So, it's been about six weeks of Ogilvy so far. And I have to admit, I'm enjoying myself. It's weird - dialling into the scale and the layers - but it's made a lot less weird by the fact that everyone's nice. And it's fascinating to hang out with planners a lot, I haven't done that for years. What a thoughtful, interesting bunch of people.
I've never had a properly international job before and it's rather exciting. I was asked to go and help our office in Warsaw on a pitch and it was immensly cheering to just turn up and be able to help. They seemed to need external validation more than they needed actual help with thinking or strategy - just someone who'd done this lots before to say yes, you seem to be going in the right direction. Again, nice people, smart people. Clever planners in that office.
One of the reasons I gave up writing about planning on the blog was the effect of my various trips to Romania. It made me realise how useless all that wibbling about esoteric theories is to someone who just has to write a brief for a Carpet City ad in the next half hour. (Or whatever is the local equivalent of Carpet City. Rug Region for instance, or Mat Metropolis). There are only a few markets in the world where there's the carrying capacity for Floaty Planny Theory and I'm mostly not going to be working in those markets. It's good to get back to that craft stuff and to find places where the fact that I've been doing this since the 17th century is of some use to someone.
Restarting in this world has also made me realise that I don't know many planners any more. I was never that good at the industry hobnobbing but doing the coffee mornings etc meant I did know a bunch of interesting juniorish planners, many of whom now seem to be very interesting very senior planners.
Maybe we should start them again. Perhaps the networking tendency will have dropped away and they can just revert to being coffee and chatting. That'd be nice.