How Comms Planners and Brand Planners Work Best Together
Since the early days of account planners like King, Pollitt and Newman in the ‘60’s and 70’s, advertising has grown up. Market growth and fragmentation, along with shifts in culture and technology have resulted in new problems for advertising to solve as well as new opportunities for brands to take advantage of. Within this context, growth and maturity of the advertising industry has led to expanding agency teams and specialization of roles. “Account planning” now comes in all shapes and sizes: brand planning, engagement planning, digital planning, connections planning, media planning–along with fragmentation of the industry, there has been fragmentation of the planning discipline.
How this fragmentation is being handled within agencies varies–sometimes a “non-traditional” planner is embedded on an account reporting directly to a traditional planner. Other times, newer breeds of planners might be a group of their own with individuals floating between accounts on a project-by-project basis. Both approaches have drawbacks and benefits; no one yet seems to have found a perfect solution for how to organize planning departments under such changed circumstances.
In a sense, specialization within the planning discipline is beneficial to the industry and to brands; it gives planners room to develop expertise and bring more rigor to the process, which should ultimately have a positive impact on productivity and output. The inherent risk within the new planning paradigm, however, is that the output itself–the creative ecosystem–becomes fragmented, which is the exact opposite of what we planners (and our clients) continually strive for–integration.
As planning continues to evolve then, it is this tension between specialization and integration that we need to solve for. Departments need to determine optimal organizational structures. Planners of all sorts must recognize what we have in common, and what we commonly own. And we must also recognize where our differences lie and what we can distinctively own.
But most importantly, we must remember that at the end of the day we are all planners striving to reach the same goal–better creative work–and that this goal can only be attained through daily collaboration and true partnership.
The document included here, which was created with input from brand and comms planners alike, begins to layout some thinking about how brand and comms planners can work together best throughout the campaign development process and ultimately get to a place where they are working synchronously to have a positive impact on agency culture and creative output.
