Farm Communications’ head of planning Craig Harries began his career as a brand manager with Unilever, working on household food brands including Ragu, Chicken Tonight and PG Tips. His advertising career has spanned Asia, America and the UK working for DDB, Saatchi & Saatchi, and WCRS on global and local projects for brands including Coca-Cola and BMW. Prior to joining Farm, Craig was a founding partner of Amp, an integrated communications agency.
My day
7.00am: Boot up the iPad and download today’s Times while I’m in the shower.
7.30am: Grab the Observer Review on the way out of the house to read on the train and see what nuggets I can use on any of the live briefs we have fizzing around.
8.15am: Arrive in the office and make a cup of tea while finishing off the grungy copy of Metro I picked up at Liverpool Street and catch up on the gossip and sports news.
8.30am: Check my meetings and review the major tasks of the week. Block out thinking/planning time.
9.00am: TRAM (Time, Resources And Money) with the account teams to see what’s coming up this week. We all sit around the table and talk about projects and resource needs and identify potential problems before it’s too late.
10.00am: Get some quiet time finishing off a new brief for the next wave of Nando's advertising. I have waded through reams of brand and ad tracking data and ad-hoc research.
11.30am: Meeting with the media agency for NFU Mutual to talk about the strategy for 2012. Thinking about the role of advertising and how we make our budget work harder as we increase our prices and battle the threat of aggregators ... phew!
12.00 noon: Take some time out to search for presentations on Brand Stories, and in so doing wander my way onto Twitter and learn that Stephen Fry is a bigger media property than the top four newspapers combined.
12.30pm: Meet with Owen and Gary our creative partners to take them through first thoughts on the new Nando's brief. The plan was to grab a sandwich, but talking about Nando’s makes us all want chicken and we decamp in Nando’s Goodge Street for half a Peri-Peri Chicken and Macho Peas.
2.00pm: We reconvene in the office to discuss new business and how we should develop our agency positioning and credentials. Anna and Woody, our new creative team, have come up with a new look and feel using fuzzy-felt characters – interesting, but not grown up enough? Discuss.
3.00pm: Marie, an account planner here, and I discuss a presentation we're writing on behavioural economics and the implications for marketing and advertising. It's coming along nicely, but more work and reading to do before we can present it to our clients.
4.30pm: Creative review of a new press campaign for the launch of a fixed-term bond for NFU Mutual.
5.30pm: Show and tell of our new ad for The Electoral Commission's Alternative Voting System campaign. A tough brief after the poor performance of the coalition government led to a lack of interest in the electoral process. Our idea turned the information booklet into flocks of birds flying through people’s letter boxes … turned out quite nice and went down well with the agency.
6.15 pm: A beer in the office while I chat with the board about our new creative brief format. We want to make it more emotive, so we're playing around with a storytelling approach.
7.00pm: Train home with a print out of the top 20 trends for teens and a copy of Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.
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