Jelena Veselinovic: Wtf is comms planning?
No one seems to quite agree on what “comms planning” means. Or rather, it means so many different things to different people that it has become a useless term.
It means, of course, whatever we collectively think it means.
This is a continuation of a series of interviews with smart people who have a point of view on the term and its proper definition. (See the previous interview with Eliza Esquivel here.)
I sat down with Jelena Veselinovic to get her take. She is not one to brag publicly, but she is an expert in communications planning, and a thoughtful and accomplished marketer. She is the founder and owner of Open Kitchen Communications, and formerly held a series of integrated marketing and connections strategy titles at The Coca-Cola Company, where she was my client, once upon a time. She was responsible for global communications strategies for some of Coke’s highest profile initiatives, including the “Taste the Feeling” launch, “100 Years of The Coca-Cola Contour Bottle,” and the FIFA World Cup.
Headlines from our interview (the full transcript is below):
- Maybe the name used for the discipline doesn’t matter. It’s not the title that defines the job, but the person doing it.
- There is no such thing as a “channel agnostic idea.” A well-defined problem always carries a seed to a solution. It’s just that the solution is not always advertising. Strategy is never neutral.
- It is an interdisciplinary effort. The job is to compel people into action, directing conditions for the right type of consumer behavior to take place, and orchestrating an ongoing series of encounters with the brand.
- Don’t choose communications channels or media because they fulfill some tactical objective like reach and frequency. Instead, choose them because they help people navigate certain problems or needs.
- Too often, jobs both at agencies and on the client side are organized according to the outputs, and not the outcomes.
- One important job of a communications planner is the connected thinking. When done properly, it transforms the nature of team interactions. Like a school of fish or a flock of birds, they instantaneously respond to what’s going on around them.
One piece of advice: Very few business problems can be solved solely through advertising. The job of a communications planner starts with understanding the business problem and then translating that problem into a people problem. Advertising is only one of the possible tools to solve this problem.
The whole interview:
Eric Pakurar: What was your title at Coke and is there a difference in the work you’re doing now as compared to the work you were doing then?
Jelena Veselinovic: My last role at Coke was the Global Connections Strategy Director. When I started in this role, the connections discipline was only just created and my job was in some ways a prototype for what this role was supposed to achieve. At Coke we always believed that it’s not the title that defines the job, but the person doing it. That’s why I was never hung up on what the words suggested I should be doing.
What defined my role was really my upbringing at Coke, rather than the job description.
I spent 18 years at Coke. That’s a lifetime. I literally grew up there—professionally, but also as a person. At Coke there are two career paths. You can either progress horizontally inside the brand marketing organization, or vertically in one of the specialist areas. Somehow, I was able to hack the rules and remained in the “specialist” lane while absorbing all the generalist marketing knowledge of the organization.
In addition to this, I was also fortunate to lead huge integrated marketing teams that consisted of all consumer-facing communications disciplines, from advertising and media, to digital, experiential, design, brand PR, consumer promotions and sampling. When you are forced to learn how something works, it makes you appreciate its value much better.
The lesson I learned is that there is no such thing as channel agnostic ideas. On the contrary, a well-defined problem always carries a seed to a solution. It’s just that the solution is not always advertising. Strategy is never neutral, but the thinking has to transcend individual disciplines. The only way to achieve this is to know a lot about everything.
The way I defined my role of Connections Strategy Director was not about what — connections channels. It was about how — connecting knowledge and efforts across marketing organization. It was never in my job description, but this is what I did. It is still what I do today.
Coca-Cola called it “connections strategy”?
Yes, at one point we defined it as “connections strategy.”
However, what I am discovering now is that “connections” is often used as a fancy name for media planning to describe a so-called 360 media approach. I think they mean that it’s not just TV but “unconventional” media as well. Well, that’s some improvement, but not enough.
In its purest form, we defined “connections” as an encounter between the consumer and the brand. That had profound implications on the job connections people were supposed to do. For one, encounter implies a dynamic process. It’s never just about transmitting a message. The way I always thought about it is closer to a job of a movie director. But in the case of a connections strategist you are directing conditions for the right type of behavior to take place.
The way to do that is to harness the dynamics between the message (content), the mindset (what consumers believe about the brand and what their needs are in a given context), and the environment (social norms, common behaviors and the “tools” people use to navigate through that situation). So, media is really just a single prop in that behavioral production. Importantly, media not as a distribution channel. Instead, media as “tools” that people use to navigate certain problems or needs. So basically, you don’t choose media because it is good for reach and frequency. Instead, you choose media because it fulfills certain needs—to learn, express, seek validation, connect to others, or whatever else.
So, it is an interdisciplinary effort whose job is to compel people into action. It is a dynamic and iterative process. It is not about transmitting the message. Also, it is never just a message or media. They are inextricably linked.
That was our ambition, anyway.
What I am seeing now — and I didn’t see it before — is that organizations are not set up to allow or nurture this kind of thinking. Everyone talks about lateral thinking. However, jobs are organized according to the outputs, never the outcomes. We have jobs that produce “impressions,” or jobs that produce “branding associations,” or jobs that make people recognize our packaging on the shelf. The jobs are mirroring the way the company sells its products. They are not designed around consumer experience.
To compensate for that, companies will introduce processes to connect the thinking across disciplines. However, the talent supposed to carry out that process has a singular disciplinary knowledge, which influences their way of thinking.
The irony is that while everyone wants multi-disciplinary talent, most companies wouldn’t even know what to do with it. It almost presents a challenge to the established siloed way of thinking.
I was once called a “jack of all trades” — and not as a compliment. Even today I have people offering me a job but struggling to define the exact position. It is a blessing and a curse.
What do you call it now that you’ve left Coca-Cola, when you’re working with your clients?
Personally, I call it “communications planning,” because this is how we used to call it before the simple idea of selling brands to consumers imploded into a sum of its parts. All other names are either too pretentious, unclear or too limiting. However, it comes with two huge disclaimers. Firstly, communications planning goes beyond audio-visual communication. Distribution, usage or pricing communicates as much or more than the TV commercial. Communications planning needs to cover every single encounter with a brand.
The second disclaimer is that our purpose is not to communicate—our job is to make people buy more. Everything we do needs to lead to a positive change in consumer behavior. Communication is just a small intermediate step, and sometimes it’s not even necessary.
When I was at Coke, I didn’t bother much with what we called it. The problem goes beyond semantics and complicates the way the industry operates.
In fact, the main reason I decided to pursue a freelance career was that I got frustrated with not being able to fit (or willing to compromise) my skills within the standard job descriptions. I felt I could do any of it, but none of the jobs would leverage all I got.
What I think is contributing to this overall confusion is that planning was never meant to be a job. It is a capability that should be embedded within every single marketing role. In a well-functioning marketing organization, there is no role for communications planning because everyone is doing it.
As a client, where do you go to get this sort of work done? Do you do it all internally? When you did the global launch for the “Taste the Feeling” campaign, you hired Ogilvy, which is how we met. Was that a regular thing, hiring an agency?
After many years working in a global role, I realized there is never a single solution to this problem. In depends on the organizational design and level of internal capabilities and agency talent. However, if you believe — as I believe — that capabilities are the biggest competitive advantage, than you will definitively want to build them internally.
Another reason is that this job requires an intimate knowledge of a system. Knowing how things are done, but also having relationships with key stakeholders. Trust and credibility are the necessary requirements for this job. If you are not part of the system, it is very hard to establish yourself in that role.
Having said that, the best results come when you work in a symbiosis with an agency. When I was on the client side, our approach was to work with a communications expert to create initial communications strategy that we used thereafter to brief core agency partners—creative and media. Could I have done it alone? Yes, of course I could. But we believed that working with external partners kept us honest, brought new perspectives and overall made us better.
Thinking — strategy— is a dialectic process. You need tension to grow new ideas. You can do it on your own, but it will never be as good as when you push against another smart perspective.
Sounds like you think that discipline-specific agencies need to work well together. How do you, as a client, make that happen?
I think it’s three things. The first thing is role modeling. You need to incentivize, punish and role model integrated behavior.
The second thing is that it’s all about people. You can’t enforce that kind of behavior through processes, tools or protocols. It is all about the values and the attitude. And this is not something that you can leave to the chance. In my last project on the client side, we worked meticulously to design a team of people that will be good for each other. We mapped the psychological profiles, run workshops, spent time on building the trust amongst the team members. However, all that “human engineering” would never work without the right type of leadership. This is what makes the true difference.
The third thing is to establish a shared mission. When everyone works off of a same strategy — you can call it a mission, idea, strategy, or job to do—then interdependency is not a choice but a necessity. Communications strategy we used to brief the agencies had the content and connections so completely intertwined and interdependent that agencies literally could not do only one part of it. It was baked in from the get go. The strategy itself needs to carry the integration within it.
So what advice would you give someone who wants to be a communications planner — or an encounter orchestrator, or whatever we’re calling this thing — who lives at an agency and doesn’t have a client like you who is modeling good integrated behavior or writes that kind of integrated briefs?
My usual piece of advice is this one thing you learn on the client side early on, that very few business problems can be solved solely through advertising. It is a very humbling realization.
Our industry is so obsessed with advertising and somehow, somewhere we forgot that it is only one thing and rarely the most important thing.
The job of a communications planner starts with understanding the business and then translating that problem into a people problem. Advertising is only one of the possible tools to solve this problem.
Advertising is a beautiful bubble, but to quote The X-Files, “The truth is out there.”
Agencies are really not doing that?
Some claim they do, but they don’t really. Partially it is because of the lack of capabilities, but also it is because of the broken process on the client side. Agency capabilities are the result of a client’s demand. When that demand is fragmented, agencies have no choice but to mirror it.
So back to your question. The value that the hypothetical agency person could bring is to link up the broken system and help connect the knowledge and efforts all the way from the business problem down to the people’s problem that marketing is trying to solve.
For me, this is a job of a communications planner — the connected thinking.
When this job is done properly, it transforms the nature of team interactions. It becomes a lot like social behavior you can observe inside a school of fish, flock of birds, even fire ants. They instantaneously respond to what’s going on around them, adapt and adjust.
I don’t know how the animals do it, but I know that on the agency or client side, we are hardly ever able to do it. There is a friction between the individual elements. I don’t mean tension. Friction. There is a lot of value being lost because of a lack of communication, a lack of response between the individual parts. The energy gets lost between the disciplines.
Sometimes we click and it feels like magic.
A nerve center, maybe?
Yes, that’s it. There needs to be a person who is an interface between all these separate disciplines to facilitate the interaction. It is probably a single person or a really tight small team. Definitively one strategy to start with that then branches out in different directions.
And how do you put a name on that? It’s so hard.
Communications is a nonlinear experience. It is at the same time what we say or do and how consumers assimilate meaning out of those experiences. Our job is to engineer that experience in order to fire up the right neurons in people’s brains, to create the right associations that will compel them to buy more. It’s not about media, it’s not about messaging. It is all of it.
The best analogy—that I stole from Faris Yakob—is the quantum mechanical property of a particle that occupies all of its possible states simultaneously. I like that very much. I think that the role of communications is to find a way to be all these things at the same time. Simultaneously.
