So, um, what is account planning?

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.