Incognit-O(Monday Resident)- Do you have a flag?

Eddie Izzard – a great English stand-up comedian, does a skit about how empires were all built with the cunning use of ….well, flags.

Yes. Flags.

You see, you would go around and stick your flag (absolutely no pun intended here) in other people’s countries and claim them for yourself.

Quite simply, if you didn’t have a flag, you didn’t have a country. Amusing, no?

Brilliant.

And so all the Ad agencies, PR companies, media powerhouses, online and BTL experts all have to have their very own flags – all in the form of their very own branding philosophies. They then go around and stick them in the land’s of clients, claiming territory.

It’s almost that if they don’t have their very own branding philosophy – as an agency, as a media arm, whatever they may be – they don’t really have the right to exist.

So let’s all have ‘flags’ for the sake of having them.

Don’t get me wrong, some of the branding philosophies out there are top notch.

Who can argue with Saatchi’s ‘Lovemarks’?
TBWA’s ‘Creating disruptive Ideas’?

Flags like those are timeless.

Yet the question that arises in my mind is this…what happens then to the strategic planner?

…the account planner has been around for roughly 30 years or so now, right? Yet he has never gone beyond the walls of his brand agency.

Why the hell not?

Do you ever see your planner cracking strategies with the PR team? The media people? The online architects? I certainly don’t. Is there not something wrong here…

But where on earth would he begin?

Would he Create Brand Belief with Burnett…..or ‘Fuel Brand Power’ with Starcom?
Would he Procreali-something (if BBDO is so hot on this word they invented, I challenge them to give it a verb)…or would he use OMD’s ‘Checkmate’.

Shouldn’t all brand planning come from one philosophy – at least within the same agency group?

Will we ever learn? Will we get to a stage where the brand and media planner become one?

Would love to hear all your thoughts on this one…