The account planning cycle devised by Stephen King in the 1970s is still sound in principle, though the means of achieving it have evolved radically.
Adapted from Stephen King, Planning Guide, white paper, JWT London, March 1974.
When people ask what I do for a living, I feel an odd sense of discomfort saying, “I work in advertising.” Why? Because it feels dated. It feels perhaps even weirder to explain, “I work at an ad agency.” I know they’re picturing Don Draper in a snappy suit, cigarette and TV storyboards in hand, and not the latest trending Instagram Stories or TikTok posts.
To understand the modern account planner and their equally modern tool kit, let’s first ground ourselves by taking a look at the changes in their natural environment—today’s advertising agency and the brands they promote.
The word “advertising” carries not only the negative baggage of the Mad Men era, but also the implication that it’s a one-way street—me, the slick marketer, pitching to you, the unsuspecting consumer. “Advertising” implies that one is advertised to versus engaged with. As anyone in today’s industry knows, the idea of talking to (or, rather, at) people to sell them something has gone the way of the rotary phone. The consumer has never been more sophisticated or better prepared to fend off unwanted messages with ad blocking. Appointment viewing? You may as well show up at their door with a case full of encyclopedias.
So, what is the right word these days? For those of you in the industry, I’m sure you have sat in client meetings where everyone avoided the dilemma by talking about “communications” and “content,” instead of “advertising.” We don’t talk about “TV” but, instead, refer to “video.” (But ignore the rumors that TV is dying—the context of TV has changed but it remains strong, even if we do now call it “video.”) With print almost dead, radio declining, and digital and social seeing meteoric growth, is this still an advertising industry? What does the word “advertise” even mean? Let’s consult the lexico.com definition:
ad·ver·tise • /ˈadvətʌɪz/
verb
Take a deep breath—advertising is simply drawing attention to a product to promote action. So, isn’t what we do today still advertising? I believe it is.
What has changed is the sheer quantity of media, channels, and platforms at our disposal. We now spend several hours every day on our phone, looking at apps and websites stuffed with messaging, much of it irrelevant. Advertising and brands are everything and everywhere now—not just traditional channels, but also every single potential consumer touchpoint and experience. That is what makes it so hard to engage people and pull them in.
Our limited attention spans make it even more difficult. In the 1960s, when media channels were scant and fewer brands existed, you could trust that if you put an ad out there in a TV show, most of the audience would get the same impression. And if it were a popular program, like The Andy Griffith Show, then you knew that a huge proportion of the population experienced the same brand exposure and would later have similar brand recall.
Over the last couple decades or so, as the media landscape has fragmented beyond recognition, advertisers have at times acted like petulant toddlers, stamping our feet for attention. You may remember the (ultimately, banned) ad for Cyberian Outpost from the beginning of the dot-com era, which showed and literally coined the phrase “shooting gerbils out of a cannon”?
At our best, however, we have created content that is so rich and compelling that it made old, stodgy brands famous again in record time. A great example is the relaunch of the aging brand Old Spice. The “Smell Like a Man, Man” campaign by Wieden+Kennedy launched at the 2010 Super Bowl and set social media on fire, quickly racking up 40 million YouTube views. Did it work? Within 30 days of the campaign launch, sales of Old Spice bodywash increased 107 percent. You bet it worked.
But this campaign ran over a decade ago, when things were a lot simpler. The attention of today’s consumer must be earned. It is more important than ever for advertisers to create authentic interactions. We can’t just bait the consumer; we need to offer something of value. Something they choose to spend time with and even seek out. Something unexpected that provides a connection that is not just a one-way street, but also a freeway of valuable information and useful ideas.
To that end, it has been impossible for account planning to stand still. So, how has it evolved? Who is the modern account planner, and what role should they play in our industry today? Let’s start at the beginnings.
In 1964, Stephen King, of acclaimed London ad agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT), was deeply frustrated. His teams were developing advertising with little or no consumer input, resulting in ineffective campaigns for his clients.
Four years later, Stanley Pollitt of the equally acclaimed BMP London grew concerned for similar reasons. His account management department was not using any data or consumer research to provide rigor and inspiration to their creative briefs. He began to suspect what we all know to be true today: great briefs are much more likely to result in famous and effective advertising that benefits not only agencies, but, critically, also their clients.
Because King and Pollitt believed that “the empty chair” (the consumer) was not being represented during campaign development, each independently developed a new and exciting advertising agency discipline, one that focused entirely on the consumer’s relationship with brands and advertising, and brought together skills and insights from disciplines like media planning, research, brand consulting, and account management. In the mid-1960s, account planning was born.
Almost 2 decades later, in 1982, Jay Chiat of Chiat\Day noticed this new discipline. Chiat already believed that British creative ideas were generally stronger than American ideas, and he decided to make the historic move of hiring Jane Newman, a British account planner, to develop the role to fit within his already successful New York agency, inspiring better, more effective work. His experiment succeeded beyond his dreams—within a decade, Chiat\Day’s annual billings shot up from $50 million to $700 million, proving that account planning, when done well, can be a game changer. It didn’t take long for the rest of the world to catch on, with most agencies across most continents adopting account planning quickly and effectively by importing their own “British planner” to spearhead the approach.
From the 1970s through to the mid-1990s (pre-Internet), account planning’s role was relatively simple. The planning cycle, as defined by Stephen King in 1974 (see page 9), was more or less fixed. With chart in hand, the actions required by the account planner to complete the cycle were:
The account planning cycle devised by Stephen King in the 1970s is still sound in principle, though the means of achieving it have evolved radically.
Adapted from Stephen King, Planning Guide, white paper, JWT London, March 1974.
A talented and intuitive account planner would show empathy with the intended audience and make the work more relevant. The idea would then be stronger and more likely to emerge from the painful process of copy testing relatively unscathed and survive the inevitable layers of client approval. By the time I entered the London advertising industry in 1990, each agency, with few exceptions, had a robust account planning department that played a pivotal role in the development of effective work.
These basic principles continue to be the foundation of good planning, though the practice has evolved tremendously, almost beyond recognition. The duopoly of Google and Facebook has swallowed up the majority of today’s online ad market, and when it comes to convenience, scale, and, of course, consumer data, ad agencies cannot begin to compete with the cookie monsters. This isn’t necessarily a question of one industry replacing another, as has been heavily reported, but more about agencies working in collaboration with tech companies. The process is now more integrated, less linear, and more complex, demanding multiple skills across digital, social, and brand strategy.
In addition, despite the huge and important proliferation of technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), we have to remember that the human brain has always been composed of two, not just one, parts. Modern planners and modern agencies need to use every tool and technology (and data partner) at their disposal and also provide something that is not purely algorithm based—and much harder to replicate. And that is the intangible but powerful strategic and creative human elements.