[note: slight modifications made to the initial post at the request of my clients & colleagues. Originally posted October 2010.]

There’s nothing quite like having a job that people don’t quite understand.  Especially when the people who don’t understand it work in your field, in your company, or, let’s say, on your floor.

I’ve been spending some quality time with a full-service agency recently.  They needed a planning director for a pitch to an existing client – a very important pitch, in which this agency could become lead agency on the entire campaign, rather than a partner agency to another shop.

There was very little time to develop a creative brief, so I worked hard, and fast, and smart.  I looked at all the research, at the client’s objectives and at the competition.  I thought deeply about what is happening in the category, in consumer’s lives.  And then I started to tell stories – inspiring stories, exciting stories, interesting stories, intriguing stories – about what was happening in the world as it related to this category. Two days after I walked into the agency, we had a creative brief.

We presented to senior management, including the creative directors, and we got them to buy into the thinking. It felt exciting – for the agency, for the client, for the category. And more importantly it felt true – the kind of truth that makes people instinctively feel what you’re saying, not merely understand it.  It was a fun meeting.

But this, to my mind, was not the most important part – it was critical, it was a catalyst, it mattered – but it wasn’t the most important bit.  The most important bit was what happened when the creative teams had to interpret what the brief was trying to say in the form of advertising and marketing.

My emphasis was on keeping things high-level, anthemic.  Don’t go to tactics, not yet.  It was hard for them not to, as that’s what they’re asked to do most of the time. After the first meeting with the teams, the feedback I got was fascinating.

“You’re the first planner I’ve met.”

“It’s so nice to get a creative brief.”

“This is one of the most useful briefs I’ve ever been given. Usually it’s just media specs.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“Can we, um, you know, ask you questions? Will you be around?”

The Muse

That’s when I saw what the bulk of my time over the next 10 days needed to be spent on – simply being available as the voice, the inspiration, the embodiment of the brief.  I joked that it was ‘helicopter parenting.’ And the contribution I ultimately made to the creative idea and to the media idea came from a few basic behaviors:

• I told them the brand story with passion – I didn’t read them the creative brief or present a research deck.  I used metaphors, I used examples, I used the language of the prototypical consumer. I made sure that the creative teams knew that I didn’t just think the brief was credible, but that I believed in it.
• I made suggestions without telling them what to do – I used the language of “what if you tried…” or “what do you think about…” or “wouldn’t it be cool if we…”  I liken it to David Letterman’s “Is this anything?” gag.  The more ideas there are, the more ideas there are.  We were well past philosophizing by this point, we needed ideas that embodied the true story we wanted to tell.
• I kept bringing them idea snacks – little artifacts of the consumer and the category that kept them in the right headspace.  Everything was done with a “check this out, ain’t it fun” approach, instead of an educational one.  I wasn’t teaching, I was sharing.
• I said no.  ”So, um, I guess we need to make a microsite.” I looked at them, dead serious, and said, “No microsites.”
• But I didn’t just say no – I showed them other cool toys they’d never played with, and demonstrated how they could, with the connective tissue of the creative idea, be woven together into a killer experience.

In other words, I served the role of the Muse – fostering ‘inspired madness’.  And it worked.  By the time we got on planes to head to the pitch, everyone in the building had caught word of what we were doing.  They wanted a piece of the action.  People had gesticulated wildly, raised their voices, talked over one another.  And they had built some amazing ideas to bring to life the creative idea.

Phase one was complete.

The Siren

The next job I had to do was just as tough.  I’d inspired the creative teams, but now I had to help seduce the clients.

And seducing 15 technology marketers is no easy task.  Especially when they are women who are probably just as smart as you are, and are dressed ten times better.

The seduction dance, in this case, was made up of some interesting pieces:

• Purring to the client that what they desperately hope is true about their brand  is true… They’re just not getting credit for all their goodness yet.
• Once you’ve pulled them close, backing away slightly, seeming a bit disinterested.  Listen, your product is great and all, but that’s not enough.
• Talking about your hotter, richer, more famous or successful exes… “When I worked on [brand you'd like to be or kill], we did …”
• But then suggesting that somehow, this client has way more going for it than that old brand.  ”What they did really wasn’t so special, nothing like what you could do.”
• And then painting a picture of the success, accolades, image and fame they will get if only they embrace this world view (that they deep down, already do, really) and champion it, take the lead and change the world/category.
• Then you unveil the prize. The beautiful and useful things that the agency will make on the client’s behalf to ensure this beautiful fate.
• Of course, you must be prepared… everyone has doubts.  You have to overcome those with a combination of reason, data and passion.  Preferably at least two of those, and one always has to be passion.
• And in the end, a kind of come-hither indifference.  This is the idea. It’s amazing. You want it. But you’re going to have to ask for it. And of course, pay for it.

In 90 minutes, we managed to do just that.  We sang our little song (literally, actually, the creatives wrote a song!) and the clients swooned and pulled free of their restraints and … gasp! … nodded their heads and smiled during our presentation.

It was striking, the roles played by what we so dully call the “account planner”. The Siren and the Muse… very different roles from the type espoused by a lot of people I hear speak within the planning community.  The desire for so long has been to find ways to “move upstream” or monetize strategy or “solve business problems” that we’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the critical role of a planner in inspiring creative work and making that work meaningful and attractive to clients.

Jaime Shuttleworth, the Chief Strategic Officer of DraftFCB in Chicago, spoke at Planning-ness a couple of weeks ago [Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, 2010] about how planners can help design a culture of creativity. But his talk was actually about the role of planning in the business.  His metaphors ran from military operations to engineering to infrastructure to medicine. He spoke of making planning not merely an organ, but the circulatory system of an agency. In other words, you can’t live without us. He wanted planners to be involved in HR decisions, influencing the culture of the agency through hiring.  He wanted planners to be the consigliere to clients and account management.  He wanted, in other words, planning to be in charge.

I was struck by how much I didn’t want those things at all.  Those things were not why I became a planner.  I have influenced client business decisions, I have helped clients develop new products and services and designs and experiences.  I have helped them hire staff, I have helped them better understand how their businesses are changing, and how to adapt to that change. But that was as a strategic consultant, not as a planner.  As a planner, what I wanted to do was simple, and two-fold: I wanted to make beautiful, smart, useful, effective things; and I wanted to win over clients.

It may be time to consider two different branches of planning. There are business strategists who see themselves as members of the joint chiefs of staff, 4-star generals advising an executive on proportional response, collateral damage, resource management, offensive and defensive strategies, deployments and force multipliers.  And then there are planners (or as seems to be an increasingly popular term “creative strategists”), who must be muses and sirens, inspiring the lifeblood of advertising – the work – and seducing clients to want to be a part of that vision, to trust the agency, to admire the approach, and to, crassly enough, buy the idea and its execution.

Thoughts?

When you’re an account planner, this is the inevitable follow-up question to the essential, “So, what do you do?”

As a tag for the role played, it’s remarkably inadequate. If planning modifies account, then it sounds like an account management role. It conjures up media planning for some who work in agencies but don’t have planning. Nothing about the tag suggests creativity. It only barely suggests strategy. And by placing ‘account’ at the heart of the tag, it suggests a role that is solely focused on the client.

Jennifer Morozowich posted this provocation on “The Future of Planning” on the Canadian Marketing Blog. She makes the argument that all the splintered and specialized sparks the industry casts off as it tries to weld together the old and the new, is counter-productive at worst and unnecessary at best. A good planner is a good planner, or as Faris Yakob remarked, there “ain’t no flavors.”

What she thinks a good planner is, I imagine, coincides with what she thinks planning is all about:

Good planners have the ability to bridge together their understanding of the consumer and how they relate to the client’s brand and visa versa.

True, true.

“Do you know what the role of account planning is?”

I worked for a planner at Chiat who asked me that question once. I babbled on about establishing the strategic vision for a campaign, advocating for consumers, and so on. She smiled at me, somewhat condescendingly, and said, “It’s to ensure that the work we produce is effective.”

Effectiveness, now that’s sexy. She’s not wrong; she was probably writing case studies and EFFIE submissions. The job of the planner, as she saw it, is to provide some conduit between what the client’s business objectives are, what the consumer’s desires are, and the creative idea that will guide those two forces toward each other, in a way that we can measure.

She saw this as a highly strategic role; some firms in fact call planners ‘brand strategists.’ This gets closer to the actual job, especially as it has been imagined and shaped over the past 50 years. Many firms root planning in ‘information’ as Stanley Pollitt and Stephen King did (as quoted in Morozowich’s post):

“The account planner is that member of the agency’s team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used – not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client’s advertising problems.” – Stanley Pollitt

Having worked in market research, I understand why agencies require ‘proof’ of a good idea. Instincts, which are honed through experience and expertise and attitudes can be a tough sell when millions of widgets and hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line. So planners often must carry credentials that relate to their familiarity with different research methodologies, and their comfort levels with reading data tabs and comprehending statistical regression analysis – those hallmarks of intellectual rigor.

In the research role, I often felt duty-bound to reflect only that which we ‘heard’ in the research, and as a qualitative specialist, to hedge: of course what we believe we learned and what we believe that means is still conjecture, the sample size is not projectable. We’ll need a survey to get real numbers. As a planner, a good hunch could be killed quickly by a standard research design. Research does a good job of illuminating how things are; the person using the results of that research must be trusted to imagine how things will be. And that needs expertise and experience and attitudes, yes; but that’s not all it needs.

I knew I’d get to Mad Men eventually.

In the 4th episode of this season of Mad Men (season 4), titled “The Rejected“, Faye does a focus group with the young, single secretaries about beauty. Faye’s got all the tricks for moderating – dress well, but neutrally; be innocuous; be self-deprecating; offer them food; tell them something that seems personal; and so on. These are tricks for setting the tone and fostering comfort and (we all hope) candor.

But Faye glides right past important bits as though they weren’t there, or sees them through very conventional lenses. The first woman to reply speaks of her national/ethnic origins, her mother’s perfect skin, the routine she uses: simple – just warm enough water, and patting her skin with her fingterips. She mildly protests that despite not using soap, her mother isn’t dirty. And she implies that this is her routine, though she never describes the routine as belonging to her. For her, beauty routines are the domain of this perfect creature, her mother, and are closely tied in with culture and class. But that routine is where her mother is entirely tuned in with herself, looking at her reflection, touching her face, caring for herself in a moment that belongs to her (even if there was a small girl who once watched from the doorway). This routine, as used by the secretary, is described in a quiet voice, with a slow tempo; she blushes a little, and bows her head slightly, and smiles broadly. This is something sacred – her mother’s beauty, this private moment, were and are still awe-inspiring to her. Here we have one archetype to begin to draw.

Then the next secretary, Dotty, speaks about using a night creme at her vanity. There is a ritual here, too, that is for her something like play-acting. She describes ‘playing house’ with her boyfriend and him laughing at her for it. Faye lets this moment elide as the embittered girl next to her takes the conversation down an inevitable route: “You shouldn’t do things for them. They don’t appreciate it.”

Dotty describes their subsequent break-up, “I don’t know what he noticed… but, it wasn’t me… I guess.” The play-acting evaporated into reality. Dressing up like your beautiful mother, or a glamorous actress, or mimicking daytime soap opera starlets is fun; but it doesn’t define who you are, or what makes you special. Faye could have grappled with the physical experience of caring for your skin (e.g., your beauty) and how you feel about yourself, versus how others see you and what your beauty means to them. Dotty wanted to be loved, sure – but she wanted to be seen by a man who liked what he saw. Then Don’s secretary, Allison, takes it from there, noting that “It’s worse when they notice, sometimes.”

And down we go into the tears and commiserating that all single women in New York are said to be familiar with.

Faye predictably concludes that these girls just want to be married; link Pond’s with matrimony, she advises. She also decides to kill Peggy’s hypothesis, that the routine itself is physically satisfying (oh Peggy, that great hedonist!). Don, rightly, sneers at her, “Hello, 1925.”

He’s found the problem – Faye was looking for what was expected, she was able to identify and identify with the notion that “single girls want to be married women”… and then let the conversation end there.

But maybe there was something else, something about letting mascara and lipstick be for him, but letting Pond’s be for me; or about taking the time to care for yourself; or about confidence and youthfulness; or about stolen moments of beauty. Don rightly pushed back and decided to lead rather than follow… but then there’s the matter of what the report will say…

Maybe instead of what it is, we should ask what it could be

The core ‘product’ of the planning department was traditionally the creative brief. This is a document that should give the creative team all the information they need to develop a campaign. But pat data is not enough, the document needs to inspire.

I used to write ads, and would shake my head (rattle my brains, more like) when I saw a brief that outlined the target as “25-34, single, college educated women with $55k+HHI, living in A & B counties”. I might be able to buy media space for this target, but I can’t single out one woman and write to her based on this. I need to conjure up a woman, the woman, what her life is like, what she loves and hates, what her hopes and dreams are, how she sees herself, how she wants to be seen (of course, this should be tailored to the category or brand). And then I need to know what you want me to do. What they currently think and what we want them to think, that’s a start. Wieden’s planners used to use “The Exciting Possibility” as the springboard from strategy to creative – the face that would launch 1000 ships, to carry on all this beauty crap.

So we have a slightly different role here, one that the word ‘account’ so often seems to contradict. This is the role of the creative muse. The planner serves as the Patti Boyd or Pamela Des Barres to the creative teams’ various interpretations of rock gods. Let accounts advocate for the client – we all know who pays the bills – while we, over here, create a communal space between consumer desires, client objectives and something else… ideas.

I sometimes imagine that the best planners would be Method. They would live as the target does, speak like the target, spend time with the target, befriend the target, sleep with the target (cue, “Common People” by Pulp). They would be the target incarnate, guiding the creative team along a meditation on what would inspire them, seduce them, convince them, lure them.

Of course, it can’t always be that – the planner must pivot in this role, playing muse to both client and creatives, inspiring them to think about their business issues, the world in which we live, the trends impacting our audience and business, and the lives and aspirations of our audience in fresh ways. Done artfully, the ideal planner sets up the creative team to develop insightful, creative, break-through work, and equally sets up the client to expect and embrace it.

But as agencies scramble to solidify client relationships, move ‘upstream’ as ‘partners’ in the business, and to be quite simply taken seriously as the experts on consumers and brands that they are, I find planners are cleaving ever closer to the client, aspiring to be ‘problem-solvers’ and business partners and consultants… But while they court clients and read data tabs and steep themselves in consumer and media and technology trends, they risk neglecting the importance – sometimes even the transcendence – of great ideas artfully executed.

So yeah, digital planner, brand planner, communications planner, whatever. There ain’t no flavors. But sometimes, I feel like there ain’t much ‘flavor’ at all.

i am going to remind you. in multiple places.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[note: posted this elsewhere, too. trying to get things consolidated, and not lose stuff in the process.]

First a link – I stole it from Noah Brier, but here it is anyway – on the phrase “that’s executional.” One of my other agency favorites is, “Well, you’re not the target market.” But that’s a post for another day. Anyway – seems to me that the thinking on the other end of this link makes part of the case about why the planning and creative processes should be ‘collapsed.’ More on that later, too.