A Strategy Named Design

For much of the time that I have grown up as a planner, the planning thinking unfortunately has largely been in a silo.

There is a definite and critical role of planning/ strategy in new business and in the early formative stages of the creative idea. But then, depending upon the agency culture, the individual rapport of the planner in the team and the workload on the planner, the role of strategy gets diminished in the final stages of the finished creative work! What a pity! Because I feel the planner's role is more critical in cooking than in chopping off the vegetables.

Sadly the much-needed new team of creative-planner has not found mainstream acceptance in India as much as the copy-art team.

But as we move into the future, the traditional walls of advertising are crumbling. The 30 sec commercial has got new peers. The 20 sec MMS, the 1 sec sms, the 2 min e-mail forward, the 15 sec interactive kiosk, the 1 min video on www.youtube.com.

Internationally there are even more novel concepts. The 10 min vertical soccer for Adidas done in Tokyo and Osaka by John Merrifield, the Hershey billboard-cum-cultural icon-cum-virtual store at Times Square, and not to forget the oft-repeated capture of the world by the design led strategy of Steve Jobs iPod.

Many of the world's foremost agencies have realised the design friendliness of strategy. CP+ B has bought a stake in Yves Behar's design company; Ogilvy in New York has a separate design-strategy consultancy called BIG. Maybe the big agencies are eyeing Elephant design in India!

These are therefore good times for account planners as they would now be able to do both- 'Think to Create' and 'Create to Think'.... Create a new medium, create a viral/ meme, create content, create buzz, spin, hype, news, influence...

And hopefully the wall between creative and strategy would be broken in India as well...What say folks?

And do let me know if there is a good online design course available somewhere? Need to be ready when the design era of strategy is upon us!