Do you ever wonder how our industry or section of it is seen? I recently gave a speech at the AHAA conference in Miami. One of the great aspects of doing some of the less obvious conferences – other than meeting some really great new people and learning about their market is that you can stumble into some sessions that you would not ordinarily go to.

Such it was that I found myself having a meal at the AHAA Account Planners Award lunch. I did not even know Account Planners had awards yet alone regional specialists. Apparently Planners have their own issues, challenges and even humor: I learnt that the Client is concerned about MY product, the Client Exec about MY Account, The Creative Director about MY ad, and it is only the Account Planner that is concerned about MY consumers.

I built my career in advertising and for an hour or so last week I was surrounded by some really wonderful committed individuals who I swear I had never thought about professionally for all my years in Advertising. From what I could gather from my analysis of really nice but seemingly alien career discussions – Account planning spins around insight. Between the chicken salad and the key lime pie and coffee I didn’t fully nail what this insight was actually into.. – but I did learn that the hallmark of great account planning was being jealous of the “insight” when you saw it. I did not have a clue what these guys were awarding – I applauded with the best of them – for the best of them, but I did not have a snow flake in hell of knowing why.

These were all brilliantly dedicated, talented and funny people – at the top of their game, but I could not help suddenly feeling really guilty for all the times I rolled my eyes in sessions when the “suits” appeared in my flame sessions and did not understand optical flow or why we needed HDRs or why green screens should be flatly lit. Of course most of my time in Miami was spent with creatives and production people – my people – who know my job, my jokes and my passion for full frame sensors with shallow depth of field.

So next time when a suit looks uncomfortable on set with why .r3ds are better than panalut HD – I hope I can remember to see my job not as the guy who draws the alien techno babble curtain to keep them isolated in the dark, but rather I cut them a little slack and see that maybe the campaign does not live and die just with our section of the industry.