Communication agencies: Account planning

 

Stephen King's paper, published in Admap in October 1985, was written during a minor advertising downturn but just before what was, in retrospect, a 20-year bull market. He identifies the systemic tre

Developed in the 1950s, the 'predictable ends, certain means' model of creating advertising has remained much the same since. The cost-heavy production spine has calcified the business. By contrast, '

A history of account planning, from its inception by Stephen King at JWT and Stanley Pollitt at Pritchard Wood in the 1960s, to the discipline's further development and export to the US by BMP in the ...

Account planning pioneer Stephen King made a crucial distinction between 'marketing department marketing', when the marketing function is bolted-on to the organisation, and 'real marketing', when all ...

Where will planning go next? Will different agency planners – creative, media, digital, strategy – form a collaboration of like minds, or will planning reside at the client? Will ‘planning’ survive, a ...

In this business, we spend a lot of time categorising the public into segments and creating new departments for ourselves. In truth, in any ad agency, there are only two types of people: complicators ...

This case study in advertising co-creation shows how Walkers involved the public in a competition to create a new flavour of potato crisp. The idea came from a unique pooling of creative talent from a ...

IPA commissioned research conducted by Nielsen into FMCG brands proves that advertising share of voice (SOV) drives share of market. The research looked at the impact of brands’ SOV in the first year ...

This article discusses agency planners and their role. Planners are interested, open-minded, intelligent and imaginative, but they have one defect: they keep questioning what their role in the agency

The changes and advances in account planning in recent years have largely failed to touch global planning, which tends to remain bogged down in concerns about structure and the global versus local deb

The article describes the founding of account planning 40 years ago, independently by Stephen King (JWT) and Stanley Pollitt (PWP, later BMP). Both took the view that the tools of research and strateg

Successful advertising does not always need a new strategy: sometimes it is only necessary to express an existing strategy in a creatively new way. Agency structure, the three-fold balance of power be

Client-side planning looks like it is here to stay, and must prosper if brands are to continue to grow. This article describes how Diageo set up its own account planning resource, and how it works wit ...

Marketing has long been subject to a debate surrounding the relative importance of logic, induction and intuition. This is the difference between order and organisation on the one hand, and disorder a ...

This article, by Geoffrey Precourt - US Editor of WARC Online - discusses the approach to planning advocated by Jeff Goodby, of Omnicom's Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. He argues that planners spend ...

In this edited report from the American Association of Advertising Agencies' 2008 Account Planning Conference, WARC Online's US editor Geoffrey Precourt discusses the arrival of account planning in th ...

This article is a reprint of a classic paper by Stephen King, first published in 1989, which describes how account planning developed at JWT (with a focus on marketing and strategy, and what a consume ...

Advertising planning for global markets requires an understanding of how markets vary and develop at different rates. Markets can be divided into three life-stages: adolescent (Saudi Arabia and Poland ...

Planning is over four decades old, and features in every type of communications agency. It is still recognisable in what it delivers - namely, an improvement of the quality of advertising - and the tw ...

This articles introduces Admap's report on account planning. Account planning itself can be said to involve identifying a desired consumer response and ensuring, through research, that it is delivered ...

This paper analyses papers from the 2007 IPA Effectiveness Awards to discover the lessons they offer about the fundamentals of planning best practice, and which can go on to enhance the bottom-line gr ...

Over the past three years the Newspaper Marketing Agency has carried out a £22m research programme to assess the effectiveness of newspaper advertising. Maureen Duffy and Anne Foster, from NMA, descri ...

Simon White, marketing and business development director for Momentum UK, puts the case for a radical rethink of how agencies are structured. He argues for 'upstream thinking' (which influences everyt ...

Anne Benvenuto, executive vice president of strategic services at R/GA, argues that planners need to change the way they and their agencies work. Firstly they need to look at more than merely creating ...

Olivia Johnson, planning director at Hooper Galton, advises on how to produce successful campaigns in today's fragmented and cacophonous media environment. She argues that too few brands have a truly ...

It is now accepted that account planning recognizes the complexity of humans and their emotional attachment to products and that this understanding can be translated into effective campaigns extending ...

An obituary article on the author's long-term colleague Stephen King (died on 16 February 2006). King is celebrated as someone with a rare ability to occupy, and bridge, the two worlds of academic thi ...

Anthony Tasgal looks at the cultural and scientific heritage of insight, in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of the term. He then outlines some principles and guidelines for cr ...

Mark Goldstein, ceo, Fallon Worldwide, offers what he terms a "failsafe" way for agencies to generate new business in this 2004 4A's speech. They are advised to stop hiring or accepting busi ...

Tim Stock and Marie Lena Tupot, of New York’s scenarioDNA, explain the concept of ‘embed marketing’, which moves beyond the conventional push/pull theory of advertising and aims to implant the evolvi ...