Comms Planning: A Year In Review
Highlights of Strategic Knowledge Through Collective Experience
Amidst flurries of research, work, and a recent hiatus, we seem to have missed our one-year anniversary! But better late than never, right? If you’ve been meaning to introduce this resource to new readers, there’s no better article to start with than this one. Now buckle up, because this is a comprehensive recap of our growth, the knowledge we’ve shared, our top stories to-date, and our plans for the future of this publication.
122 in 15
Over the past 15 months our team has collectively published 122 articles — that’s roughly twice a week, holidays included. Some of our very first articles introduced readers to comms planning and taught the basics of writing a comms ecosystem, and some of our latest shared the unspoken skills of great planners. As you can tell, we’re fans of sharing knowledge through and through. And somewhere along the way we managed to amass nearly 8,000 followers, corresponding with readers from as far as Brazil and Australia.
So what exactly have we been writing about all this time? It’s a hodgepodge for sure, but we swear there’s method to our madness.
Media, Marketing, the Mind, and Much More
Our team is a mixed bag in most senses of the term. Not only are we demographically diverse, we also hail from varying professional and educational backgrounds.
Most of us have media and marketing backgrounds, which is why established industry publications like Adweek, Campaign US, and the IAB have recognized our whitepapers on beating display banners and fundamental shifts in Facebook advertising.
Some of us pull from our design experiences to help our data shine, while others pull from social and cognitive psychology educations, drawing parallels to advertising and improving our understanding of how consumers actually make purchase decisions.
At the end of the day though, we’re all Communications Planners at heart. So when we share knowledge from personal experiences, like our best presentation tips or what we consider are defining traits of a great Comms Planner, we truthfully believe in them and hope you’ve found them useful.
Top 10 Comms Planning Articles To-Date
On that note, here’s something we hope you’ll find useful too — our top 10 articles by reads:
- 11 Examples of Branded Snapchat Filters & Lenses That Worked
- What is a Comms Planner vs. a Media Planner vs. a Brand Planner vs. a Digital Strategist?
- The Ugly and Dirty Planning of BBDO
- Brand Actions Library — 75 Examples for Creative Inspiration
- Ten Books Every Comms Planner Needs to Read
- 20 Creative Ideas That Cost Under $20K
- How to Own the Instagram Grid
- Why Most Creative Testing is Bogus and What You Can Do to Fix It
- It’s Byron Sharp’s World. We’re Just Marketing In It
- 7 Tips for Aspiring Planners to Conquer the Catch-22 of Entry-Level Work Experience
Looking Ahead
For starters we’re aiming to exceed, or at least maintain, our current pace of publishing twice a week. The hiatus has left many of our writers with a deluge of possible blog topics though, so we hope you’re excited if we publish even more often than that!
We also plan on continuing our open-minded editorial process, publishing content that’s not only relevant to the latest industry developments and our personal experiences as Comms Planners, but reflective of our individual strengths and backgrounds too. Of course, if there any topics you’d like us to write on, please shoot any one of our editors a note and we’ll do our best to make that happen.
And finally, we’ve got an end-of-summer surprise in the works. It’s a project more than a year in the making, and we can’t wait to share it with you and the rest of the world. For regular updates and the big announcement, please continue (or start to!) follow us here on Medium and subscribe to our newsletter below.
Thank you again for your dedicated readership, and many thanks in advance for another year of sharing strategic knowledge through collective experience.
Read On,
The BBDO New York Communications Planning Team
