Planner Monkeys

These are the members of my planning team at my ad agency. We are deemed either account planners or strategic planners, depending on which you think sounds more impressive. We stand for the consumer...for the people. We hunt for unique truths to base the strategies of entire yearly ad budgets on. Unique truths in a world where "out-of-the-box" thinking has itself become a cliche term. An awful little oxymoron.

We are meant to get our hands dirty in the name of research. To walk in the sandals, stilettos, swim fins of another. We are the meandering soulful characters in every fish out of water movie (think old 80s favs "Big" or "Mr. Mom"). We are journalists, reporting as faithfully as Lois Lane, and often as goofily as Clark Kent. We are muses of creativity - sirens of inspiration.

We work hard to stay true to all of this - to be real. But it ain't always easy.

Often we find ourselves drowning in office politics...battles of bureaucracies. Because people don't always want to hear the truth. It's okay if a brand, product or creative idea has a couple of "issues", but CEO forbid there exist a fundamental flaw. And so many times we become the information monkeys. Fetch this fact. Make the "consumer" dance.

Grind monkey, grind!!!

Well I think it's time that we simply step out of our unlocked cages and bare our banana-stained teeth. I think it's time we throw a little poop at the people peering through the bars.

We are not frustrated creatives because we love what we do. We are not the gophers of human emotional waste because we care about truth, beauty and love. But we are silly, curious, fun-loving, crafty, stout-hearted and more intelligent than you might give us credit for. We are the planner monkeys.