Account Planning A BRITISH PERSPECTIVE Nicholas Staveley ccount planning is an important advertising agency function that has been arried out in British agencies for more than a quarter century. Its focus is on the initial formation of advertising strategy and thereafter upon campaign development, through a closer understanding of the client’s final customers or other target(s). First pioneered in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, it has gradually infiltrated agency practice in other countries, and is now quite widely applied throughout the developed world. The application of account planning—and its importance relative to other functions—varies considerably from one agency to another. For instance, account planning should not be confused with the established discipline of media planning. Account planners may sometimes replace media planners altogether, but more often the relationship is complementary, and sometimes account planning is seen simply as a creative rather than a media influence. 35HOW AGENCIES OPER, Ty 36 be primarily researchers, or else generalists who in tay y researchers: 7 a t role and status of account planners within an agen, ac ; : Whatever ihe Sroduction involves radical changes in both the agen, their success! eed les, role, and client relationships) and its structure, These ee plain why adoption of the system isnot always successy, = require * least at the outset, and also why it has taken so long to become part of bey as : I ie in many present-day agencies, The planners ma employ advertising Agency Philosophy en — —X—X—X—X—sK«E Conceptually, account planning emphasizes the importance of the target consumers: understanding them, finding advertising strategies that will best fulfill the client's marketing objectives in terms of attitudinal or behavioral response, and then evaluating the advertising developed on this basis, through pre- and post-testing, long-term tracking, and so on. Plainly, this consumer focus has to be shared by everyone in the agency, not just the planners who Tead it. Such a philosophy also marks out a somewhat changed relationship with the client. Instead of simply mirroring the client's marketing strategy and goals (usually expressed in terms of markets, volumes, brand shares, and revenue), the agency provides a complementary expertise—that directed at an intimate knowledge of the target group. This involves conducting a dialogue with consumers to understand better who they are, how advertising directed to them will work best, how they use it, and in which media, and, afterwards, how well it is doing once a campaign is up and running. Ageney Structure ot eB ang | AE a esti Functionally, the agency must also change—not only in importing the new Sccount planning skills (and absorbing their cost), but in redefining the relationships of everyone else involved in planning, making, and placing advertisements for its clients. Those particularly affected are the account handlers, the creative team, and (as noted above) the media people. Account directors, in particular, can find it hard to accept the apparent loss of theirAccount Planning n traditional leading role in planning; creative people may similarly distrust a powerful potential critic if they have no experience of the compensatin, practical help and understanding a good planner can provide. : The most common reasons account Planning may fail to take root ina particular agency are (a) that itis arbitrarily added as a sort of “bolt-on” to the existing structure, with no allowance made for an adjustment of existing roles and (b) the recruitment (or internal reshuffle) of people without the skill or sensitivity to make good planners. How It Began The origin of account planning (and the use of this term to describe it) occurred at about the same time in the mid-1960s in two leading British advertising agencies, and was in each case the product of a dominant single thinker. The agencies were the J. Walter Thompson Company (JWT) London office and the then new, very small agency Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP), now BMP DDB Needham, also in London. The two dominant personalities involved were JWT’s Stephen King and Stanley Pollitt of BMP. Apart from a shared emphasis on the consumer, the approaches of these two agencies were very different, representing two distinct ideologies. How- ever, both were remarkably successful, and both have had profound influence on subsequent advertising practice. Inevitably, there has been some dispute about which came first and which was the better. The important point is that the two events were independent of one another, although they had much in common, and that each led to the production of advertising of extraordinary quality. Nor did either King or Pollitt see the other as rival or copyist. It is therefore interesting to consider each approach Separately, to illustrate the very great differences in the way account planning can be applied effectively. Moreover, the ideas then formulated remain vivid and relevant today. The JWT Approach Suidicsaee GAMAE cgi canines NOES In the 1960s, JWT was the largest agency in Britain and had already acquired a formidable reputation both for its creative work and for the intelligence ofHOW AGENCIES OPER, ne 38 ee Fi trusted by its (typical its people. It was alse uniquely admiedand mo its people. clients. it had introduced the “Thompson TPlan,” a constng Not long before tH seem. Its points of emphasis were, fi, oriented strategic target groups and, second, the importance of conside;, proved ee ms of response, Father than message or input, Thy’ seats ae principal classes of consumer responses that could , identified Ga dvertising planning—responses from the senses, the ming a, consi the feelings. Apparently si implistic, the T-Plan in fact emphasized the variability in, ways in which advertising works. It was perhaps the first model that Tee nized that advertising can work in many different ways, and that its succes depends on the effects it causes, not on what it says. oe King had also for some time been interested in the potential importance of ‘| new research sources using very large sample, single-source data—powerful s . These could combine longitudinal information about individual respondent’ media consumption and product behavior as well as demographics and genera attitudes, He explored this interest in tandem with the British Market Research Bureau, JWT’s market research subsidiary, which later produced the world’s first such study: the Target Group Index. British media research studies, notably the National Readership Survey, had already long been providing some product consumption information, to add important marketing insights to advertising agency media recommendations. For all these reasons, the WT version of account planning, which the agency introduced in 1967, had a strong media and single-source research flavor, powerfully underpinned by qualitative studies. The organization methods employed are also of interest. Essentially, the agency created ® intimate new three-person managing team for each of its accounts: 1. The account director (or other senior account handles), representing ee ‘marketing strategy, and any political considerations —and also the adit” trative implementation of any decisions The creati itplenie a group head, representing both the “ideas factory” and crea plementation, such as TV production and art buying 3, The account planner, also responsible for media planning 2. cssentially representing the consumer, or target grUP: bs leveloping strategies, advertising research, and sua"Account Planning - The account planners replaced JWT’s marketing department. Some ac- count planners were recruited from the old marketing department, others from media, and still others from research. Overall, the new alignment seemed to make better sense of the agency's functions, One of the most interesting results was the harmony with which many of the new triumvirates worked, and how often they exchanged roles. In all of this—the T-Plan, the alliance of media knowledge with marketing objectives, and creativity—King was greatly supported by the senior creative person in the agency, Jeremy Bullmore (author of Chapters 5 and 15 in this volume). The BMP Approach From 1965, Stanley Pollitt had been experimenting with similar ideas at an Interpublic agency, Pritchard Wood & Partners. But it was only when he and others launched a new agency of their own in 1968—Boase Massimi Pollitt— that these efforts came into full flower. Openly borrowing the term from JWT, Pollitt, too, called his new troops account planners. The infant BMP was of course a very different environment from JWT London. It was tiny, British and not American owned, and had no international affiliations. But it also became sharply creative—shortly acquiring a formi- dable creative reputation thanks to John Webster, a talent recruited from the London Ogilvy agency—and had a burning desire to show that its creativity was both accountable and effective. For these reasons, the new BMP planners were destined to be very much more advertising researchers and experimentalists, often engaged in conduct- ing their own fieldwork. Pollitt was, moreover, especially exercised by the introduction of proprietary, quantitative pretesting methods, mostly imported from the United States. He saw these as destructive of truly effective adver- tising. They prescribed one or another single mechanistic view of how adver- tising works and imposed rigid norms (interest levels, preference shifts) without any Proper dialogue with the consumer. JWT, too, was alert to these problems, but its massive authority and intellectual status made them less of a preoccupation. For Pollitt’s small elite, they were an appalling and immediate threat to the excellence he aimed for. Fortu- nately, an important BMP confectionery client—John Bartle of Cadbury—1 HOW AGENCIES op PRany - . him to realize hi; 7 itt’s views, and enabled i ati, shared and supported Poll vision of account planning. Later Developments ea f account planning at JWT and BMP became widely recogy} The success of ‘and competitive agencies in Britain. The latter soon ado by both clients all major agencies in Londo, and adapted the idea on a wide scale; by 1970, i in place. had account planning systems in pI : _ The 1970s and 1980s were years of expansion for the British Advertising business, despite a number of setbacks caused by a general Economic malaise and by strikes in all industries, including the media. As agencies STEW, accoun, planning became an integral part of their being. Account Planning WAS soon seen as an advertising discipline in its own right, and agencies began to teen, account planners fresh from universities (mostly liberal arts graduates) and train them in-house. Account planners formed an influential association, the Account Planning Group, which was established to improve and otherwise develop professional practice in the field. This organization currently has more than 200 members. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) encouraged the growth of account planning, and the IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards are toa large degree based on the evaluation of campaign effectiveness made by account planners in British agencies. The Account Planning Group has pub- lished a handbook on the discipline, How to Plan Advertising, an anthology of papers writen by the most prominent Practitioners, describing the best work in the field,! ici ce planning is an evolving discipline. The econometri¢ plates" web wee effects plays an Increasingly important role in aceoun! frontiers of thea oe pee are also engaged in expanding the rita ofa cr a 'sed for advertising development, including expl “Tanging as anthropology and symbiotics.