Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue
Opinion
Lego’s Emily Fairhead-Keen gets her spirit lifted at the home of Channel 4 as she recalls an inspiring Media Planning Group debate.
Last Wednesday, we met for the second Media Planning Group (MPG) Noisy Thinking event: ‘Nobody ever got promoted for a brave media plan.’
Noisy is an established flagship evening debate series, with each session featuring leading industry speakers tackling a provocative, unresolved question. The Account Planning Group (APG) has an archive of these wonderful in-person gatherings; the MPG is its newer baby sister and, excitingly, is just getting going.
On an evening when I’d been feeling personally a little blue inside, battered further by the sog and rain outside, I left with a spring in my step. Or ‘puddle wonderful’ as E. E. Cummings [1920] might say.
In the audience, I met an old colleague I hadn’t seen for 15 years and a new member who had retired from the agency and, inspiringly, set up an MMM shop. I was impressed by our borrowed home for the evening at Channel 4. A little awestruck by the 50-foot steel ‘4’ I’d only seen on the telly and the long copy Altogether Different vision, emblazoned on entry.
We heard from Alexia Clifford, who has led some of the UK’s most impactful public health campaigns – including Change4Life, Stoptober and Every Mind Matters; Ann Wixley, creative entrepreneur and former ECD of WPP Media; Sam Hicks, head of advertiser strategy at Channel 4 and hosted by Lucy Verby, founder and CEO of Wearemasterplan.
I have felt a little brow beaten by the industry’s familiar discourse in recent months on man vs machine, bot vs human debate – and no doubt, the industry itself is arguably bruised by the realities of it on the ground. Every discussion today has loaded potential to stray into the overarching and rightly dominant theme, but with different content.
But this wasn’t that. Rather than getting into the belly of the Spinning Jenny vs the displaced spinner debate, the speakers instead refreshingly gave us new food for thought.
Cognisant of the context we operate in, we heard refreshingly honest and personal takes on their experience and why getting to and fighting for better matters. This was not about ‘bravery’ but resilience in getting great work over the line. This was about the power of relationships and the power of both the collective and the individual in getting to the best.
For me, five things hit hard:
Sometimes the stakes are high
We love to say ‘we don’t save lives’ when it gets tough in this industry. And most of the time we don’t. But Clifford, who led some of the country’s most impactful and important health campaigns at Public Health England, pointed out that sometimes the stakes are high and communication does save lives.
Her examples were the best I’ve heard in any talk in my career. “AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance” was a landmark 1986–1987 UK public health campaign launched by the Department of Health and Social Security, led by then-health secretary Norman Fowler, and is worth a closer look.
Fowler battled Margaret Thatcher over why the Aids crisis needed noisy and explicit communication, vs quiet under-the-radar messaging, to – an eye-wateringly good example of fighting for the right solution.
Love your audience
Wixley talked about how much respect you need to have for the people we really serve. Clifford talked about the power of behavioural insight – Flipping smoking cessation’s obvious January answer to October. Stoptober was a movement driven by the insight that if you quit for 28 days, you were more likely to quit for good, and so a movement which owned a month and worked with the priming behavioural lever was born. This idea has spanned 14 years and was instrumental in helping drive smoking down in this country, with 2.5m people making a quit attempt as a result.
Don’t stay in lane
Personally, I’m concerned that media planning risks getting narrower. Planners risk losing a sense of breadth.
Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to have leadership that encouraged media planners to tackle any problem, even if it meant a solution that didn’t sit in the agency or wasn’t a product to sell.
For planners to stay serious strategic consultants, we must continue to advise on the areas we can’t always directly affect. Clifford rightly pointed out that impact comes from the breadth of levers planners have to pull, and behaviour change comes from environmental cues as well as capability and motivational levers.
Don’t let ‘improvement’ mean death by a thousand cuts
Channel 4’s Hicks pointed out that whilst the vast amount of information and data available to planners gives clients the stabilisers to buy a big idea, when an idea is ‘improved’ and made safer to the point of losing any of its original power, we need to take a step back.
Hicks argued we’re all protection agents of good ideas, in a process which can take 12 weeks plus, and be over in 12 hours.
Realise your power to make change
Wixley gave a brilliant response to a question around dominance of holdcos and the small guys. She pointed out we all have agency to create impact in this world and should recognise our potential to make change and take action. It’s easy to blame someone else, but we can all scratch the little corner of our earth to make change.
Noisy evenings like this matter on an individual and industry level. New examples from older times, old friends and new connections, borrowed homes for the night, steel 4s and the warmth certainly lifted my blue, and I believe they have the power to shift what can feel like an industry blue.
See you next time.
Emily Fairhead-Keen is a senior strategist at the LEGO Group.