, should hope to deliver.
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In theory, planning in Asia should be no different to planning in the rest of the World. But it is. For both good and bad reasons.
The reality is planning is still a relatively new concept here – embraced as much for ‘agency fee justification’ as it is to help liberate new ideas, thinking and creativity.
There is a long way to go – of which nurturing and training local talent needs to be a priority – however in some areas, we’re miles ahead of our Western counterparts.
Whereas many planners in the West can find themselves spending months upon months fine tuning a few words to create the perfect brand pyramid, out here the pace of change – driven, admittedly by market opportunities that have been in the West for decades – means the gap between thinking and doing can be in the blink of an eye.
What this means is we not only have to be more entrepreneurial, collaborative and open minded in our approach, we also have to trust our gut more.
That might sound dangerous because what you feel in your gut might be the result of a dodgy meal rather than a great idea – but at a time where nothing seemingly happens unless it has been tested to within an inch of it’s life, it means we get to produce ideas that tend to be bursting with energy rather than sanitized by process.
Of course this situation isn’t exclusive to Asian planning and without doubt, there are many occasions where planners have contributed to the creation of blandness rather than colour – however, because of our need to truly demonstrate our value to clients [and colleagues] as well as keep pace with the speed of change across the region – we probably get to make more things happen more often.
What makes this exciting is that because Asian business [including Western brands in Asia] is only interested in action – rather than conversation – as long as you can make it make business sense, anything is possible which is why the planning community here tend to talk more about creation than the West’s love of discussing theory.
It’s different here. But not in a bad way.