Super Strategist

The Art and Science of Modern Account Planning

Lesley Bielby

• Publisher: Figure 1 Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781773271477
• eBook ISBN: 9781773271484
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Super Strategist: The Art and Science of Modern Account Planning is the only modern guide to advertising's arguably most vital discipline, that has been written with the passion of someone who's found their calling and the wisdom of an industry veteran who is still actively leading strategy in a large, modern, full-service agency. Super Strategist is full of practical advice for newcomers and usable strategies and insights for experienced planners, or anyone with an interest in the discipline. Readers will find clear outlines of the role of account planners within an agency, including step-by-step plans to achieve success with clients large and small: how to conduct modern consumer research, develop and implement the creative brief, use data skillfully to protect and improve great work, and use all of these tools and more to influence the feather in the planner's cap—the customer journey.Whether it's called account planning, brand planning, strategic planning, or creative strategy, the goal is the same: to inspire brilliant work that is backed by rigor and data. Creative is still king, but in today's fractured markets clients need to know their multi-million-dollar campaigns are supported by up-to-the-minute research and data-driven insights. Account planners ensure, as Douglas Atkins puts it in the foreword, that the work is idea-led, but consumer-informed. To find that perfect balance of art and science, the successful account planner is "X-shaped": experienced in digital, social, communications and brand strategy, comfortable in creative and quantitative disciplines—a Super Strategist who is the fulcrum of any successful agency.

six

Data and the Science of Strategic Planning

In the early days of advertising, until about a decade or so ago, the “art” of advertising was felt to be enough. An ad would win awards if it looked like a 60-second movie. That ad may have looked and felt amazing, but it didn’t always move the needle, and if it did, it was often by chance. Those days are over.

The single biggest shift in the use of research in our industry over the last decade is the sheer proliferation and use of data. All clients talk about today is data: the importance of data. The need for data. Data-infused insights. Data-informed solutions. The mantra “digital or die” has become “data or die.” If today’s planners and agencies are not data literate, they will not survive.

All this data can be incredibly overwhelming. When abused, it can hurt. When used properly, it is a beautiful thing.

The ability to form a complete data loop is a critical part of the success of any modern agency. At my company, pulling D&A into the core agency from its origins as a media-only function has been a very, very successful change for us. It demonstrated that the role of data extends well beyond media monitoring and optimization. Modern strategic planners, with their data analyst partners, need to help our clients understand the key role data can play in identifying business and consumer opportunities, through testing and learning and performance analytics. Planners need to navigate the whole data loop across the entire customer experience, without killing great ideas.

Why is this so important? Clients do not pay agencies a huge amount of money to think and approach problems in the same way that they do. They pay us to challenge them and think differently. They pay us for creative excellence. They want us to suggest new ideas and solutions by using the less analytical right side of our brains. But the stakes have never been higher (think of the average tenure of a CMO or CEO), and the tolerance for trial and error shrinks every quarter. The role of agencies today, and particularly strategic planners, is to strike the right balance of inspiring creative and reassuring data. Data is critical to support creative, but we can’t overcorrect and stifle new ideas. Data must provide insight and evidence that helps new ideas survive and thrive, so that the art and science of our craft are both represented throughout the process of creating advertising.

Creative is still king. And ad agencies still attract the best creative talent, despite the competition from in-house agencies; or consulting firms like Accenture, which provide rigor (and that have even gobbled up ad agencies); or big tech Alpha brands like Google, Apple, and Facebook. Why? Creative people want to work in a creative environment, with people who share a purpose, passion, and vision, which is to make amazing, effective work that they can be proud of. Also, brilliant creative people, who generally have short attention spans, do not want to spend all of their time working on one brand. And once they jump to the client or in-house or consultancy side, their portfolios will lack variety, so the longer their tenure, the harder it is to get back to the agency world. (Yes, consulting firms do work on multiple brands, but advertising is not their core expertise, so the culture of the company may be less desirable.) Most great creatives want to work at great agencies to keep themselves interested and engaged, and to keep their portfolios fresh.

Will that change in future? In all probability, it may, especially as marketing budgets continue to get squeezed, and the competition offers more attractive packages. But for the foreseeable future, I believe that ad agencies will continue to attract the best talent. However, no matter how great the talent and how great the creative, it will never be enough for today’s clients.

The work simply has to work.

If the work dazzles audiences, but doesn’t lead to measurable business results, CMOs will take the client’s business elsewhere (assuming they keep their job). Long gone are the legacy client agency relationships of 10 or 20 years or more. Clients today are nervous, and that makes them fickle, so agencies need to stay disciplined and ahead of the curve, looking out for every potential obstacle and opportunity.

When used well and selectively, data gives us a significantly greater chance of helping the work to work. It helps us understand our consumers better. It helps us determine what drives their emotions, behaviors, and decisions as they move through the path to purchase. It helps us to optimize positionings, ideas, and media channels and track the effectiveness of not only media choices, but also brand and business metrics. Data also gives us the ability to launch great, mold-breaking ideas, knowing that we have done everything in our power to help them, and our clients, be successful.

The Data Loop

When any agency is pitching for a piece of new business or planning a new or evolved strategic and creative direction for an existing brand, the strategic planner is at the center of the process, using research and data to inform and inspire themselves and others on the team. There are many stages, all relying on research and data: analyzing business data to help define what success looks like; finding consumer insight; testing positioning territories; pretesting creative concepts; doing in-market testing, such as AB testing; tracking brand and creative success; analyzing media effectiveness; and, ultimately, establishing if the team has met the KPIs of success.

It’s a cyclical process that is informed by a data loop, which, sadly, is not approached with this degree of rigor nearly enough, partially because not all agencies have the ideal conditions. To complete a data loop, it is best if:

• your agency has an in-house media team to plan and buy the client’s media
• your agency has an in-house decision science (D&A/research) team to help you plan and analyze the use of data
• your agency is owned by a holding company and has access to their data and tech capabilities, such as IPG’s Acxiom and Kinesso (although, typically, access isn’t free—you have to pay to play, in one way or another)
• you have media autonomy; that is, there is no pressure to partner with your client’s media team. If that’s the case, they will have a vested interest in keeping the data from you. After all, data is power. Agencies do not like exposing one another to their proprietary tools, processes, and approaches, lest they be stolen (and, of course, they will be).
• your client has integrated brand, digital, and/or social capabilities. Why any smaller or mid-sized brand would split these into different agencies is beyond me, as it is totally inefficient. For large clients and brands, the desire for specialization is understandable, but it’s not easy to execute—the separate agencies do not really like working with one another, as hard as they might try to get along.
• your client is not in a highly regulated industry, such as banking or pharmaceuticals, where privacy is paramount and data cannot be shared

Let’s assume that you do have in-house media (or an unusually fantastic relationship with your sister media agency). Where do you start, and where does data play a role?

The following approach is what I have found to be most successful when planning a brand launch or campaign. You do not need to go through this entire process for each and every brief campaign, only for significant new brand or campaign changes that will last for several years. “America runs on Dunkin’,” for example, has been the brand’s tagline for over 14 years now, and I do not see it changing anytime soon—even if the context and campaigns around it evolve to remain relevant, as culture and consumer beliefs and behaviors progress over time.

Data and research inform the work, which leads to more research and more data, which informs the work...

If the process looks lengthy, let me reassure you, it is not, and it cannot be. Done well, with the right team, each stage happens simultaneously with teams sharing their findings almost in real time. This whole process should take at least several weeks ideally, but it can take as little as 5–10 days, including proprietary research, if expedited. Clients do not have the patience or budgets for things to drag, so the more skilled you become at this type of planning work, the faster it will move, without sacrificing quality. Your clients will be happy, and so will your creatives—they are not going to let you take half or more of a 6-week total timeline to do your strategy work, while they are left with a paltry week or so to do the actual creative work.

However, a word of caution: as tempting as it is to expedite, do not rush this if at all possible. A new brand house, tagline, or big brand campaign idea is a big deal. It will significantly affect the future of the brand, so unless it is an emergency, don’t shortchange your clients or your team. Give this the attention it deserves, and it will yield great dividends.

The account planner needs to lead the charge and make it all happen. Throughout the process, data plays a critical role, informing, giving insight, validating hypotheses (or not), providing analytical rigor, all while ensuring that ideas remain intact or are enhanced by data.

The KPIs of Success

Advertising is not a magic bullet; one campaign rarely transforms a client’s business. But a good campaign should be able to create measurable change. The first part of the process is establishing how to measure that change, and what success will look like.

Do not skip this part, no matter how tempting to you and/or your clients. I know it’s exciting to get to the consumer insight work and write a juicy brief for the creatives, but if you skip this step it will be impossible to gauge your success. You will also ultimately waste time: endless hours will be spent spinning, debating strategy and creative, because you have no objectives against which to judge the work. It will come down to personal opinion. Or, should I say, opinions. Because there is never only one of them.

If the KPIs for success are not immediately available, do not give up. Even if clients are resisting because they want to get moving, you must insist on doing this work. Of course, herein lies the rub: there is a vulnerability in establishing KPIs, because they can establish failure as well as success. But isn’t it better to work with the benchmark or foundation of real metrics?

Frequently, agencies are given goals that are soft brand metrics, such as increasing brand awareness or consideration. While these are important, what you need to push for are specific business goals. Are online sales declining due to cheaper competition? If off-line sales are weak in a region, how can advertising reasonably help, and what level of investment would be needed to do so? What goal can advertising credibly help achieve? What other activations are happening in that region other than advertising? Is your KPI for success stealing a percentage of the share from a competitor? If so, what percentage share seems reasonable, based on past data and media spend?

Sometimes the marketing team says they cannot find the relevant data or they do not understand their data. I guarantee there is someone within the organization who can find it, and who does understand it. Find that person, pull in your account leads and analytics team, and work with them (and the marketing team if they will jump in) to figure out what needs to be done and how advertising can help.

If this person does not exist (it’s rare, but it happens), then ask your client if they are willing (and legally able) to share any data, so that you can crunch the numbers with the help of your decision science team. If they cannot share data, you may have to rely on what’s publicly available. There is plenty of it out there, and it brings at least some rigor to the process. And if you are part of a holding company and are lucky enough to have access to its data stack, then go at it. For the purpose of illustration, I will assume that this is not the case (the reality for most small to mid-sized agencies).

If you...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• one
• two
• three
• four
• five
• six
• seven
• eight
• Acknowledgments