the future of brands and planning

At the beginning of August I wrote this post, and promptly did nothing about it. Huge apologies. So here's my attempt to catch up and start with answering Gemma's question:

What do you think Planning will look like in ten years and how will Planners have to adapt?

Obviously most things will be the same. In any forecasting project it’s always good to start by making it clear that most things will be the same. Look at any 10 year time-span and most things are mostly the same before and after.

But here are some predictions for you, in and out of planning:

The Superbowl and Coronation Street will still be on and they’ll still be punctuated by ads. Most of those ads will still be no good. But slightly more of them will be good than now.

Seth Godin will be publishing books on an hourly basis.

Traditional quantitative research agencies will have almost entirely disappeared (though a couple will be preserved at the National Museum of Redundant Services). The sheer amount of opinion generated by whatever the blogosphere becomes will make asking people new questions pointless. The companies who mine, analyse and package that opinion will replace old school quant and everyone will hate them as much as they hate Millward Brown now.

MRI and neural imaging will be banned for market research purposes when a petfood ad makes someone’s brain explode.

Planning departments will dump their econometricians when it’s discovered that econometrics is simply a vast con perpetrated by a cabal of disgruntled mathematicians and that statistical science is more akin to astrology than astronomy. Lots of planners sigh with relief and admit they’d never really understood statistical significance anyway.

Global warming and rising ocean levels will mean that the Cannes ad festival is relocated to Bucharest. The winning ad in 2016 is a visual joke about someone falling over that no-one remembers ever seeing before.

DDB will have created a computer model of Paul Feldwick’s brain which is issued to all their planners on a memory card which goes in their phone. They will simply wave their phone over any product or brand and a genius strategy will be SMS’d to the giant simulation of Trevor Beattie running in the creative department.

Naked Inside will be named ‘Contagion Number One’ by the Center For Disease Control in Atlanta.

As Sky/Fox/Star exceeded 100% household penetration on earth News Corp executives will announce their corporate space programme (re-using abandoned Pendolino rockets from the bankrupt Virgin Galactic). Their first move will be to target planets newly discovered around Cassiopeia and to use football as a ‘galactic battering ram’. The first game scheduled for transmission to the entire galaxy is a Carling Cup clash between Nottingham Forest and Portsmouth.

The IPA Effective Awards committee will finally admit that they can’t prove whether advertising works and attempt to prove something simpler. They’ll start with the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.

Neil French will start his own country.

Maurice Saatchi will be made United Nations Branding Tzar. His taskforce will go through the dictionary and issue every registered brand in the world with their own word, seemingly at random. This will be the only word each brand will be allowed to use in communications. An unofficial One Word Equity Market will be established where brands secretly trade words, Marks and Spencer will desperately try and offload ‘putrid’ but will find no takers.

Planners will be banned from blogging as the amount of content they generate exceeds the world’s storage capacity.

Comments

[gemma]

Right. So I need to fake an interest in football, stop trying to keep up with everything Seth Godin publishes, forget about econometrics (thank god) and get blogging before its banned :-)

[Richard]

LOL

[Carol]

I had a great time writing my response to your post. Then I took a stab at ten predictions:

http://www.planningblog.com/2006/09/future-of-brands-and-planning.html

[Charles Edward Frith]

The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer assertion is pure conjecture. Very funny:)

[claudiu]

the future is bright! now i feel optimistic. brilliant post.

[Phillip]

This post prompted me to wiki and or google 7 terms or people in it. Good learning experience for a young planner. Nice job and very funny (especially when you understand all the references).

[Chris]

"Global warming and rising ocean levels will mean that the Cannes ad festival is relocated to Bucharest. The winning ad in 2016 is a visual joke about someone falling over that no-one remembers ever seeing before."

That's classic. Fun read.

[Kajal]

ha ha ha..Thanks Russell! I needed a laugh! Am especially loving the one word equity..

[Gavin Heaton]

Bring on the blogging ban ... maybe I can get some sleep!

[Piers Fawkes]

ha!

[Armando]

Russell, what a wonderfull post, i laugh a lot…really.
We got a conversation waiting…see you

Cheersss

[Anton Reyniers]

Not really relevant to this article Russell but about the APG event Battle of Big Thinkers. Just emailed my head of planning to try and get funding to attend. If not, in exchange for intimidating the floor to vote for you (although I'm sure you'll get a landslide anyway) any chance of getting on the guest list for a poor but enthusiastic trainee planner?

[Anton Reyniers]

My agency just confirmed I'm being funded to attend. Made my day. See you there

[Anton Reyniers]

My agency just confirmed I'm being funded to attend. Made my day. See you there

[the hidden persuader]

ahahahah ... I loved that one about "Paul Feldwick’s brain on a memory card". Why not?