Recently I've been doing a lot of small research projects on a variety of things, much of which is
presented via boards and walls. For those non-ad types reading this, a board/wall is basically lots of A4 and A3 print-outs (maybe of a deck, maybe not) put up on a surface to communicate something – from an idea for an advert to a creative territory to a bit of research on hashtags.

Why are boards good for this? Well, for some probably obvious reasons. Boards make it easy to conceptually organize
content. You can rearrange and reorder bits at whim. Plus, boards require someone to
explain their content – they require a storyteller to make sense of the data at
hand.

It's also worthwhile saying that boards are used all the time here at Wieden's (as far as I can gather), in nearly every part of the process of producing an advert. Which I think leads on to an interesting point: there’s a
storyteller involved at pretty much every part too –
not just in selling the idea to the client, but within the research stage and
the creative process as well.

Which leads to a further, more abstracty point: the process of producing advertising (tell interesting stories to other humans!) looks like the product (tell interesting stories to other humans!). Which is quite nice.

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(Thoughts courtesy of Planning Placement newbie James.)