• by Lisa Seward , November 28, 2006

I can still remember when I came to the realization that media planning had changed forever. It was the late 1990s, and I had been worrying about where the field was going. With all the changes happening, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the conventional rules were becoming less applicable and effective, and I was contemplating where that would leave us.

Don't get me wrong: I didn't exactly worship at the altar of media conventions back then. I had made a fairly successful career out of bending and sometimes outright flouting the traditional rules of media planning. But I was aware that my success had depended in part on there being a set of conventions to use as a foil.

So naturally, I did what anyone would do: I committed myself to replacing the old set of conventions with new ones. We at Fallon Media put loads of time and energy into pioneering connection planning, convinced it was the Holy Grail. We identified protocols, practices, and tools that would comprise this new-to-the-U.S. discipline - lists of precisely what connection planners would do to ensure that our media thinking was informed by consumer insight and conducted with a much more expansive definition of what media could be. We were proud of our progressiveness and convinced we had crafted the next set of media rules.

Then one day, before we had rolled out connection planning to our clients, I got hit over the head with an idea that changed everything. It came in the form of a quotation by Max Boisot, an expert on international management and technology strategy: "The future will belong to those who can handle fuzziness."

Suddenly I got it. I felt simultaneously terrified and thrilled at the prospect of there being no set conventions in these times of cataclysmic change. Here we had been putting our energy into clarifying new media rules, when in fact, the very definition of next-generation media might be its inherent "rulelessness." Suffice to say it was an epiphany. I jotted that quotation down on a scrap of paper, stuck it up by my desk (where it remains to this day), and have tried to follow it ever since.

We still moved ahead with our connection planning work, but we removed any notion that it was "the" answer. Instead it became a tool to gauge possibility - an ongoing practice that helps guide us through the unknown. Beyond connection planning, in what has been an even bigger transformation for Fallon, we created a media planning group that is the equivalent of our creative department: inventive, relentlessly curious people who come up with ideas, not flowcharts.

This hasn't been easy. But it's been more than worthwhile; we see now that fitting our clients' brands and products into people's lives today takes not only insight but pure, undiluted ingenuity.

But if you still want conventions, there are some overarching "rules" emerging:

>Consumers are in charge. If your idea doesn't captivate, entertain, and/or inform them on their terms, it's a bad idea, period. Everything you do needs to emanate from an understanding of not only what consumers want, but why and how.

>Consumers are the medium. Consumers always have had the power to influence others; technology just gives them a more powerful megaphone. It doesn't matter if you want them to be your "brand ambassadors" - they will be, for better or worse. We need to design programs with that reality in mind.

>The biggest risk of all is repeating last year's plan. Yes, many clients are risk-averse and cling to the comfort zone of the old ways. But it's our job as media professionals to convince them that the least responsible thing they can do is the old last-year's-flowchart-with-an-inflationary-increase trick. After all, how many people do you know whose media habits are exactly the same now as they were a year ago?

It's all about ideas. The currency to connect with consumers today isn't great creative, and it's not great media. It's brilliant ideas (which, ironically enough, make creative and media indistinguishable). Big, powerful ideas nullify consumers' ability to avoid us and instead lead them to invite us into their lives. And that, after all, is what we're supposed to be achieving.

Not exactly a prescriptive set of rules, I know. But that's the beauty of our business today: We get to embrace fuzziness.

Lisa Seward is the media director at Fallon, Minneapolis. (lisa.seward@fallon.com)