Eliza Esquivel: Wtf is comms planning?
Not so long ago, I asked “Wtf is comms planning?” (Click here for some background on why it’s a good time to be asking this question.)
An astute commenter on Linkedin remarked that the answer depends on where you sit.
True. It is what we collectively think it is, I suppose.
So I’m asking a whole bunch of smart people what they think, from the vantage point of where they sit. We’ll see what comes of the project, and whether, through it, we can collectively make any sense of the question.
First up is Eliza Esquivel. We spoke on April 27, 2018. She was, most recently, Senior Director of Global Brand Strategy, Naming, Management and Partnerships at Microsoft for the Office marketing group (Microsoft 365, Office 365, Teams, Skype, Outlook, and others). Prior, as a VP of Global Brand Strategy at Mondelez, she was named one of the 30 most creative women in advertising. She has been an account planner at a handful of creative agencies, including TBWA, Wieden+Kennedy and DDB, where we worked together, back in the day.
The headlines from the interview (the full transcript is below):
- “Connections planning” is planning across the whole journey, across all touch-points; “comms planning” is only paid media
- One important job of a connections planner is to take a creative idea and bring it to life across the whole journey, with different messages at different parts along it,
- It requires thinking about marketing in different ways, beyond just advertising
- A lot of useful and necessary data comes out of the world of paid media, but should be used for planning beyond just paid media
- The best form of connections planning is the intersection of business planning, analytics, brand strategy and touch-points
- Key question: Why and how does the brand matter to this business?
- If you do it right, you do not always come out with a marketing solution
- There’s no good name for this way of solving problems. Maybe it should just be called “strategy.”
One piece of advice: “I’d say a great comms planner knows that “everything communicates.” So they consider everything, including silence, as a tool to help brands matter.”
The whole interview:
Eric Pakurar: If I say “communications planning” to somebody, everybody seems to have a different meaning for it. So I’m just curious. I’d love to just pick your brain a bit. From your experience from DDB and TBWA, and then client side at Mondelez and Microsoft, and other places you’ve been, what’s your point of view?
Eliza Esquivel: You know, when I was at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, we had a comms planner in our [account] planning department. Actually, we hired two comms planners. They basically looked at it from the creative idea out — what is the best point of contact and expressions of the idea along the consumer journey? So they were almost like “creative” comms planners.
So the creative idea has already happened? “Now we have this idea, what do we do with it?” — is that the question?
Yeah, that’s it. So for example, Happiness Factory. So a comms planner came up with the idea that we would treat Happiness Factory like it was a movie that we were launching. So we would mirror the tropes of movie marketing. There would be trailers, there would be movie posters, and there would be outdoor billboards like the way that movies market themselves. They surround the concept that this is we’re launching a movie, even though it was just an ad.
So you almost need to think conceptually about it — what’s the metaphor around this idea. There were other comms planners that worked at Wieden that did the media. It wasn’t media buying, though. It was advising and strategizing how to bring the ideas to life, across channels, but from a creative idea-centric perspective.
So why — at Wieden, anyway — why was that not a creative department job or the job of the brand planner?
They just had that as a specialization. I think it was because there was a feeling that, and I think to a degree rightly so, that almost all the people who play the comms planning role had worked at media agencies before that. So they were coming in from the media world and bringing that expertise, but applying it in the advertising context.
But how they applied it was not just paid media, right?
Yeah, definitely. At Chiat, they had a group called Media Arts and the Media Arts Lab. It was the whole function, it was the whole division, to do Disruption through media. It just focused on disrupting the way that you show the community that you use media as a brand — multiple ways of seeing data, but also create a cultural-centric, idea-centric ways to disrupt a brand’s presence in the world, by rethinking the way they use media.
How did you work with them? Is it a conveyor belt? You do your job as an account planner, then the creatives do their job, and then you hand it off to Media Arts Lab, or the Wieden comms planner, or whoever?
You know, basically we would. It depended on the relationship with the client and what the problems were at the time. But a lot of times, we would pull in comms planning for pitches and some Disruption sessions, when there was some media component to the problem we were solving with a Disruption day. So it really depended. There wasn’t a hard and fast process.
Then on the client side [at Mondelez], we had a global head of media, and he did have somebody that specialized in comms planning. Those decisions were made by lots of people though, with the brand manager and their team, and then all these different people inside on the client side wanted to be part of it. So it wasn’t like one expert deciding analytically.
They called it “connections planning,” not “comms planning,” by the way.
Oh yeah? Is that a better name, in your opinion?
It’s better in a way, because comms planning can be misunderstood just as planning your campaign, know what I mean? Connections planning, one can imagine being part of the entire consumer journey, various messages at different parts along it, in different ways that wouldn’t be just advertising. It could be shopper marketing, it could be an app, it could be anything. All kinds of things that you could do along the consumer journey.
Got it. So “connections” says that it’s all along the journey, lots of different channels. “Comms” to you is paid media only.
Yes, that’s it.
So a handful of year ago now, you left the creative agency realm and went to the client side. That sort of comms planning that you described from Wieden, do you expect to get it from your agencies now? Or is it only done internally? And if it’s from your agencies, where do you expect to get it from?
Well, what I did in my last role didn’t really require that function. Lots of categories are already so well established, all of the communication touch points along the path to purchase are known. In the productivity software space, everything was already set in stone. The nurture stream, the influencer marketing, the owned channels… and everything else. The machine was already built. So there was no need to invent anything from scratch — or even to rethink things.
But let’s say I would go become a brand marketer for a brand that worked with multiple agencies. If I weren’t going to hire that expertise inside my team, I would expect to get it from my media agencies.
Interesting. So the way you describe it working when you were at Wieden was as a creative discipline.
Yes.
And you expect to be able to find that sort of creativity at a media agency?
Yes. It would depend on what a creative agency I was working with. If the creative agency was very rigorous in terms of a data analysis, I would feel confident. But I think that once you get on the client side, you have to justify the expenditures, the marketing spend. So it’s gets serious very quickly, in terms of the rigorous analytics and the number crunching of it.
So the creative level is high enough you would expect at most media agencies that you don’t have to worry about that side of it? Or that the analytical rigor is more valuable than having stellar creative?
Well, I’m assuming there wasn’t already a well-entrenched standard and or understanding of the consumer touch points that we need to be hitting in order to drive sales. In that case, I would work with the media agency to establish that. Then, okay, now that I know all the key touch points and what’s at stake, then I can hire the right agencies to create the content to hit those moments.
Okay, cool. That makes sense. So the implication there is that you as a client are going to wrangle all the agencies. Once you have the touch points identified from the media folks, you’re going to wrangle the creative agencies to make good on them, to make the right content for the right touch points.
Exactly.
Okay, so why aren’t you doing that touchpoint identification then as a client? As a hypothetical client, why aren’t you responsible for all of that internally yourself?
Well, I think it’s about access to the data — and I think that the more you know, the more you know what you don’t know. As a client, you realize that there are people who have just been spending the last twenty years of their career thinking about that very thing, do you know what I mean? Obviously, if you work for a startup you have to do it yourself. But if you’re working for a company that can afford it and you want to do something with excellence why not go get an expert?
Most media agencies are very good at paid media — understanding it, optimizing for it, making the most efficient buys, that sort of thing. It sounds like you would look for them for things beyond paid media?
I mean, it’s an excellent question. Because in order to not think about paid media, you still need to have all the data that comes from the paid media world, and all the analytics and look at it and go, okay if I didn’t have a media budget, what would I do? And I don’t know if you’re going to consistently get that sort of thinking from the media people.
Yeah, I keep wondering… The situation that I keep thinking of is the classic packaged good example. Let’s say you’re Tide. Everybody knows Tide. So theoretically — now, I don’t know the business at all, so take it all with a grain of salt — but theoretically, everyone knows the brand, and everyone has a positive opinion of it. The brand building side of the equation isn’t a problem. So shouldn’t most of their money be put into shopper marketing, or trade spend, or trials, or couponing, or something more conversion oriented? And how does the media agency, who thinks very well about paid media, which tends to be brand building side of things, how does that agency come up with the answer that says no, put all your eggs in the shopper basket, friends? How is that decision made?
Where you get that answer from about where you put all your eggs really should come from inside the client world, when you’re working with the research team and the data analytics team.
So for example — this is research that I did at Microsoft. I worked with the research and data analytics teams to find out which brand attributes or perceptions actually correlate with how we measure our business, which is subscriptions, renewals, and sales. And once I found out what those brand attributes were, then I did research across all touch points. Meaning from inside the product, to buying the product, to marketing, to influencers, to word of mouth — every way that you could hear or learn about a brand. And I was able to isolate which of those touch points was the most important, in terms of driving these critical perceptions that are correlated with making money.
Got it. That’s really cool.
So that’s something that I did as a client. I did it. I didn’t outsource that. That’s heavy business stuff, it’s proprietary. Then, once you know that, you can go get your external partners to help you achieve excellence in whatever those channels are.
Okay, so what do you call that process — the heavy business analytics process that you just described?
Honestly, I don’t know, and my Microsoft business unit had never done it before. I had never done it before either. But I just call it strategy. That is something that your brand strategist could be doing.
They should be doing the touch point stuff too, is what you’re saying?
Well, they should be doing the analysis to understand why the brand matters to the business. Does brand matter? How does it matter? Is there any correlation between brand perceptions and sales? And if so, which brand perceptions? And then when and where are those brand perceptions created? Where are the most important places those brand perceptions are created? That’s what a brand strategist should do.
But the trick is, if you do the research correctly, you do not always come out with a marketing solution.
Definitely.
So in this case, a lot of it was driven by the in-product experience. A lot of it was driven with a point of buying experience; a lot of it was driven after the point of buying.
So it’s more of a CX problem, or a UX problem, or a…?
Yes, and beyond. In other words, as a brand strategist, in all the different ways that our consumer or customer interacts with us, looking at everything and not just marketing, how are we driving these brand perceptions? And you start finding out that actually marketing is a really small part of it.
Yeah, that’s so true. So.. how much of your day on the client-side is focused on marketing versus other stuff?
I mean I would say, I mean for me I did brand strategy management, naming and partnership and part of brand strategy was I had a creative strategist who wrote the briefs for creative content that we created out of our own studio. So just to see that you understood what my role was that I would say that I probably only spent twenty percent of my time focused on marketing-related stuff and the rest of it was more looking at the interaction between the brand and the business.
Yeah, that makes sense. It’s hard — there’s no good name for all of this.
Yeah, when you figure it out let me know and I will start using it too. I don’t know if you remember this little bee I got in my bonnet and I put something on LinkedIn about it about planning and engineering.
Oh yeah, I read that.
This is a struggle, and the struggle is real, okay? The struggle is there was this thing called account planning that was born in the agency world. And basically it’s a discipline that teaches you how to use multiple ways of seeing in order to solve communication problems. That’s what it was. But it wasn’t just communication problems, it was business problems. So it’s this way of solving problems that the term “account planning” doesn’t even come close to describing.
And to be honest with you, even “brand strategy” is a misnomer because it’s a way of seeing what could influence product strategy, it could influence your go-to-market plan. It could influence so many things. So the thing I have been trying to struggle with is how do I talk to people about the magic of the way I’ve been trained up to think and the magic of how I solve problems. It’s hard to talk about.
It’s hard to talk about; there is no name for it really.
Yeah, there’s no term and the thing is if you’re not talking to somebody who knows what an account planner is, there is no shorthand to explain it. If you’re talking to somebody who understands what the account planning discipline was about and then you just say oh well, I use that approach for all of my business problem-solving people get it. But otherwise, there is no shorthand.
