Welcome to Optimism comes to you today from sunny
Krakow. (Living the dream, etc.)

View from my hotel room window this morning.

Unfortunately Campaign's circulation has yet to
penetrate Krakow but, as the publication's much anticipated School Report hits
doormats around London Advertland, we hear word of good news from W+K HQ. 

Yes, we scored a respectable eight out of nine. (“Excellent.”)

If we're honest, we're a little disappointed. Not
at the ranking, but at the change in format. Because the really
compelling part of the School Report, the bit which has made us giggle since it
was introduced a few years ago, was seeing how the agencies’ assessment of
their own performance compared to the estimation of Campaign. This worked
neatly as a public indicator of Advertland hubris, self-delusion and spin: it
was always interesting to see how agencies would characterise a year of carnage
and disaster as ‘eventful’. Now that Campaign comes in a smaller size, the self-assessment presumably had to be dropped.

This year, W+K scored ourselves lower than did
Campaign.  False modesty? Perhaps. We gave
ourselves seven out of nine. In old money that's probably a ‘B’. Whilst 2012 was
a good year for W+K London, we would categorise it as one which mostly,
hopefully, set us up for future greatness.

We did some excellent work across a variety of
business.

We bolstered our client list with some new
accounts full of promise for creative opportunity.

In particular, we won one of the major pitches of
the year when we landed the Tesco business.

And we hired some great new talent.

If we received an actual school report it might
say: Wieden + Kennedy has worked hard
this year and has shown us flashes of brilliance. The effort paid off with an excellent result on the all-important Tesco exam. W+K have a tendency to be
scruffy and cheeky that sometimes holds them back. They could do better across
more subjects if they really apply themselves in the year to come.

Here’s what Campaign actually said of our 2012
performance:

We'll graciously
accept the generous score of eight from Campaign. Stay tuned as we try to
turn our own B into an A* rating in time for next year's report. We’ve had a strong
start already in 2013 – with good work on Tesco, Lurpak and Three. We’ll be
working hard to keep up that momentum. That's all from Krakow for now.

Do przodu!

In exciting news, I have helped out on a
bit of brief writing. To be inserted into the actual process of producing ads is
very exciting. Super exciting, in
fact, bolded font and everything. Good to get my hands dirty as the placement goes on.

This week I have also been getting stuck in
to a few strategic problems that the other planners are working on. Some of them are really
tough – not in the sense that they are unfathomably complex, but rather that
the issues involved are subtle and delicate. 

As is probably obvious, the more of the actual job I see + do, the more my idea of it evolves. For example, I'd assumed at the beginning that the job was nearly all research, and underestimated the degree to which a planner has to be creative. It’s a kind of craft all to itself.

I also had a Christmas Lunch with the other
planners, which was jolly good fun. Very sedate.

'Til next week, folks!

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(Thoughts courtesy of Planning Placement newbie James.)