Erwin Ephron

The Flying Account Planner

Today’s strategic planner has broad horizons,
but no proper home.

The late Stanley Pollitt, a brilliant advertising man at Boase Massimi Pollitt in the UK, is said to have invented strategic planning. More accurately he invented the strategic planner, since agencies could make fair claim to the strategy thing before Stanley. What Pollitt did that was revolutionary, was to turn a shared task of the agency brand team (strategic planning) into a staff assignment (strategic planner). He focused agencies on the primary importance of developing a consumer-oriented brand plan by putting a researcher in charge of doing it, and made that person co-equal with account management and creative. By now the embroidered function is familiar. The account planner is described as the consumer’s representative, the brand’s champion and the communication plan’s architect. She or he is said to have broad knowledge of consumer behavior through research and to know brand marketing and marketing communications.

The planner uses these skills to lead, shape and give nuance to the development of a brand strategy to the point where the craftsmen - writers, art directors and media planners - can take-over and create the campaign. It sounds like a high-powered way to create advertising until you realize it’s a full-service agency concept at a time when full-service agencies are kaput.

The clinker in account planning is the rise of the media agency as the brand’s other marketing partner. With media separated from creative, where you put the account planner is important, because he who controls strategic planning, controls the account.

The traditional answer would have been “put account planning at the creative agency” but that often doesn’t work today. Creative agencies are too transient. Creative loses accounts, media doesn’t. So in a strange twist the media agency may become the seat of account planning simply because creative is too important not to be able to fire. But to be effective the account planner needs to sit with creative, not send emails. This suggests major structural changes lie ahead if the benefits of account planning are to be realized.

Either it will be absorbed by the brand group itself, which is probably where it belongs, or agencies will have to rebundle around a new concept of creative management. The supreme importance of creative means advertisers need choice. But no agency provides choice, only the illusion. When they present the work, they’ve already picked the winner. To get choice, advertisers need more than one creative agency. The upside is any talent with a pencil can be in the running. That means the new full-service agency will develop the strategy, manage the budget, plan the media, and supervise the creative by contracting with creative shops for competing campaigns. And why not? Agencies understand creative management better than anyone. The flying account planner will finally have a home.