Admap classic: the anatomy of account planning

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 consumer's response to a brand should be) and BMP (where the emphasis was on research to refine and improve each communication).

Admap classic: the anatomy of account planning

Stephen King

Tracking account planning is rather like counting a mixed batch of tropical fish. You think you see patterns, but they've all changed by the time you've finished counting.

There's little doubt about its growth. Today most top UK agencies have planning departments and most of the recent new UK agency wave have them built into the letterheading (at least one of Beagle, Bargle, D'Annunzio, Twigg & Privet will be a planner).

Yet the current approach of agencies varies between the integral and the nonexistent. It's impossible to imagine Boase Massimi Pollitt...

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