Planning For Good needs your help…

This is an urgent request to planning & strategy folk (responses needed by Monday March 23):

WE NEED SOME CAUSE-RELATED BRIEFS

Can you help us help the Ideas Foundation?

It’s a fantastic UK charity that is committed to championing creativity in young people. It’s a mentoring program for 16-17 year olds which gives them the tools of communication (and some guidance from industry leaders) and enlists them to solve the problems facing their generation: e.g. get teenagers who are worried about crime the chance to change their peers’ behaviour through creativity.

In the Idea Foundation’s own words:

“We broker projects between industry and education.
We spot & develop young people’s creativity.
We pilot creative education projects and champion transferable skills within the creative industries and beyond.
We provide effective work experience, internship and apprenticeship opportunities. We signpost further & higher education routes to creative employment and enterprise.
And having done all that, we encourage our creativity scholars to stay in touch and get involved”

So here’s the shout out to Planning for Good types – do you have a social policy brief that you’ve written that these kids can do work from?

Maybe the client didn’t buy it? Maybe the suits or the CD didn’t like it? Or your boss? Or you?

So what are we after?

A brief to target a youth audience on a social policy area

It could be in areas such as smoking cessation, sexual health, knife or gun crime, drug or alchohol abuse, bullying, internet safety etc.

We’d really just like your old briefs.

Or, if you have a great social-cause strategy hiding somewhere in your brain, and really want to write a new brief, please feel free to do so but just make sure you include the usual information (the problem defined, the audience, etc) and try to ground it in reality and evidence…

Thanks very much in advance on behalf of the Ideas Foundation – we promise to keep you in touch with what folk send in and what they do with them.

Please send your briefs to Mark Earls at markearls [at] hotmail [dot] com by Monday night.

Or feel free to contact me/leave a comment if you have any questions.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Toronto planning event

The gorgeous new AGO - image via wvs

I’m very excited to share some details about an upcoming event for Toronto’s strategic planning community.

First, some background. The idea for this came out of discussions I and a few other planners and strategy types have been having over the last 6 months. We realized a few things:

1. There are thriving planning communities in other markets, such as the APG in the UK, and lots of sharing and discussion in the blogosphere, but in Canada and specifically Toronto there’s no sense of local community at all.
2. Because of this, while other marketing communities (creative, clients) have events targeted to their interests and needs, the strategic planning community doesn’t have anything of its own.
3. Most importantly, the strategy community has increasingly become a fractured field, with lots of different disciplines (account planning, communications planning, engagement planning, user experience planning, etc) across different types of companies (traditional/media/digital/design agencies, clients, market researchers, etc) – but there’s not much interaction or cross-pollination between these groups. But we’re all doing similar things, and increasingly the client challenges we all face require learning about each others’ skills and toolsets.
4. And despite our lack of community, there’s still some amazing, world-class strategic thinkers and thinking going on here, and it’s time to celebrate that fact more.

So this is an attempt to foster more of a community around marketing strategy in Toronto (and Canada). We’re starting with an event, and if it’s a success, we hope to make it a regular thing.

Details:

Thursday April 9, 2009 – 2-6pm

The Art Gallery of Ontario – Jackman Hall

The event has a pretty amazing list of speakers, including the lovely and talented Mark Earls, all the way over from London; and some of Canada’s leading lights including Sean Howard, Matt Milan, Michael Anton Dila, and Laurence Bernstein. And, to bring down the average, I’ll be chairing the afternoon’s proceedings.

In addition to the speakers, the event will include some food & drink and lots of opportunities to socialize and meet new people.

Details for the event and ticket registration information can be found by clicking the big orange button above, or here.

Hope to see you there.

Filed under: Canada, planning

Instruction vs inspiration

(image via)

“If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Filed under: words of wisdom

Only in a woman’s world

The second campaign that we’ve just launched is for a few other Frito-Lay brands.

Frito-Lay is introducing some new products and reorganizing some of their their packaging and in-store shopping experiences to appeal more to women. As you can imagine, it’s a massive project for them.

To support those initiatives, we’ve created a new web video series called “Only in a woman’s world.“

We launched it with a trailer last month that shot up to about a million views on YouTube.

On the heels of that trailer, the official launch of the series was this past weekend, with a red-carpet premiere in LA with a sprinkling of celebrities and invites to a great group of awesome female bloggers who helped us cover it. The first three episodes of the series are up today, with lots more to come.

The press is starting to roll in on this stuff, and there was a nice write up in the NY Times last week that delves into some of the upfront learning that was done to really understand women and snacking, work that took over a year and ranged from ethnography to neuroscience. Even better, it has the distinction of being the first campaign I’ve ever been involved with to be covered on entertainment news shows. The NYT is nice and all, but The Insider FTW!

One of the best things about this campaign was that the team, both client and agency, who worked on it was entirely female – and I think that played a massive role in it actually working.

Big congrats to everyone who worked on it for pulling this together, and especially to our clients who have been incredibly passionate about truly and deeply understanding the mindsets of women around snacking and media, and for being willing to step outside the confines of traditional advertising when it came time to do the communication.

UPDATE: Oh yeah – how could I forget – you can follow the series on Twitter too…

Filed under: Juniper, ads