Account Planning is almost being on the other side of the table to understand the business of the client well. With a lot of research and constant discussion with the client Marketing teams, planners help strategize for the brand from within the agency. This profile requires research skills and a thorough understanding of the product category that the client / brand belong to. This also requires a deep understanding of the consumer. In many ways, this profile is an extension of the marketing team within the agency.
“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
To put it simply, planners need to study the market, the product category and the consumer and translate it as insights / briefs to the creative and the media teams to arrive at solutions that will achieve the marketing and advertising objectives.
Typically, it is the account planners’ job to write the creative and the media brief documents (which will be discussed in a latter section). The brief must contain the marketing and advertising objective, the proposed media used, the key consumer insight, key pointers from any research undertaken and finally the take-away that the communication should leave the consumer with.
Account planners must have the necessary skills and attitude to organize information about the consumer and the brand. The data can be derived from primary or secondary research, discussions with the client etc. This helps in the brand arriving at a proper positioning statement. The planner must also be involved in the creative development. This helps in meeting two objectives. First, to be convinced about the message, the take-away from the creative piece arrived at. This includes analyzing the creative from a consumer’s point of view. And second, to be in a position to convince the client about the creative produced by the agency.
Most account planning departments are also responsible for tracking the advertising campaigns taken up for a brand. The tracking of a campaign’s performance is by employing follow-up research with consumers and coordinate tweaking of the creative message (if necessary).
What is the planning process? Well, have tried to make this as a small diagram to ensure that this is understood easily.
In the Indian Advertising industry, you tend to always find the planner having ‘servicing’ executives reporting into them. The concepts of marketing, branding, research and case studies learnt during the B-school days get to be used here. However, a good part of the theory and life in real may be very different. Hence, on-the-feet thinking, quick response time etc, are key requirements of a professional playing this role. Though this job may sound ‘research intensive’, one would tend to encounter a lot of thinking and finding solutions the creative way.
This same process is also applicable for decision making on the media selection. Today, with the innovations in media including Outdoor and digital media and the convergence of different media vehicles, it is important that the above process is followed for media planning as well. All media agencies have ‘planning’ divisions which help in identifying the correct vehicles and the frequency to achieve the advertising and marketing objectives.
In subsequent posts, I will try to add examples from my experiences on each of these functions.
