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Part I
Planning: Role and Structure
The articles in this section give a very vivid flavour of the London advertising world in the 1970s. It is the definitive account of where the new discipline of account planning came from and what it aimed to do at a time when all advertising agencies were modelled on the typical structure of American agencies. The multinational agencies were relatively large and coherent entities in the sense that all the disciplines lived under the same roof.
The value of this historical perspective to readers in the fragmented world of communications planning today is enormous. Why? Because the job to be done is exactly the same in our more complex world as it was in what seems a much more orderly past.
The bitty, fractious media and agency environment together with the distractions of technology and social change often obscure this fact. Yet the intellectual logic that binds the whole process together is the same now as it was then and the themes in this section have important lessons for today.
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1
Who Do You Think You Are?
By Malcolm White, Planning Partner, krow
Of the articles presented in this wonderful book, 91% were written by Stephen King. The remaining 9% (or two articles) were written by the late John Treasure, formerly of JWT, and the late Stanley Pollitt, formerly of Boase Massimi Pollitt. Both these articles are collected here along with Stephen Kingâs account of the birth of account planning.
These three articles are quite different from the others in this collection. They are not directly concerned with marketing, brands or budget setting, nor with technical subjects like pre-testing. Nor are they theoretical or obviously polemical.
Instead, all the articles are concerned with events that happened almost 40 years ago. They are the story of something extraordinary that happened when three people who are sadly no longer with us, and a host of other individuals who are much less well known than these three authors, started thinking along similar lines. The extraordinary something was the development and introduction of account planning in agencies.
The story each article tells from slightly different perspectives is played out in a world that seems very different from our own: it is a world that is sketched out in the articles. Advertising agencies have marketing departments that plan new product development, that analyse the sales data for clients and present the results to them at their board meetings. Account men are called ârepresentativesâ (or at least they were at JWT), and we come across a roll-call of agencies that no longer exist or have probably been swallowed up by one mega-merger after another: Pritchard Wood and Partners, DPBS, OBM and Beagle, Bargle, DâAnnunzio, Twigg and Privet (the last of these is a favourite Stephen King joke: a spoof on the raft of small agencies that began springing up in the 1980s characterized by the name of virtually every employee on the door).
In short, these articles are firmly rooted in the past. They are history. Why then should the modern young planner in these time-pressed times give these articles the 30 minutes required to read them? The simple answer is that they will tell the modern young planner in these time-pressed times who they are, and what they should be.
Reading each of these articles is like coming across a box of old family photographs hidden in a dusty attic. And I donât just mean that these articles, like the old photographs, arenât looked at very often. The background and settings in the articles are certainly different from today, like the background and settings of years gone by in old family photographs. Many of the people mentioned in these articles arenât well known today; they are the equivalent of a shadowy figure in the back row of a formal family portrait.
But despite the obvious, superficial, differences between past and present there is a deep echo from the past in these articles that is slightly surprising but helps to explain why we are the way that we are, and even helps to explain the interests and preoccupations we have. A bit like spotting a family resemblance between yourself and a great, great aunt.
Have Planners Lost Touch with their Roots?
Planning has certainly changed and developed from the planning defined and practised by Stephen King, John Treasure and Stanley Pollitt. A certain amount of change is inevitable, but I think in the process many planners have drifted away from, and lost touch with, their roots, not always to the benefit of themselves, their agencies or their clients. I even suspect, from the conversations that I have, that todayâs planners under the age of 30 have little awareness of where they (and their job title) come from.
Reading these papers is at very least a comforting reconnection with the past and a return to roots. But there is something rather unsettling about these articles. They make me think that some of us are denying our roots, like someone from a working-class background in the North East who has succeeded in London and is slightly ashamed of his or her humble background. I think this because there are three clear lessons to be drawn from these three articles. They may surprise at least a few of the younger planning community.
1. Planning Was Never Intended to be Just about Imaginative Leaps or Just about Lateral Thinking
When attention has been paid to the story of the birth of planning over the last 40 years, too much of that attention has been focused on the differences in approach between the two agencies that could claim to have invented it. Reading the story of the development of planning at JWT (as told by Stephen King and John Treasure) and at BMP (as told by Stanley Pollitt), I was not only struck by the broad similarities but by the emphasis that both agencies put on thorough and rigorous planning, grounded in facts and realities.
JWTâs approach was grounded in client marketing realities and its Planning Department sprang from their Marketing Department. BMPâs approach was anchored by the reality of the consumer:
All creative work â and we mean all creative work â at BMP is checked out qualitatively with a tightly defined target market. . . To give some idea of scale we conducted some 1,200 groups last year which arguably makes us the largest qualitative research company in the country. (Pollitt)
This all feels quite different from current practice. So much of what I see in the planning of today (including in our own APG Planning Awards) is more about interesting ideas than it is about the right idea (or even a right idea). These three articles remind us that great planning isnât creativity; it is grounded creativity. Great planners are those who can flip between logical analysis and lateral flights of fancy, or as Jeremy Bullmore put it: âWe need to be intuitive, instinctive, scared and lucky AND we need to be rigorous, disciplined, logical and deductiveâ (Bullmore, 1991).
I think we need more of these sorts of people and less of those who are just âinterestingâ. For the planning species to thrive and prosper, it has to reject the specious.
2. Planning today is too concerned with downstream creative interventions at the expense of big, strategic thinking which happens upstream
Stephen King refers to his famous typology of planners in
The Anatomy of Account Planning:
I believe in fact that the most fundamental scale on which to judge account planners is one that runs from Grand Strategists to Advert Tweakers. And that nowadays there are rather too many agencies whose plannersâ skills are much too near the the advert-tweaking end of the scale.
Paul Feldwick (2007) has observed that âit would be fair to see JWT as closer to the former and BMP (at least by the 1980s) to the latter, though the choice is clearly somewhat loaded!â What Stephen King meant by âgrandâ at the extreme is clear from a later paper where he describes grand strategists as people who are âintellectual, aim to see the big picture, are a little bit above the fray, almost economistsâ (King, 1988). From my personal perspective, being âgrandâ by that definition is every bit as bad as being a tweaker. Also, more importantly, as marketing departments and consultants grew in number and in confidence, they tended to play this role.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that both agencies and planners have increasingly retrenched to the ad-tweaking end of the scale, even if few would call it that, and Stephenâs criticisms are even truer today.
Because of all this, I think we need to reassert the role of the planner in developing big, strategic upstream thoughts. Thoughts like âDirt is goodâ for Persil and Doveâs âCampaign For Real Beautyâ, for example, are big upstream thoughts. They neither belong to the camp of the Grand Strategist, nor to the party of the Ad Tweakers.
They are much more like the idea of the âstrategic conceptâ that John Treasure defines in his article:
Such strategic thinking and planning is especially valuable for the advertiser who is financially unable to match forces (or dollars) with a strongly established competitor. And it will be seen here that CREATIVE thinking may be even more valuable than in the area of messages, where most of the talk about âcreativityâ in advertising is focused.
To encourage us all to strive more often for these big upstream strategic concepts, we at The Account Planning Group will be unveiling a small, but important change to our biennial awards: from 2007 they will be called The APG Creative Strategy Awards (rather than Creative Planning Awards as they are today).
3. Planning was, and is, a force for changing advertising and communications, and the way agencies think and behave
Stephen King linked the futures of account planning and advertising in his article, and of course the stories that the three authors tell in their three articles is about the impact of planning on two agencies and on the world of advertising generally. Stanley Pollitt emphasizes that planning requires a particular agency environment in which to flourish, and he points out that the basic ground rules of advertising and how it is developed were also changed by planning.
In recent years there has been too much debate on the role and skills of account planners, and far too much emphasis on the planner as an inspired individual. This runs the risk of separating the planner from the process, the agencies and the clients.
To celebrate this broader role of planning we are creating a new award for our 2007 APG Strategy Awards. This award will be called The Stephen King Strategy Agency of the Year Award, and will award not an individual but the collective efforts of the planners in the agency that has done best in the awards.
But What a Brilliant Idea Account Planning was
Reading these articles brings home a point that I think has too often been obscured by the shadows of history, by our contemporary obsession with the future, and by always moving forward. The three articles illuminate, with the flash of a firework exploding in the pitch black sky, what a brilliant idea account planning was. It was as big an idea in the narrow context of 1960s advertising as Darwinâs idea of evolution was for the Victorian world.
To steal the words of the American philosopher David Dennett â meant for Darwin and his theory of evolution, I believe, and reading these three articles reminds me of this belief â account planning is âthe single best idea anyone has ever hadâ (quoted in Dupre, 2003).
Letâs not forget that.
And Finally . . . the Challenge to Planners in 2007
Forty years on from the invention of account planning in agencies, most of us are quite familiar with planning. Reading these articles makes this familiar thing â planning â strange and wonderful again.
They challenge all planners to take a long, hard look at themselves and what they do, and ask some searching questions:
⢠How does what you do as a planner, measure up to the vision of Stephen King and Stanley Pollitt?
⢠Ask yourself when was the last time you were rigorous, deductive and logical rather than just intuitive and lateral?
⢠When was the last time your interesting ideas were really grounded in facts, realities and data?
⢠When was the last time you came up with a big strategic concept for a brand? The correct answer to the last three, by the way, is: âJust last week, thank you very muchâ.
REFERENCES
Bullmore, J. (1991) Behind the Scenes in Advertising. NTC Publications.
Dupre, J. (2003) Darwinâs Legacy: What Evolution Means Today. Oxford University Press.
Feldwick, P. (2007) âAccount planning: Its history, and its significance for ad agenciesâ, in Ambler, T. and Tellis, G. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Advertising.
King, S. (1988) The Strategic Development of Brands â from an APG one-day event.
1.1
The Anatomy of Account Planning1
By Stephen King
Tracking account planning is rather like counting a mixed batch of tropical fish. You think you see patterns, but theyâve all changed by the time youâve finished counting.
Thereâs little enough doubt about its growth. Today most of the top UK agencies have planning departments and most of the recent new UK agency Weves have them built into the letter heading (at least one of Beagle, Bargle, DâAnnunzio, Twigg and Privet will be a planner).
Yet the current approach of agencies varies between the integral and the non-existent. I...
