I can imagine how hard it is to run a three-person planning department in the a smallish City where the clients are dubious and the creatives are resentful. You're probably not getting a lot of training or support, you need the Account Planning conference to be full of useful craft wisdom and opportunities to learn practical new stuff. (And you probably don't need gonzo fools like me prancing around like an idiot telling everyone to ignore the rules and just be free, man).
Equally, I can imagine that you've been planning for 20 years, you've worked at big agencies and small, you've seen trends, techniques and idiots come and go and frankly you could do with someone to shake your ideas up a bit, or at least reinvigorate you.
Those sound like two different conferences to me.
I can see that pleasing both of those constituencies and all the people in between is a tall order, but I'd have thought that something called Spark! would be lighter on the former and heavier on the latter. Less Planning 101 and more Planning 3.1.
Comments