Laya Menon, Principal Partner – Client Leadership, Mindshare talks about the similarities that she could see between Lego blocks to build a car and making plans
BY LAYA MENON
Principal Partner - Client Leadership, Mindshare
A few weeks back, I got down to helping my eight-yearold with building a car with his Lego blocks. What it also triggered off was this epiphany that there was immense similarity between using Lego blocks to build a car and making media plans!
To begin with, you need to have the tenacity to go through the whole grind and stay motivated till the finish line, even when the client (my boy in the Lego part of the analogy) himself gives up too soon and wants to throw it all up in the air! Second, arrange the building blocks (costs, ideas, data, content) into a meaningful sequence so that you can get the right block without wasting time (was also burning the midnight oil and the client -my boy - was on my back for fast completion).
Then, never ever skip a step! This part of the epiphany was quite hard-hitting as there was also too much déjà vu happening! Somehow, the instructions in the Lego manual sounded far too basic and therefore infra-dig to be followed to the tee. That was the oh-so-treacherous moment. For just about 10 vain minutes, I was able to fool myself to believe that I am at step 20/25 until the next screw refuse to sit smugly like it was supposed to. This mistake set me back by a good half hour in the middle of the night. I found myself undoing about 10 steps to put that one screw first and then build the rest on from there.
Thankfully enough, redoing the next 10 steps was an easier job. By now, I was quite tempted to call it a day (night) and crash. But soon enough, the pressure of not being able to ‘deliver’ the car to the ‘client’ next morning caught up, and I quickly got to the next step in the instruction manual.
Coming up was the slightly trickier task of pasting the stickers (content/integrations) onto different parts of the car, which had started coming into form by now. While the stickers looked very harmless and simple to paste, the trickiness started unravelling itself when I started working with them. Some of them got torn and some refused to come into that perfect alignment of lines that I was getting adamant on by now. After all, I had spent a good night’s sleep on this, just to see that smile on my boy’s (client) face! After innumerable deliberations to get that perfect alignment (brand fit), they finally fell in line. There was one that had got torn (the execution was looking different than the brief). The next half hour went into putting the torn pieces into something that looked like the original. How could I present the car (plan) without one of the stickers (idea)! It would look so incomplete… The thought of my child (client) finding out that a sticker (idea) was missing was even more devastating. After some struggle, I managed to get the torn sticker also in place. The cracks were not too visible. Phew!
I placed the car carefully besides my son’s bed and went off to sleep, rather pleased with myself for being able to pull this off. It was no small deal to be able to put together a pull-back car, that also with blocks (budget is always limited) in a couple of hours (the time is always short). Finally, it was all worth it, when the morning was made special by the more than visible joy on the child’s (client’s) face. Vowing never ever to buy complicated toys (please note - the analogies have ended), I made my way to begin the day which had started off pretty well after a good night’s effort.
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laya.menon@mindshareworld.com
