“Account Planners Need to Be Distillers of Chaos”
Sytse Kooistra, graduate of the Boot Camp for Account Planning in New York, shares the wisdom gained in “A Planner’s Playbook.”
For every student in Miami Ad School’s Boot Camp for Account Planning, the experience can seem like trying to drink from a fire hose. The intense program floods students in a deluge of information which they try to absorb as quickly—and thoroughly—as possible.
Alumni walk away from the process with a head full of new maxims, axioms, and words-to-live-by (along with a smartphone fully-loaded with new industry contacts and—let’s not forget—a new career.) When Sytse Kooistra graduated in the summer of 2013 from the Account Planning Boot Camp in New York, he took the lessons he learned, the facts and advice that he wanted to imprint on his brain, and created “A Planner’s Playbook: Everything I Learned About Planning at Miami Ad School That You Should Know About.” Here is a sampling of the wisdom Sytse captured in his playbook:
“Remember, you are there to make the work effective. So, you’d better know what effectiveness is.”
“Be whatever you need to be to get the job done. Know something about everything that goes on in your company and be ready to learn more.”
“The problem is seldom as simple as we’d like it to be. (And the client usually doesn’t know what the real problem is.) Spend most of your time finding out what the problem is. You can’t come up with the solution if the problem isn’t clear yet.”
“You won’t find the answer by sitting at your desk all day. Planning is about understanding human behavior and interactions with brands and products. The only way to experience that in real life is by going out in the real world. Don’t limit yourself to your computer, go out and explore! (And bring your laptop.)”
A Planner’s Playbook – Everything I learned about planning at Miami Ad School New York from Sytse Kooistra
Sytse is a Senior Brand Planner with isobar | Netherlands. See Sytse’s post on his Account Planning Boot Camp experience (Dutch) here.
