ALEX CAMPBELL'S TUMBLELOG

Anonymous asked: What does a strategic planner do?

To answer this let’s look at some background first…

In the early days of advertising, advertising agencies had two main roles. They would develop creative messages to engage their audience, as well as working out the best ways to deliver these messages through buying media on their client’s behalf.

In the 1970s these roles were split into two types of agencies. ‘Creative agencies’ come up with ideas for communicating the client’s messages. ‘Media agencies’ plan and buy the media to deliver these messages.

As this split happened, creative agencies realised that the social science that went into media planning could be used to help them make more effective ads. The role of ‘account planning’ emerged in creative agencies – so called because it comes from both ‘account management’ and ‘media planning’.

In traditional agencies, the role of planners is to unearth insights that creative teams could use to make more relevant, impactful ads. In order to do this planners conduct endless research into their target markets, looking for new trends, behaviours and needs that will allow the client’s message to cut through and truly connect with its audience. That’s the theory.

In some agencies (like the one I work at) the role is much more strategic, hence “strategic planner”. It involves a lot of consulting work with clients, identifying what the real business problem is that we’re trying to solve. It involves structuring the problem in such a way that our different teams can each solve part of it – some problems need creative solutions, some problems need technological innovation, some problems need content, many need all of the above.

The role also involves working collaboratively with creative teams on media selection, because in so much of what we do the message is deeply connected to and informed by the medium. And finally it involves filtering back the work through the brief to make sure it is still on-message and on-target, and helping present and rationalise the work to the client.

Unearthing insights and understanding cultural context is still an important part of what we do. But in digital this is much more of an ongoing, evolutionary process - we don’t create one-off 30 second spot and run 1200 TARPs, we create experiences that live indefinitely and require ongoing re-thinking and optimisation. And I believe increasingly our role should be to make creative work more culturally disruptive, rather than getting it to fit into culture. We should make trends rather than follow them!