I have tried to make it as actionable as possible with the 5 following points:

1- Learn planning the British way
Let’s start with the beginning, the first thing you need to do is to understand British Planning specificities. France and the UK have some basics in common, increasingly so since most French agencies are embracing digital, but the size and the impact have nothing in common between French and English agencies.

I have already talked about twice on the blog so have a look at the following links to understand the main British planning specificities. here and here

2- Get to know the British Plannersphere and its wisdom.
What is great about planning in the UK as a discipline is that sharing is embedded in its roots. I have learnt a lot of things about planning by reading books, blogs, getting to meet top planners and going at events. It is different to France, the planners blogging, tweeting in the UK actually have day jobs and are pretty good at it! They are genuinely willing to help and to share interesting stuff about the job, the industry, culture…

People like Russell Davies, John Grant, Richard Huntington, Iain Tait and Faris Yacob have been amongst the pioneers in sharing their thoughts, advices… these blogs are a great place to start (and are my personal favorites)

Beyond blogs, if you want to know more about planning, you should have a look at the pages I saved on my Delicious under ‘planning’. You’ll find a collection of articles, presentation, podcasts… about planning including these must reads according to me:

Here, here, here, here, here, and here

And obviously, make sure you’ve check out the APG – Account planning group – website, the daddy of the modern plannersphere.

If you prefer printed content, I would read Jon Steel’s Truth lies and advertising and John Grant’s Brand innovation manifesto, these are brilliant starters.

3 – Have a point of view on planning
Once you are pretty clear about what planning is, your best bet to enter a London agency is to put together your portfolio with the stuff you’ve been doing whether they are personal or at an internship, explaining the way you worked, your input…
As you will the need to prepare your applications, a great place to start is Ad Grads where you will find the latest job offers from the planning world as well as getting to know all about grad schemes (The British way to recruit new talent on a yearly basis) and obviously interviews.

4- Be creative, you operate on a crowded market
Planning directors receive a zillion application a year so if you want to stand out from the crowd you will need to have your own vision of planning and to treat your application as your first brief.
Not all agencies have a grad scheme, especially the start ups so make sure you check them out because you will be quickly in touch with senior and respected planners – on a daily basis.
Check out the IPA (English version of the AACC) and their agency list to get to know the various agencies.

For smaller agencies and creative boutiques, make sure you read Campaign Magazine (British equivalent for Stratégies) and have a look at the new business wins to see which are the agencies doing well at the moment.

When it comes to creating an original an meaningful application, your must read is Asi Sharabi’s experience, it is a model of what young planners should be doing.

I also gave my humble point of view of my Organic Frog experience as it proved to be quite successful for me. You can read about it here and here.

5 – Be social, planners love to talk and it’s not that difficult to find them

After reading all this and getting your portfolio ready you will probably want to meet people and to take it even further. Two places are great for this: The plannersphere wiki and the Ning. The last one exists also in a Facebook version.
They are great places to get to know who works where and to start casual conversations.

If you want to chat and get some wisdom from French planners in London, I also created a Facebook group to get the conversation starting.

If it’s real interaction you’re looking for, no worries all you have to do is to turn up to one of the Cwoffee Morning. I am not sure often these are happening but I am sure it is worth checking out and getting to know people in ‘real life’.

That’s it for me now. I hope you’ll find these few lines helpful and that you’re odyssey into planning will be a successful one. I am always open for discussion (at least most days!) so if you want to contact me you can find my email under the ‘about the frog’ tab.
Best of luck

Only a few moments after the ad was aired, it has already its parody. Now this is what I call success!

If they are a few people that haven’t deleted my feed on their RSS aggregator, I wish you all the best for the New Year.

Today I want to talk about a campaign that I don’t get. I’ve seen the creative below in London last November I think and it reinforced what I thought about Pierre Cardin: What a weird brand this is.

Pierre Cardin is for me the typical example of a brand without a position and therefore not being able to think about long terms perspectives.

Here is the problem on one hand you can’t pretend to be a luxury brand and on the other hand being sold at Lillywhites. It shows us how crucial the need for a solid distribution strategy is. No brand campaign will fix the harm made to them. When you have a look at their website it shows how hard it is for some brands to keep innovating in the way they communicate. Please Pierre Cardin, you have to react; you are a part of the French heritage!

Who needs a website these days!

Seeding is increasingly important in today’s digital world. However, seeding isn’t working. Good seeding is rare and most of time treated like media buying.

If things aren’t done in a right way from a seeders perspective, it is the same from a bloggers perspective as some saw here the opportunity to participate in a vicious business model. As Paul Boutin from Wired puts it, “The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.”

Of course you could argue that good content will always spread, the reality of things is that you will need some solid seeding thoughts beyond the send to a friend button.

Here is the main issue: ‘Industrial seeding’ isn’t talking to the real actors of the web anymore. It is talking to people that transformed their blogs into magazines. These aren’t the genuine actors of the blogosphere, all they are interested in are financial deals not content.  By doing so these bloggers have lost their only real power: credibility. The problem isn’t therefore about the blogosphere not being right to spread new ideas but more about finding the genuine actors of the web.

Indeed finding the right persons or groups take a lot of time and often require people with connections within these communities not a media buying agency.  Moving forward, seeding should be considered earlier in the process to allow enough time for research, making the right connections. If you are short on time anyway, sources like the Social Media Library (for the UK) are interesting and will give you an idea of the persons to contact.

Of course the two main things to remember are: great content is paramount and be transparent and collaborative when contacting bloggers.

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Nicolas Bard, one of the managing partners at Naked in France asked French bloggers to name their top 3 creative agencies in the world. As Alex tagged me I am playing along with the meme.

Creativity is such a subjective concept. Although our industry is changing and everyone is talking about engagement vs. messages, the principle of a great idea well executed is still true. What has changed though is that we aren’t only judging a result, a visual or a movie but the entire creative process.

Anyway back to the original question. As I am biased I can’t really mention the Brooklyn Brothers can I? Ok I have but I am still going to name three other agencies!

Number 3: Ideo
Ideo is not exactly an agency, in their own words their ‘focus lies at the intersection of insight and inspiration, and is informed by business, technology, and culture.’ They are the kind of place that inspires the entire industry because they are doers at heart. I love their principles: Inspiration, Iteration and storytelling.

Number 2: Anomaly
Founded in 2004, Anomaly is one of these agencies that go beyond traditional distinction in a genuine way. “When a client comes in with an advertising problem, Anomaly addresses it more broadly as a business issue, analyzing everything from design to product development.” I love the work they did for Converse; it is a great example of an agency understanding a client heritage. They are good at crafting things as well: “half of Anomaly’s business is doing client work, the other half is building brands from scratch.”

Number 1: Droga5
Similar model here, small, flexible, people from unconventional background… They have a great ability to put brands in a cultural context; their work for Ecko, Unicef and Guitar Hero is representative of that. I also love the fact they have everyone participating on their website.

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“As a response to a fan video from Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08, Tiger Woods and EA SPORTS demonstrate that the “glitch” Levinator25 thought he found in the game, is not a glitch at all”

When I received the email above I knew the name sounded familiar but I couldn’t remember how I knew this person! Then after a couple of seconds I realized it was Don Drapper, the main character from the TV series Mad Men following me on Twitter! I really liked the idea of following him and working in the industry I even imagine meeting him at a random industry event!

Checking the Twitter feed was great as well, posts like “Looking at my newly monogrammed watch and thinking that I should do something nice for Betty soon” are into the spirit of the series!

Then I saw that the website of Don’s agency (Sterling Cooper) URL! I thought great, what a site of an advertising agency in the late 50′s would have looked like if the Internet existed!! And then everything fell apart! No fake website to continue the great stortelling they started but the landing page of AMC…

They’ve ruined my experience! Maybe I’m being picky but they did the hardest part, they got my attention… and I wanted more. Attention to details my friends, that’s what is lacking there! (Great idea anyway!)

I have been working on a couple of brands recently and one thing that came often form the client mouth was: we want to be more ‘premium’!
As if being a premium brand was the ultimate achievement in life! Of course as Richard Huntington pointed out on his presentation about brands, operating in a monopoly allows you to fix your price and therefore to be more profitable. However there isn’t only one business model, no frills chic, premium brands, commodity brands, luxury brands and also unnoticed brands all have ways to stand out of the crowd and stand for something.

I guess this last thing is what most of the client I talked to are actually missing. It is not about being premium or low cost… you name it but it is about cre    ating genuine values. Values that are meaningful for your audiences: people, stakeholders… Most brands are struggling to define what they stand for because they only stand for making more money!

As Marie-Claude Sicard pointed out in her book Les ressorts caches du désir, There are no more than10 to 15 brand values out there: Proximity, Confidence, Authenticity, Innovative, Dynamic, Quality, Passion, Transparency, Responsibility, Performance, Professionalism, Effectiveness, Ethical, Bold, Ambitious…
You won’t build your brand by being ‘more premium’ and stick a bunch of empty words next to it but by thinking in depth about what you believe in!

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Well worth spending 15 minutes of your time! Others presenters include: John Grant and Jeremy Bullmore