Dana Pascu

The Planner Survey 2010 – Results

Posted: August 18th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

Please find below the Planner Survey 2010 Presentation by Heather & Co. or click here to view and download the results.


Planners and Strategists – What is it they do anyway?

Posted: August 9th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising, Online | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

Wondering what MY mum would say about me :)

The APG Awards – Call For Entries from APG Australia on Vimeo.


The New Planner

Posted: June 15th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising, Trend | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

Here’s a very interesting presentation found at Sean Howard:

View more presentations from hackemer.

Although I don’t necessarily agree with everything stated above, I am looking forward to see The New Creative in this landscape too..


What is Strategy?

Posted: June 14th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising | Tags: , , | No Comments »

Over at his blog, Bud Caddell is crowdsourcing a definition of strategy. There are 114 definitions so far and some are quite interesting.

My favourites:

Via MisEntropy


The Royal Society of Account Planning’s Visual Study Guide Of Cognitive Biases

Posted: May 18th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising | Tags: , , , , , | No Comments »

What is a cognitive bias?

Cognitive biases are psychological tendencies that cause the human brain to draw incorrect conclusions.

Example: Post-purchase rationalization = the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.

This is a great resource, just check it out!

Cognitive Biases – A Visual Study Guide by the Royal Society of Account Planning

Via Living Brands


Ding – dong! It’s Planner Survey Time Again

Posted: May 6th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising | Tags: , | 1 Comment »

Have a bite of the last year’s results and then enjoy the new survey here.

Don’t forget to subscribe for the results also.


Account Planning School of the Web is Back

Posted: May 6th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment »

This time, Rob Campbell developed an interesting assignment to test 3 things vital in the modern world of communication:

  • Thinking
  • Creating
  • Presenting

It’s basically a pitch presentation, except your job is not just to develop a strategy and idea to solve a specified problem, but to pitch it to the judges as if you were in the room and doing it in the flesh.

The brief

“How can ‘Head & Shoulders’ shampoo be seen as the brand men [18-35] should use every day, rather than just on the occasions they think they have a dandruff issue”.

Participate here

Good assignment, great response idea. I just can’t wait to see the results.

it’s basically a pitch presentation … except your job is not just to develop a strategy and idea to solve a specified problem, but to pitch it to the judges as if you were in the room and doing it in the flesh.

The brief in the post digital age

Posted: April 20th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising, Online | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

Gareth Kay has a very interesting presentation about briefing in a post digital world, where identity is distributed, things are complex, attention must be earned, and ideas must DO.

Great stuff, enjoy!


Best Online Planning Tools

Posted: February 19th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising, Online | Tags: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Best Resources for Desk Research using online sites, tools and applications:

  • Professional Insight - the big “traditional” resources that cost a *lot* of money

Mintel – Big, hefty market intelligence reports

TGI – Market Research surveys and analysis

Forrester – More editorial reports on specific pertinent topics

WARC – the bible of marketing and advertising specific insight

Datamonitor - business specific insight and intelligence

LexisNexis – news aggregation service

Nielsen – the mecca of insight. Tools, papers, resources, everything

eConsultancy – digital marketing specific insight

  • If your agency does not have access to these expensive resources, you can access them via:

RoyalMail Infobank – A great resource in Holborn where you can use these resources for FREE

IPA Information Centre – the lovely people here can do searches for you if you are an IPA affiliated agency

  • Industry Information - the “obvious” trade rags and blogs and their wealth of news, articles and commentary

BrandRepublic – Central news resource for advertising and media

AdAge – Global news resource

Creativity – creative led news and opinion

Adverblog – great aggregator of great ads

Adrants – more advertising stuff from around the World

This is an ad – blatant plug for mine and Toby’s “alternative” advertising aggregator

Planners Blogs – the Plannersphere wiki of all the planner’s blogs (not all are active anymore)

  • Ideas Conferences - source of inspirational presentations

TED – the ultimate video resource of truly inspirational speakers

GEL Conference – more brilliant presentations from the Good Experience Live Conferences

Interesting – Tons of stuff from Russell’s Interesting conferences from around the world is online

  • Business Insight - the kind of planning resource that makes you credible to the big cheeses

Economist – don’t underestimate the amount of cleverness hidden here. CEO’s and Marketing Directors adore it when planners quote economist articles.

  • Digital Marketing Insight - for when you have to justify that increasing digital spend

IAB – Brilliant resource for internet stats and case studies

User Experience Insight - understanding the experience of your brand as well as the message

Boxes and Arrows – great Information Architecture insight

Good Experience – Mark Hurst’s brilliant user experience resources

  • Marketing Trends - seeing where the market, consumer and brands are heading

Springwise – new business ideas from around the world

Trendwatching – consumer trends, with brilliant monthly trend briefings

PSFK – daily news, ideas and trends aggregator from the lovely Piers Fawkes

Contagious – Quarterly intelligence briefing

  • Advertising resources - when you need to look at what the competitors are up to

Visit4info – quite cheap and thorough resource for ATL ads

Lurzer’s Archive – global ad resource

Nielsen AdRelevance – advertising aggregator and analyser

Xtreme Information - competitor media monitoring

  • Web trends - getting a wider view of activity on the web

Google Trends – track any online trends you fancy and plot them on pretty graphs

Google Alerts – push delivery via email of every new piece of content around a specified keyword

Alexa – slightly flaky competitor website traffic monitoring

  • Professional Buzz tracking - the essential paid-for tools for any social activity

Buzzmetrics – The daddy of buzz metrics tools from Neilsen

Onalytica – a tasty alternative

Integrasco – more “grown up” tracker

  • Free Buzz tracking – the free but slightly dodgy suite of buzz trackers. Good for indicative measures.

Trendrr – comprehensive real-time buzz tracking tools

Serph – realtime buzz tracking

Omgili - Find out what people are saying

Trendpedia – buzz tracking powered by Attentio

How Sociable? – understanding how well a brand fares in social media

Addict-o-matic – brilliant visual social buzz aggregator, using an automated NetVibes-type interface

  • Search Insight - researching keywords to see what people are searching for

Google AdWords – understand search terms around your product and brand

  • Social Bookmarks research - see what people think is important content around a brand or product as opposed to an “engine”

Del.icio.us – The daddy of social bookmarks

StumbleUpon – recommendation driven bookmarking

Digg – news and content with a tech leaning

  • Facebook analysis - Seeing how people act on Facebook

Adonomics – bespoke Facebook application tracking (see how crap most of them are)

  • Blog research - for understanding what real people are saying specifically on their blogs

Technorati – the Google of Blogs

  • Board Trackers - see what the topics for discussion on forums is around key words

BoardReader – Message Board and Forum reader

Board Tracker – and another one

Google Groups – searching groups with Google

  • Twitter Research - getting under the skin of what’s happening on Twitter

Twitter Analyzer – A bunch of insightful ways to look at a Twitter account

Tweitgeist – Twitter Zeitgeist

#hashtags – real time monitoring and analysis of topics on Twitter

Twitt(url)y – tracking URLs inserted into Tweets

Twitrratr – automated Twitter analysis tool that sorts Tweets around a term into positive, negative and neutral

Twilert – Like Google Alerts, but for Twitter…

Tweetbeep – …as is this

Xefer – Pretty way to represent Twitter account usage stats

  • Researching Video content - understanding what people are watching online

Truveo – online video content aggregator (with great top 10’s)

Viral Video Chart – keeping track of what’s hot, with great trend graphs and tools

Many thanks an please add this great (re)source to the list above!


Ogilvy’s Approach to Digital

Posted: January 18th, 2010 | Author: Dana Pascu | Filed under: Advertising, Online | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

Internal stuff stolen from this presentation:

Structure for social:

Via