Another Planning Blog…

Currently: (June 2010 onwards) Executive Planning Director/Partner at True Worldwide.

I’m writing this on day one of the official start of a new agency, called True. Hopefully, I’ll find some time to update the ads and more in due course, but for now, here’s the intro…

True is a start-up agency.
But with a few twists that make us truly different… we’re calling it a ‘hybrid’ agency.

Not just because we’re fusing digital and advertising. We are, but that’s not enough. You’ve got to do things differently if you want to be genuinely relevant to your audience.

Today, consumers know more, share more and listen less. We’ve built a set of new and unique tools that allow us to get closer to the customer through their digital behaviour. The difference for clients is better insight and less guesswork through understanding what people do, not what they say they do.

We started this from a clean sheet of paper and struck the right balance of senior people from the outset – uniting the worlds of advertising, digital and technology. We did this because, in our opinion, clients need the ability to connect with their audience without media bias or boundary.

Finally, we should mention WPP. We’re still a start-up, majority owned by the founders, but their support adds resources and scale. That’s a massive helping of “best of both worlds” for clients.

As a result, we can focus on developing communications that grab an unfair share of attention and sales.

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Previously (Since Feb ’08): Head of Planning at TBWA\London

And (May ’06-Feb ’08): Group Planning Director at WCRS in London.
Key accounts: Sky TV, 118 118, BMW, Royal Navy, Royal Marines Commandos & Rolls-Royce.

Before that, I spent 5 years working at Goodby Silverstein & Partners,
working my way up to Group Planning Director
(excluding 1 year in the middle as Partner/Director of Planning for See: London)

2000-2001, I spent at Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, San Francisco.

Prior to that, I worked in London at Saatchi & Saatchi, JWT and CME.KHBB.

And I went to UCL University (89/92) – BA(Econ) Hons in Economics.

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Some work I’ve been involved with…

Last thing I did at Goodby Silverstein & Partners was on HP – we pitched for the Personal Computing division (and won) with a strategy to decommoditize the PC – the work’s been out for a bit, and you can see it all at The Computer is Personal Again Site… or watch the summary video Here.

My personal favourite, though, is this one…

Prior to that, there was the well-known “Picture Frames” work – which netted a Gold Effie in the 2006 US Effie awards. (US Effie Awards Link)

The ad was well-known and ran in many different guises over 3 years or so. See one here:

However, the thing that grabbed me more was the amount of people who made there own (frankly, rather good in some cases) versions… like this one:

Finally, in the same time period, we did loads of work with HP’s commercial division – that deals with major businesses IT needs – all based on the strategy of “Embracing Change”

You can find the ad at YouTube – but this ‘behind the scenes’ seemed cool and interesting to share…

And here’s a couple of ads we did for 3 – an account we no longer work on, but was mighty fine back in the day…