Ramsey Naja is chief creative officer at JWT MEA
“I have a love-hate relationship with planners. That is to say I love a few of them and hate all the others. You may argue that this is normal, coming from a creative person, and that it arguably works both ways. To hell with that – it’s beside the point.
The planners I love are like Indian scouts in the old US Cavalry: able to take in a whole load of seemingly disjointed information from their environment and use it to detect danger and identify the exact path to follow. And, like those US scouts, they are a rare breed, which means that many of us end up being stuck with that other brand of planners: the one I will call Basicallists.
Unlike those sharp minds that can fuse an entire field of informational debris into a neat, accurate compass, Basicallists are just good at listing the debris. Indeed, that’s where their name comes from: unable as they are to turn volumes of know-ledge into a vaguely coherent strategy, they keep repeating the word ‘basically’ in a desperate attempt to summarise the cargo of useless information they carry into smaller pieces of luggage.
They can be useful, mind you – if you are playing Trivial Pursuit or need to phone a friend on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Otherwise, you might as well go to a client carrying the entire printed edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and hope it will say something of note.
Great planners, I discovered, have amazing but weird brains that seem to have a teenager living in them. Like true creatives, they are refuseniks of the obvious, ugly ducklings with swan-like minds, and are often rubbish – or simply lazy – at writing, so much so that they find themselves forced to do as little of it as they can, something that makes them get to the crux of things pretty damn quick. These creatures have an uncanny ability to transform a collection of labyrinthine tasks into an elegantly stated objective, and the only time you will hear them say the word “basically” is the moment before they give you a killer strategic platform.”
