I’m sure some of you are asking yourselves, “What does a lifelong account person like Nancy Hill have to say to 700 people at the AAAA Planning Conference, other than ‘welcome?’ ”
Well, I have a confession to make:
Today, I’d like to finally come out of the closet:
I, Nancy Hill, have always considered myself to be … an account planner. Or at least a wannabe account planner.
Actually, this should come as no surprise to any planner who has ever worked with me.
I’ve been told I have this adorable habit of “helping” planners by asking a lot of questions and probably making too many suggestions…
Kidding aside, it’s an honor for me to have this opportunity to stand before such an amazing group of advertising professionals, and to share a few thoughts about planning: where it’s been, where it is, and where it’s going…
I’ve been very fortunate during my 25-year advertising career to work and collaborate with some incredible people—many of them planners—who have taught me more about creativity and inspired thinking than almost anyone else in the business.
Adam Morgan, Katrina McAuliffe, Tracy Lovatt, Domenico Vitale, Suzanne Powers—are just a few master planners whom I’ve long admired or had the privilege to know and work with.
I can tell you, however, that the relationship between account people like me and planners hasn’t always been so collegial.
Some of you will remember this well… Others here, thank god, don’t know a thing about it.
Maybe there was something lost in translation when Jay Chiat first imported Jane Newman and the idea of planning from the U.K., and positioned account planning as a separate agency department.
It wasn’t quite account management, it wasn’t quite creative, and it wasn’t quite research, but planning was something entirely new and, frankly, something entirely threatening to lots of account people who rightly felt very territorial about their positions.
Here’s a quote: “The expertise of the account planner is his/her application of information to the advertising process. In this respect, this area of responsibility overlaps to some extent with that of the account manager.”
Imagine it’s 1982, and you’re an account person, and you’ve just read this description of what an account planner is and does in Adweek magazine.
Your reaction is probably, “Holy shit, some Brit (because back then planners were always British) is going to steal my job!”
Probably not the best way to make a good first impression.
At my first agency job, at Doner in Baltimore, I remember that a lot of the account guys (because most of them were men) were highly suspicious, and thought planners and the entire discipline was much ado about nothing. Just a passing fad…
One skeptical account manager described the onslaught of planning in the United States akin to “cutting my brain in half.”
On this side of the pond, at least in the early years, planning was a tough sell at agencies that already had well-defined departmental boundaries—or should I say, well-defined silos—in which we did our jobs. We really didn’t need or want to add another layer into the mix, thank you very much.
But it wasn’t until I moved on to my next agency job at TBWA where I fully realized the indispensible role that an account planner—and a well-run planning department—can play in the process of creating great advertising.
TBWA was very much at the forefront of establishing the discipline of planning in the United States, and by 1984—two-and-a-half years after its introduction stateside—the agency claimed its billings exploded from $80 million before the introduction of planning at the agency to $230 million after.
In fact, according to reports at the time, Chiat’s now-legendary “1984” commercial for Apple Computers was shaped in large part by account planning.
So while it may have taken us Yanks a bit longer to grasp the concept of planning and then to embrace it—and all of you—into the mix, I, for one, am very glad it happened.
Today, virtually every agency has set up an account planning practice and advertising has benefited greatly from planning’s place at the table.
You planners, by your very nature, are expert gatherers: of information, of experience, of insights.
But beyond the mere act of gathering, planners have a unique—some might even say mutant—ability to translate reams of cold data and statistics and bring them to vivid life in communications strategies that connect consumers with brands they love.
As I was preparing my remarks for this morning’s presentation, I spent some time re-reading a stack of books, essays and articles about the past, present and future of planning.
Flipping through the dog-earred and highlighted pages of my copy of “A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King,” I was continually struck by how much we can still learn from what King said and wrote about planning over four decades.
“If advertising is to succeed, it has to involve the receiver and entice him into participating actively in whatever is being communicated about the brand. It has to stretch his imagination and make him an accomplice.”
Stephen King’s words practically foretell the current world of consumer-generated and social media, more than twenty years before its time.
That King had the vision to see through the data, through the concepts and pass straight through into evaluating and understanding content and context, amazes me in its simplicity and elegance, the hallmark of a brilliant strategist and planner—indeed, a brilliant advertising person.
I think what makes this community so special is how much it has recognized the importance of connecting with the global community, and reaching beyond the geographic boundaries that separate us.
It’s planners who deeply understood and taught us that the most effective and engaging marketing communications today have transformed from local to global, from private to public, from selfish to socially responsible, from monologue to dialogue.
As I said in my remarks at our Leadership Conference this past April in California, “Our perspective must be broader and more global in scope. What American agencies do today have tremendous influence and impact on what an agency in Beijing or Sydney or Moscow can and will do tomorrow—and increasingly the reverse is also true.”
As any good planner could see, the word “agencies” could easily be replaced with “consumers” and the point would be equally valid.
In no other advertising discipline has the idea of global community been more readily embraced than in the planning community.
I see this in the numerous international entrants and winners of our annual Jay Chiat Awards for Account Planning—which by the way, I’m proud to say, is the only international prize given for strategy and planning—to the attendees of this conference, who represent nearly a dozen countries beyond the United States, including Argentina, Australia, Brasil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom, among others.
In fact, when the question about diversity arises in industry discussions—which it has, particularly in New York City—planners can be held up as a model for diversity in the industry.
Not only does the planning community beautifully represent diversity of race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and age, you also reflect a diversity of ideas, experience, and knowledge.
To me, you represent the great truth and possibility of what advertising can and should be, now and in the future…
I’m a self-admitted, avid technologist (some people even call me a geek). We all know that the tools that are available to advertising professionals today have increased exponentially, and will only continue to expand more and more into the digital arena.
In no other discipline within agencies have I seen digital platforms and ideas embraced as much as with planners.
You know that consumers are driving brands to become more transparent, more authentic and more digitally savvy, and you know how to walk in their shoes and live their lives in ways that amaze and inspire all of us in the business.
I said earlier that planners are natural and astute gatherers. I’d also add that planners are consummate hoarders. I mean this in the most complimentary way.
As hoarders, planners aggregate almost everything, every bit of knowledge, every bit of minutiae, in your ongoing efforts to understand the world around you and translate that world back to your agency colleagues. This, in many ways, is the key to your craft.
We talk often about advertising as being a business of ideas. But I think planners recognize innately that we are business of ideas and ideals.
Ideas, as Suzanne discussed earlier, are the stuff of planners. And though we can all agree that ideas can and do come from anyone and anywhere, I believe what makes a truly great planner is the ability to take these ideas to a higher level—aiming for ideals that substantiate higher truths about our world, not just in the context of advertising and marketing communications, but in the broader sense, to the world we live in.
So what’s ahead for planning?
“Planning is (literally) about thinking ahead, moving things forward, embracing change.”
That’s Merry Baskin’s quote from one of her introductions in “A Master Class in Brand Planning.” Again, so simple and so elegant.
I think this definition can also apply to my vision of the new AAAA. Our job—my job at the AAAA—is to think ahead, move things forward and embrace change.
Much of that forward movement and change naturally includes technology, and as we’ll experience over the next two-and-a-half days, this conference is really an opportunity to engage in conversations.
To that end, the AAAA wants to help facilitate discussions in as many digital channels as possible. For this conference, we’ve set up a Twitter feed and a Flickr page, as well as blogs and forums to engage all of you in the conversations.
Also, throughout general session, you can text your questions to our speakers. We’ll make every effort to get to as many questions as possible. Also, I’d like to alert AT&T users, which means all of you iPhone users, that service in the ballroom is sketchy, so I hope you’ll be patient and bear with the technical glitches.
These are small—but big—ways the AAAA wants to move forward, and I hope you will join in.
Like all of you, we’re here to learn and to share, and I’m so excited that you’re all here.
So let’s get the conversation started…