Wtf is comms planning?
“Communications planning” is a term that has been around for a couple of decades now, give or take. But it doesn’t seem to mean the same thing than it did when it started. In fact, it’s changed (or added?) definitions so much that I’m not sure what the heck it means any more.
I want your opinion.
Looking for some perspective, I asked the Account Planning group on Facebook last week about it and there was a fair bit of discussion, much of it trying to draw a line between comms planning and media planning. But that was a specific group of people — self-identified account planners, the majority of whom work at creative shops. We need a broader sense of it. Surely there are other points of view.
In the end, the term means whatever we collectively think it means. And so I put it to you: Wtf is comms planning today? Whether you are a comms planner or not, how do you define it? In your experience and in your current jobs, is it relevant? Is it a discrete discipline?
On the Facebook thread, someone who knows my career asked whether I was serious.
I am.
In case context is helpful, here’s some background:
I’ve considered myself a comms planner for a long while—even after spending the majority of my career in account planning roles at creative agencies. Back in 2001 or thereabouts, after I’d been a media planner for a handful of years at DDB New York, the powers that be at Omnicom sucked all the media planners out of its creative shops to make OMD. My boss, Rich Notarianni, thought that was a silly idea. Why should the creative process be divorced from the decision about where and when that bit of creative appears? So he and the head of account planning, Paul Parton, hatched a scheme to partner account planners with newly-titled “communications planners,” intended to be the strategy equivalent of copywriter-art director pairs.
The experiment at DDB didn’t last long—the comms planning jobs were lost in the fallout of the dot com bust—but it set the bar for me on what comms planning should be: Content and context strategy done together, at the up-front part of the creative process. That experiment led to a job at Naked and has colored the creative-side planning roles I had after that.
Starting in the late 90s, others were playing in that same comms planning sandbox, with longer-term success: Michaelides and Bednash, Unity, and Naked were the OGs, in London. Nota Bene in South Africa. Fallon in Minneapolis. There are others. (It’s worth a turn through Space Race by Jim Taylor, if you’re into the history of the discipline.)
In the time since, the meaning of “communications planning” has clearly changed or been added to. Some observations:
- Some people who say they do this work at media shops, some at creative shops
- Some people who call themselves comms planners only deal with paid media, some try to consider all marketing communications channels
- Everyone who would have been called a media planner back in the day now has a card that reads “communications planner”
- Some do brand planning together with comms planning at the start, some conveyor-belt it, waiting for the creative idea to be set first or doing it separately
- Sometimes one person does both brand planning and comms planning, sometimes they’re separate and distinct disciplines
- Some do a similar thing, but call it by other names, like connections planning or engagement planning
- One could argue that there is a fair amount of overlap with CX, UX and CRM strategy as well
(Surely many of these are symptoms of the “great blur” at agencies, as Faris puts it in this interview.)
But enough from me. What’s your take?
