The role for opinions and assumptions

Planners are often advised not to feel the need to be the smartest person in the room. It makes sense?—?a big part of the job is to develop enough cultural baggage to tackle multiple types of briefs at once, often in the same day or week. So the wider your cultural net, the quicker you can make important connections when a new brief does come in. Or at least recognise where else you have a gap and go better understand that particular part of the problem.

With this, there’s a risk of creating unrealistic expectations that you need to have the answer to everything. Or at least an opinion on everything?—?the planner as walking Wikipedia?—?, which leads very easily to assuming lots of things. Which makes our life more difficult than it should be.

There is therefore a role for opinions, and a role for assumptions. Which is to say, it’s one thing to cultivate an opinion about a subject, quite another to assume that your opinion will match the opinions of everyone else. That’s where the job gets particularly schizophrenic?—?when your opinion doesn’t match with what the brief requires. Just because you think it’s one thing, you can’t assume that everyone else does too. And that’s ok.

The thing about passion jobs, or knowledge jobs in a broader sense, is that our cultural net needs to be wide enough to cover multiple ends of the spectrum. And often juggle very contradictory ideas at the same time. Otherwise, we risk creating the so called echo chambers of planner-land and ad-land that don’t match what everyone else outside of London or San Francisco thinks. And then Brexit and Trump happen.

In an age of fake news, filter bubbles and echo chambers, it feels more important than ever to recognise the difference between an opinion and an assumption. Individually, we’re all entitled to stand our ground when it comes to a political statement, a view on a piece of technology or what to eat for lunch. For the greater good (i.e. the work you’re helping produce), oftentimes that’s not nearly enough.

That’s the moment when you need more than a Google search or a trend report or the thoughts of your equally bubbled advertising friends to lead you in an interesting direction?—?one which you’d never even consider, because until our very last days, if we’re lucky, we’ll keep hitting upon ideas and perspectives that we never even considered.

To paraphrase a recent post from Sword & Stone, this elevates the need for primary research more than ever. It also puts planners more in the spotlight, because “when not representing the consumer in the advertising development process, the planner was just an extra opinion in the meeting and had no reason to be there.” But it also brings back into question not only what we research, but why we research in the first place. The answer might not always be to give us an extended opinion about something?—?more often, it will be to break a certain set of assumptions about something else.

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