First thought: Planning has left the agency and ventured forth into the wider world -into consulting, client internal departments, media agencies, etc. (taking it's power with it). It also seems less impressive out there -less grounded when separated from the creative.
yes I wonder if it is even "planning" if it isnt demarcated from a creative department that gets briefed? I dont even call it that, I separate work into projects (where I am the creative/entrepreneur/strategist) and consulting (pay for thinking hours)
planners have certainly spread though, and taken a style of thought with them?
the interesting thing is I think most current tendencies in planning (and its mirror image our point of view on the world 'out there') were kicking around in the early 1990s we called it postmodernism then, mary goodyear's papers being a fairly representative summary of what people were thinking. The trouble was that then it didnt have an agency outlet except as 'trends'. I remember a VW strategy presentation I wrote back then on car sharing & similar - I was told by the agency chairman to go away and come back with something that had something remotely to do with advertising. Only the avant garde brands like Tango got to actually turn those insights into anything which affected the creative output. Although even then it was changing with the growth of relationship marketing, experiential marketing, cool chasing & so on :J
I became a digital planner 6 years ago and before that was a client who worked with Planners. I think it is a combination of media fragmentation and channel diversity which has changed planning since then.
Planners now have to understand the whole marketing experience as success no longer is possible through telling everyone something on TV inspiring them to remember to choose something on the high street. It is about understanding how diverse media and purchase channels work together. Not all these media are new some are the same just more targeted and sometimes the best method is our audience themselves. It also means planners from different types of agencies have to work together. Yes the internet helps but so does tea and biscuits with the other agencies planners whilst thrashing out the best integrated plan for a client.
the original idea of planning (at BMP anyway) was that instead of having a separate market research department generating insights, target audience definitions, candidate propositions - it would make some sense for there to be an ongoing conversation - and for the agency to hire people that would come to understand both the research and also the creative process of developing ad ideas
if you read the early ipa effectiveness papers they did come up with some brilliant lateral strategies, that seemed to be their 'speciality' eg given the brief 'use advertising to reduce crime' the agency response was an ad campaign persuading people to fit window locks.
somehow (my view) in the interim some of that flexibility got lost around advertising, as things settled into a mature consensus on how advertising was supposed to look and supposed to work. we lost the sense of R&D, the sense of not knowing how it was supposed to work. the gift that new media brought, when i was a planner (although i dont think i really understood this at the time) was the reintroduction of a basic uncertainty. on the st lukes brief the key box (there were only two) said 'how is this going to work?' that would have functioned pretty well as the creative brief at BMP c1975 too.
my concern is that integration can be yet another attempt to formalise and hence be 'expert' and 'reassuring' but ultimately not trailblazing. many clients of course are not even looking for breakthrough they are looking for maintenance of the status quo, and consensus based planning is better for them, it's just hard to see in many cases it actually added anything vs a standard agency brief which says 'do something pretty typical for the category but with a new creative twist'
meanwhile the broader application of the 'how will it work?' mentality has served very well in business concept innovation (Gary Hamel eg in Revolution writes like an old school BMP planner)
just thinking aloud, it's so nice to be back in this conversation, I am feeling quite nostlagic for planning dept meetings back at st luke's now :J
This is an inspiring idea John! Well done you. Put my name down.
I feel there is a growing respect for business focused strategy that re-frames problems and delivers growth. Agencies still place far too much importance on award winning creative over effectiveness. The two should be hand in hand, but planners still allow adland friendly creative to upstage business effect.
Tactics are becoming appreciated, so we can be creative with approaches not just messaging. This might bee a sign of a growing maturity within communications.
This may also be a response to the desire for comms planning rather than just advertising (which I gather is simply a step back to how things were before the creative/media split but now with more options to consider).
I feel agencies still promoting messaging over experiences have had their day. Great messaging tends to deliver growth through big ad spending, but experiences of products and the business itself deliver long term recommendation which is the real driver of growth. I feel we should focus on this over messaging if we are to be truly useful to clients.
I like your thought about new media introducing uncertainty. Perhaps only within an environment of exciting uncertainty can the leaps in business approaches that deliver results be spawned. I'd like to think therefore that planning may be changing to become more useful to businesses (as Emily notes), but I feel this may only be fully achieved if we bypass the marketing dept and report directly into the CEO.
Perhaps the next change is for planners to provide new ideas beyond marketing as standard. Whether your VW chairman would buy them from us these days is the test. Otherwise, we'd be best to stick to our messaging.
When we get enough thought starters, can we split them into separate posts so we can address them individually?
I could go on and on about media/comms planning. And I could also take a devil's advocate stance against separating planning from creative in the first place.
And now there's the emerging trend of planners getting even more involved in the creative -actually (gasp) brainstorming ideas (I think primarily due to media fragmentation and the need to lead the thinking and/or communicate the big idea via concrete examples)
I wouldn't call this something that has changed Planning 'the most', but more and more of Planning's role (certainly here Ooop North) seems to be as Trainer, i.e. helping other people (especially account handling types) to write better briefs, understand client's businesses better etc.
This is especially important as today the original man-marking account director/planner relationship isn't economic on all but the biggest accounts.
Not sure if I offer an entirely different perspective… but maybe there’s some benefit in clarity on the basics. I haven’t been as exposed to UK planning and in other parts of the world the role seems slightly different… if not broader.
For over a decade, my roles have been primarily to re-focus everyone on the current consumer reality to enhance creative, communications, business models, product innovation, etc. While creative strategy is integral, I see it as the culmination of the more upstream thinking, which is key to drawing a line around what communications can and can’t achieve (rather than a catch-all solution). Until recently, integrated communication choice seemed to rest on the shoulders of the account planner, while media departments focused on traditional media... giving rise to connection planning. And I’ve often used research to re-jig the marketing mix balance for a more cohesive experience, in addition to uncovering insights that translate to potent creative.
Today, planning seems to be used as an infusion of innovation to continuously re-draw consumer boundaries. It now permeates specialty/emerging media, research, marketing/brand consultancies, agencies, client groups, etc. I almost see endless application and adoption of consumer understanding.
So, here are my questions:
1. What was the role of planning 40 years ago? How widely was it adopted? 2. What are the boundaries to the arena of this discussion? Are we focusing just on planning in ad agencies, media agencies, emerging media specialists, etc? 3. How would we define as planning today?
"... more and more of Planning's role seems to be as Trainer, i.e. helping other people (especially account handling types) to write better briefs, understand client's businesses better etc." - Gemma.
I think 'trainer' or 'learner' is a great way to describe Planning role.
Ultimately, a Planner is helping a client learn more about their customers by helping to make a 'something' and seeing how people respond to it. Businesses (good ones) use agencies (good ones) to learn how to be better. Simple.
The explosion of newness that digital introduced is captured with the excitement of learning. That's how people express themselves in this new world of speed and uncertainty. They learn to adapt and adapting is fun, even moreso if you can learn alongside other people. So we egg each other on.
Learning (not 'education') is something everyone can share and be enthusiastic about. If this industry reframed 'communications' as 'learnings' customers would be genuinely fascinated by what the industry produces for them because they'd be learning something about themselves and each other. If business itself adapted that frame, well... great things would happen. Look at Google. Google shares what it learns from you FOR you and for everyone else (within limits). It's a learning company. In the world of the web, it's who learns fastest and deepest wins. Agency-land is so far behind, but it has unique opportunities. Anyway...
'How will it work?' as a response to brief, although highly practical, seems to me a bit blackbox and disconnected. What a customer really wants to know is, 'How do I work?' Help them figure that out and you have a friend.
The BIG brief, the one we all share between people, agency, and business, is: 'How do WE work?' Quite literally: 'How is it I am what I am with these needs and these passions and these abilities?' 'What does my life mean?' 'How do I/should I work in this world?'
Simply, we ALL want to be a bit better so let's just help each other learn how to achieve that.
the trainer thought (i'm tempted to use the word 'coach') does seem to have potential as the container for lots of interesting themes.
One as adam says is to focus on practise. What we actually do as opposed to 'the theory in theory'.
Another is the (over)view that what's changed in general in the last 40 years is that emergent/systemic thinking has tended to replace linear/mechanistic thinking in many fields, perhaps including ours?
The somewhat recent Americanization of planning seems to have created the uninspired role of "planner as cheerleader".
Seems as though 'planners' are often called into the room just to create some sort of social-scientific justification to clients for any idea that may pop up.
I think it reflects very well the idea about our role in Italy right now, to warm up the audience before the "real creatives" enter the stage.
I think that probably we must discuss about the role of "strategy" (I like to define myself on my Linkedin page as a Brand Strategist) what is our horizon today? A campaign? A season? A single event?
have you seen the trumpet polygamous wedding what is connections planning presso? They pitch planners as the new creatives - creating ideas that are no longer bound to art direction expressions - Nike ID and that.
It's a thought. I still think we think about stuff for other people, but no reason we can't have ideas sometimes.
Also thought - In Truth Lies etc Steel talks about planners used to be outsourced marketing strategy business planning function. Sometimes I still work like that. Quite a lot in fact as I don't work at an advertising agency.
Something Dan Ng once said to me - strategists were a competitive advantage that have become a competitive necessity for any marcomms firm of whatever discipline.
Most cynical thought about planning: advertising needed a role that was specifically designed to attract real smart people (who felt a creative impulse) so they didn't go and become lawyers.
Thought: planning thinking needs to encompass what would traditionally be thought of as account and media planning - they don't make any sense without each other - you don't understand people if you don't understand mediation today.
Hope that meeting went well - sorry couldn't be there.
Faris wrote: advertising needed a role that was specifically designed to attract real smart people (who felt a creative impulse) so they didn't go and become lawyers
*My* cynical self thinks that sometimes advertising has needed a person they can roll out to meetings in a 'look! we're not complete philistines, we have smart people too' way.
Hope I'm not repeating too much of what's been said ... I think that the influence of media fragmentation on account planning has only really started to be felt relatively recently. In that historically the brief was all about a single thought or proposition. Where as now in many/most? situations the communication needs to be planned in several stages. Of course media fragmentation itself hasn't changed this but media fragmentation led to media agencies developing there strategic abilities and in general media agencies have been better than most ad agencies at understanding how different media might relate to different mindsets and how active and passive mindsets require different messages and how brand and retail work together or the integration between brand and rational evidence messaging etc. And also how the timing of the message can be so influencial. A single minded proposition type brief doesn't include these issues but more and more in an ad literate, cynical, hyper competitive market these issues are really crucial. I think this is has a huge influence on planning and one that makes planning potentially a much bigger contributor to clients businesses especially as it lends itself to product development and things like store design etc. Although to some of the other comments perhaps this close to where planning was when it started? I've always liked Jeremy Bullmore's comment on how somewhere in the 80's seduced by rock start marketing directors and award ceremonies we become obssessed about advertisements rather than advertising. Perhaps we are coming full circle?
I believe the entrepreneurial spirit of the planner has helped our discipline thrive over the last 40 years. Our ability to not only identify the need for change but to embrace it has helped drive our industry forward.
Continuously explore and invent new research techniques Try new and interesting ways of working with and briefing creatives Willing to go beyond communications and help clients invent products and change business models To learn what we don’t know as we go along and to share what we have learnt
The very creation of ‘planning’ was, to a certain degree, driven by this entrepreneurial spirit. Taking a risk in an attempt to improve the way we do things.
I think planning has indeed gone full circle but we are entering into a new dimension.
By that i mean we have to ground ourselves in real world insights driven through research and customer data analysis. But the change is denoted by the change in the questions we ask.
It's not about asking people what they think or might consider anymore, instead it's about asking them about how they behave and how they'd like brands behave.
In response to this we call planning at iris Behaviour Planning where we strive to understand advocacy drivers & destroyers and the snakes and ladders of different purchase journeys.
Our end game is about understanding what we can do to activate profitable behavioural change for both the consumer and the brand.
Key to achieving this is by understanding the cultural context of the brands and consumers we work with and translating that into marketing activity be that anything from NPD to an integrated campaign.
this is all very interesting, do keep thoughts and comments coming - I'll use this thread down the line to pull out some key thoughts & quotes & debates :J
I'm not sure trying to re-define planning as something different on the basis of it no longer being the sole preserve of advertising is necessarily useful. Planning has evolved to meet the changing needs of communication and the consumer...
It started in ad land with account planning (actually at BMP I was led to believe - you can't do a 40 year retrospective without a mention for Stanley Pollitt!?). Starting as a grad at BMP was an inspiration but even with their planning might I wonder if planning would really have been seen as a successful model without the creative genius of John Webster at the other end of it? anyway...
In my view it started as a way of harnessing consumer insight and applying it in a business relevant way to give direction for advertising creation, which, by and large was pretty much the dominant if not only form of communication for decades.
The 1950's saw the spread of home television sets and post-war consumerism where brands slowly realised they needed more than a jingle and a USP to maintain a market position. By the 1960's they also needed to look sexy and mass communication was firmly established so things got more difficult and competitive. Planning came along and got us closer to consumers, further from competitors and better linked to ROI, all good stuff.
Thing is, this all pretty recent, 40 years is not a long time. For example, to my parents generation TV was a new thing, our generation grew up with it but thought computers were magic, our kids are completely comfortable with both and a host of other technologies.
So people got used to brands being in their homes, and loved them. We still love ads but we're used to them now and are more savvy. The argument about viewing fragmentation is a bit of a red herring (though important) - fundamentally people want more.
The advertising discipline failed to keep up with this by and large. Ad land was still focused on the 30" spot (a 40" if they could get one) and really precious of the advertising execution (its their bread and butter). Although the account planners still did great work on brand essence and positioning keeping their top table relationship with the client, the expression of planning was, I think, limited. It became a discipline more about agreeing the client brief and helping the suits sell the advertising ideas.
Look at the IPA effectiveness papers, many (not all) are far from convincing actually ..."we did some advertising and sales went up", this is what advertsining should do surely! is this really a success for planning or just awareness?
Wuth ad agencies fiercely defending 'the ad' this left a whole space for media agencies to enter, a new business opportunity responding to what the clients wanted.
As media agencies dropped their rates to win business they needed other disciplines in their armoury from digital,DM, event, sponsorship etc. and so they started moving from the placement of ads in TTL media to talking about integrated communication.
Media planning was created as a strange hybrid of account manager and planner. In mid 1990's (?) their role was more channel planner i.e. justifying the media selection and its deployment in a clear theme and doing creative things now and then usually to amplify the advertising, sometimes coming up with big ideas independent of the advertising but usually these were quite tactical.
By 2000, the 'strategic planner' had become established in media agencies, an addition to media planners, their remit was to work closer with clients to drive brand level strategic thinking, to challenge the brief and come up with communication strategies, that, as they understood, often operated on an entirely different level to the advertising campaign idea. Only recently have we begun to scrutinise and classify these approaches.
Similarly the way to engage consumers became more complex, its not just about messaging and image any more, so there are now specialist planners withing channel disciplines; digital planners for example.
This, to be is the exciting new age of planning we are in. We still do what we did 40 years ago - we still shape insight, understand the business needs and brief (different) disciplines but rather than hand this brief over we also now steer the ideas that result from our work and there are many different types of idea out there.
Part and parcel of this is of course acting like a 'trainer' in getting disciplines to work together to a central theme and with different ideas but its quite an arrogant view. Frankly there exists in the industry expertise in disciplines that is as good and as important as 'strategic planning'
Maybe we sometimes get planning confused with getting everything a brand does to be consistent, maybe its about doing different things with a consistent tone (a la Nike) - here the expertisie in understanding how a channel or piece of content can be used to engage the consumer is of equal importance to 'the strategy' and I know plenty of channel experts who frankly feel that they have to train their planners!
John Grant is author of Co-opportunity (Jan10) and the award winning 'Green Marketing Manifesto' (Oct07), and three previous books. John was a co-founder of St Luke's the socially aware ad agency and is the co-founder of Ecoinomy which applies community self organising principles and social web platforms to greening the office through behaviour change. Contact me at john.grant(AT)ecoinomy.com
27 comments:
First thought: Planning has left the agency and ventured forth into the wider world -into consulting, client internal departments, media agencies, etc. (taking it's power with it). It also seems less impressive out there -less grounded when separated from the creative.
The internet. Suddenly we weren't isolated as a few planners (or just one) in an agency, but part of a global community sharing ideas and insights.
hurrah, comments, suddenly this all seems real!
yes I wonder if it is even "planning" if it isnt demarcated from a creative department that gets briefed? I dont even call it that, I separate work into projects (where I am the creative/entrepreneur/strategist) and consulting (pay for thinking hours)
planners have certainly spread though, and taken a style of thought with them?
the interesting thing is I think most current tendencies in planning (and its mirror image our point of view on the world 'out there') were kicking around in the early 1990s we called it postmodernism then, mary goodyear's papers being a fairly representative summary of what people were thinking. The trouble was that then it didnt have an agency outlet except as 'trends'. I remember a VW strategy presentation I wrote back then on car sharing & similar - I was told by the agency chairman to go away and come back with something that had something remotely to do with advertising. Only the avant garde brands like Tango got to actually turn those insights into anything which affected the creative output. Although even then it was changing with the growth of relationship marketing, experiential marketing, cool chasing & so on :J
I became a digital planner 6 years ago and before that was a client who worked with Planners. I think it is a combination of media fragmentation and channel diversity which has changed planning since then.
Planners now have to understand the whole marketing experience as success no longer is possible through telling everyone something on TV inspiring them to remember to choose something on the high street. It is about understanding how diverse media and purchase channels work together. Not all these media are new some are the same just more targeted and sometimes the best method is our audience themselves. It also means planners from different types of agencies have to work together. Yes the internet helps but so does tea and biscuits with the other agencies planners whilst thrashing out the best integrated plan for a client.
the 'tea and biscuits' model is a keeper :J
the original idea of planning (at BMP anyway) was that instead of having a separate market research department generating insights, target audience definitions, candidate propositions - it would make some sense for there to be an ongoing conversation - and for the agency to hire people that would come to understand both the research and also the creative process of developing ad ideas
if you read the early ipa effectiveness papers they did come up with some brilliant lateral strategies, that seemed to be their 'speciality' eg given the brief 'use advertising to reduce crime' the agency response was an ad campaign persuading people to fit window locks.
somehow (my view) in the interim some of that flexibility got lost around advertising, as things settled into a mature consensus on how advertising was supposed to look and supposed to work. we lost the sense of R&D, the sense of not knowing how it was supposed to work. the gift that new media brought, when i was a planner (although i dont think i really understood this at the time) was the reintroduction of a basic uncertainty. on the st lukes brief the key box (there were only two) said 'how is this going to work?' that would have functioned pretty well as the creative brief at BMP c1975 too.
my concern is that integration can be yet another attempt to formalise and hence be 'expert' and 'reassuring' but ultimately not trailblazing. many clients of course are not even looking for breakthrough they are looking for maintenance of the status quo, and consensus based planning is better for them, it's just hard to see in many cases it actually added anything vs a standard agency brief which says 'do something pretty typical for the category but with a new creative twist'
meanwhile the broader application of the 'how will it work?' mentality has served very well in business concept innovation (Gary Hamel eg in Revolution writes like an old school BMP planner)
just thinking aloud, it's so nice to be back in this conversation, I am feeling quite nostlagic for planning dept meetings back at st luke's now :J
This is an inspiring idea John! Well done you. Put my name down.
I feel there is a growing respect for business focused strategy that re-frames problems and delivers growth. Agencies still place far too much importance on award winning creative over effectiveness. The two should be hand in hand, but planners still allow adland friendly creative to upstage business effect.
Tactics are becoming appreciated, so we can be creative with approaches not just messaging. This might bee a sign of a growing maturity within communications.
This may also be a response to the desire for comms planning rather than just advertising (which I gather is simply a step back to how things were before the creative/media split but now with more options to consider).
I feel agencies still promoting messaging over experiences have had their day. Great messaging tends to deliver growth through big ad spending, but experiences of products and the business itself deliver long term recommendation which is the real driver of growth. I feel we should focus on this over messaging if we are to be truly useful to clients.
I like your thought about new media introducing uncertainty. Perhaps only within an environment of exciting uncertainty can the leaps in business approaches that deliver results be spawned. I'd like to think therefore that planning may be changing to become more useful to businesses (as Emily notes), but I feel this may only be fully achieved if we bypass the marketing dept and report directly into the CEO.
Perhaps the next change is for planners to provide new ideas beyond marketing as standard. Whether your VW chairman would buy them from us these days is the test. Otherwise, we'd be best to stick to our messaging.
Ooh this is good.
When we get enough thought starters, can we split them into separate posts so we can address them individually?
I could go on and on about media/comms planning. And I could also take a devil's advocate stance against separating planning from creative in the first place.
And now there's the emerging trend of planners getting even more involved in the creative -actually (gasp) brainstorming ideas (I think primarily due to media fragmentation and the need to lead the thinking and/or communicate the big idea via concrete examples)
I wouldn't call this something that has changed Planning 'the most', but more and more of Planning's role (certainly here Ooop North) seems to be as Trainer, i.e. helping other people (especially account handling types) to write better briefs, understand client's businesses better etc.
This is especially important as today the original man-marking account director/planner relationship isn't economic on all but the biggest accounts.
great idea emily - a typology of topics (if that isnt a tautology) - lets let the room fill somewhat & then see :J
Not sure if I offer an entirely different perspective… but maybe there’s some benefit in clarity on the basics. I haven’t been as exposed to UK planning and in other parts of the world the role seems slightly different… if not broader.
For over a decade, my roles have been primarily to re-focus everyone on the current consumer reality to enhance creative, communications, business models, product innovation, etc. While creative strategy is integral, I see it as the culmination of the more upstream thinking, which is key to drawing a line around what communications can and can’t achieve (rather than a catch-all solution). Until recently, integrated communication choice seemed to rest on the shoulders of the account planner, while media departments focused on traditional media... giving rise to connection planning. And I’ve often used research to re-jig the marketing mix balance for a more cohesive experience, in addition to uncovering insights that translate to potent creative.
Today, planning seems to be used as an infusion of innovation to continuously re-draw consumer boundaries. It now permeates specialty/emerging media, research, marketing/brand consultancies, agencies, client groups, etc. I almost see endless application and adoption of consumer understanding.
So, here are my questions:
1. What was the role of planning 40 years ago? How widely was it adopted?
2. What are the boundaries to the arena of this discussion? Are we focusing just on planning in ad agencies, media agencies, emerging media specialists, etc?
3. How would we define as planning today?
j.
"... more and more of Planning's role seems to be as Trainer, i.e. helping other people (especially account handling types) to write better briefs, understand client's businesses better etc." - Gemma.
I think 'trainer' or 'learner' is a great way to describe Planning role.
Ultimately, a Planner is helping a client learn more about their customers by helping to make a 'something' and seeing how people respond to it. Businesses (good ones) use agencies (good ones) to learn how to be better. Simple.
The explosion of newness that digital introduced is captured with the excitement of learning. That's how people express themselves in this new world of speed and uncertainty. They learn to adapt and adapting is fun, even moreso if you can learn alongside other people. So we egg each other on.
Learning (not 'education') is something everyone can share and be enthusiastic about. If this industry reframed 'communications' as 'learnings' customers would be genuinely fascinated by what the industry produces for them because they'd be learning something about themselves and each other. If business itself adapted that frame, well... great things would happen. Look at Google. Google shares what it learns from you FOR you and for everyone else (within limits). It's a learning company. In the world of the web, it's who learns fastest and deepest wins. Agency-land is so far behind, but it has unique opportunities. Anyway...
'How will it work?' as a response to brief, although highly practical, seems to me a bit blackbox and disconnected. What a customer really wants to know is, 'How do I work?' Help them figure that out and you have a friend.
The BIG brief, the one we all share between people, agency, and business, is: 'How do WE work?' Quite literally: 'How is it I am what I am with these needs and these passions and these abilities?' 'What does my life mean?' 'How do I/should I work in this world?'
Simply, we ALL want to be a bit better so let's just help each other learn how to achieve that.
(Sort of thing...)
the trainer thought (i'm tempted to use the word 'coach') does seem to have potential as the container for lots of interesting themes.
One as adam says is to focus on practise. What we actually do as opposed to 'the theory in theory'.
Another is the (over)view that what's changed in general in the last 40 years is that emergent/systemic thinking has tended to replace linear/mechanistic thinking in many fields, perhaps including ours?
The somewhat recent Americanization of planning seems to have created the uninspired role of "planner as cheerleader".
Seems as though 'planners' are often called into the room just to create some sort of social-scientific justification to clients for any idea that may pop up.
This happens more than we'd like to admit.
Hi
I like the idea of planner as a cheerleader!
I think it reflects very well the idea about our role in Italy right now, to warm up the audience before the "real creatives" enter the stage.
I think that probably we must discuss about the role of "strategy" (I like to define myself on my Linkedin page as a Brand Strategist) what is our horizon today? A campaign? A season? A single event?
hey chief,
have you seen the trumpet polygamous wedding what is connections planning presso? They pitch planners as the new creatives - creating ideas that are no longer bound to art direction expressions - Nike ID and that.
It's a thought. I still think we think about stuff for other people, but no reason we can't have ideas sometimes.
Also thought - In Truth Lies etc Steel talks about planners used to be outsourced marketing strategy business planning function. Sometimes I still work like that. Quite a lot in fact as I don't work at an advertising agency.
Something Dan Ng once said to me - strategists were a competitive advantage that have become a competitive necessity for any marcomms firm of whatever discipline.
Most cynical thought about planning: advertising needed a role that was specifically designed to attract real smart people (who felt a creative impulse) so they didn't go and become lawyers.
Thought: planning thinking needs to encompass what would traditionally be thought of as account and media planning - they don't make any sense without each other - you don't understand people if you don't understand mediation today.
Hope that meeting went well - sorry couldn't be there.
Faris wrote: advertising needed a role that was specifically designed to attract real smart people (who felt a creative impulse) so they didn't go and become lawyers
*My* cynical self thinks that sometimes advertising has needed a person they can roll out to meetings in a 'look! we're not complete philistines, we have smart people too' way.
would like to share an article I'd written "The Furture of Strategic Planning"
http://povfromindia.blogspot.com/search/label/strategic%20planning
Mythili, great article... completely agree.
j.
Hope I'm not repeating too much of what's been said ... I think that the influence of media fragmentation on account planning has only really started to be felt relatively recently. In that historically the brief was all about a single thought or proposition. Where as now in many/most? situations the communication needs to be planned in several stages. Of course media fragmentation itself hasn't changed this but media fragmentation led to media agencies developing there strategic abilities and in general media agencies have been better than most ad agencies at understanding how different media might relate to different mindsets and how active and passive mindsets require different messages and how brand and retail work together or the integration between brand and rational evidence messaging etc. And also how the timing of the message can be so influencial. A single minded proposition type brief doesn't include these issues but more and more in an ad literate, cynical, hyper competitive market these issues are really crucial. I think this is has a huge influence on planning and one that makes planning potentially a much bigger contributor to clients businesses especially as it lends itself to product development and things like store design etc. Although to some of the other comments perhaps this close to where planning was when it started? I've always liked Jeremy Bullmore's comment on how somewhere in the 80's seduced by rock start marketing directors and award ceremonies we become obssessed about advertisements rather than advertising. Perhaps we are coming full circle?
@Southern Planner
Great comment. Very useful to me right now. Thanks.
Great conversation guys.
I believe the entrepreneurial spirit of the planner has helped our discipline thrive over the last 40 years. Our ability to not only identify the need for change but to embrace it has helped drive our industry forward.
Continuously explore and invent new research techniques
Try new and interesting ways of working with and briefing creatives
Willing to go beyond communications and help clients invent products and change business models
To learn what we don’t know as we go along and to share what we have learnt
The very creation of ‘planning’ was, to a certain degree, driven by this entrepreneurial spirit. Taking a risk in an attempt to improve the way we do things.
I think planning has indeed gone full circle but we are entering into a new dimension.
By that i mean we have to ground ourselves in real world insights driven through research and customer data analysis. But the change is denoted by the change in the questions we ask.
It's not about asking people what they think or might consider anymore, instead it's about asking them about how they behave and how they'd like brands behave.
In response to this we call planning at iris Behaviour Planning where we strive to understand advocacy drivers & destroyers and the snakes and ladders of different purchase journeys.
Our end game is about understanding what we can do to activate profitable behavioural change for both the consumer and the brand.
Key to achieving this is by understanding the cultural context of the brands and consumers we work with and translating that into marketing activity be that anything from NPD to an integrated campaign.
this is all very interesting, do keep thoughts and comments coming - I'll use this thread down the line to pull out some key thoughts & quotes & debates :J
"Change artists" came to mind after reading the above thread (although not the standard 'quick change' variety).
Thought others could perhaps build on this.
Hi,
I'm not sure trying to re-define planning as something different on the basis of it no longer being the sole preserve of advertising is necessarily useful. Planning has evolved to meet the changing needs of communication and the consumer...
It started in ad land with account planning (actually at BMP I was led to believe - you can't do a 40 year retrospective without a mention for Stanley Pollitt!?). Starting as a grad at BMP was an inspiration but even with their planning might I wonder if planning would really have been seen as a successful model without the creative genius of John Webster at the other end of it? anyway...
In my view it started as a way of harnessing consumer insight and applying it in a business relevant way to give direction for advertising creation, which, by and large was pretty much the dominant if not only form of communication for decades.
The 1950's saw the spread of home television sets and post-war consumerism where brands slowly realised they needed more than a jingle and a USP to maintain a market position. By the 1960's they also needed to look sexy and mass communication was firmly established so things got more difficult and competitive. Planning came along and got us closer to consumers, further from competitors and better linked to ROI, all good stuff.
Thing is, this all pretty recent, 40 years is not a long time. For example, to my parents generation TV was a new thing, our generation grew up with it but thought computers were magic, our kids are completely comfortable with both and a host of other technologies.
So people got used to brands being in their homes, and loved them. We still love ads but we're used to them now and are more savvy. The argument about viewing fragmentation is a bit of a red herring (though important) - fundamentally people want more.
The advertising discipline failed to keep up with this by and large. Ad land was still focused on the 30" spot (a 40" if they could get one) and really precious of the advertising execution (its their bread and butter). Although the account planners still did great work on brand essence and positioning keeping their top table relationship with the client, the expression of planning was, I think, limited. It became a discipline more about agreeing the client brief and helping the suits sell the advertising ideas.
Look at the IPA effectiveness papers, many (not all) are far from convincing actually ..."we did some advertising and sales went up", this is what advertsining should do surely! is this really a success for planning or just awareness?
Wuth ad agencies fiercely defending 'the ad' this left a whole space for media agencies to enter, a new business opportunity responding to what the clients wanted.
As media agencies dropped their rates to win business they needed other disciplines in their armoury from digital,DM, event, sponsorship etc. and so they started moving from the placement of ads in TTL media to talking about integrated communication.
Media planning was created as a strange hybrid of account manager and planner. In mid 1990's (?) their role was more channel planner i.e. justifying the media selection and its deployment in a clear theme and doing creative things now and then usually to amplify the advertising, sometimes coming up with big ideas independent of the advertising but usually these were quite tactical.
By 2000, the 'strategic planner' had become established in media agencies, an addition to media planners, their remit was to work closer with clients to drive brand level strategic thinking, to challenge the brief and come up with communication strategies, that, as they understood, often operated on an entirely different level to the advertising campaign idea. Only recently have we begun to scrutinise and classify these approaches.
Similarly the way to engage consumers became more complex, its not just about messaging and image any more, so there are now specialist planners withing channel disciplines; digital planners for example.
This, to be is the exciting new age of planning we are in. We still do what we did 40 years ago - we still shape insight, understand the business needs and brief (different) disciplines but rather than hand this brief over we also now steer the ideas that result from our work and there are many different types of idea out there.
Part and parcel of this is of course acting like a 'trainer' in getting disciplines to work together to a central theme and with different ideas but its quite an arrogant view. Frankly there exists in the industry expertise in disciplines that is as good and as important as 'strategic planning'
Maybe we sometimes get planning confused with getting everything a brand does to be consistent, maybe its about doing different things with a consistent tone (a la Nike) - here the expertisie in understanding how a channel or piece of content can be used to engage the consumer is of equal importance to 'the strategy' and I know plenty of channel experts who frankly feel that they have to train their planners!
wise words :J
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