Humped Zebra Crossing originally posted by dknNYC
Co-posted to cubemate.com and the DDB Open Planning Group blog
I've been back in London for four months, and it's been very good so far. The planning department at DDB is even more fun the second time around. I don't think I'll work with this many planners in one office ever again - 35 by last count across digital, direct, econometrics, and broadcast - and now we're Facebooking, IM'ing, and blogging. Soon we'll sit together in the same area (and we already rant and drink together.)
Another part of being in London, though, is getting in touch with Greater London's Plannersphere. But last week I rashly wrote on my friend Ian Leslie's Facebook wall that I was tired of the 'Plannersphere Mafia' and that I was glad that Russell Davies' Interesting 2007 conference was sold out.
The main reason, I neglected to say, was that I had read a few blog accounts of Iain Tait's presentation at PSFK London 2007. The blogs I did read made the talk out to be really awful. It made me feel like I was on the outside of the 'cool kids club' with traditional agencies named for dead white men (or "Benson, Christ, Smith-Fellow, Hasbeen and Shagalott" as the presentation put it) while the digital agencies were all vibrant and interesting.
I may have judged a little bit too quickly. On reading the original posts at Iain Tait's blog, I found a well-balanced and well-thought out essay on the differences between our two approaches. It might have been a provocative title, but it wasn't really that bad. So I'm posting this to say that there isn't as much of a divide between big traditional agencies and smaller integrated ones, and if there is, let's talk instead of calling each other names. It's really not very productive.
