Why planning?

The other day I was driving somewhere and I switched on the radio to catch the end of the evening news show on Radio 4, PM. I came in halfway through a piece and heard the distinctive Barking twang of Dave Trott. Most of you I’m sure will know of Dave, he was my creative Director at Gold Greenlees Trott and was then, and no doubt still is, one of the most influential and original people working on the UK advertising scene.

Hearing Dave’s voice – I think he was talking about nostalgia not being what it used to be – reminded me of a conversation I once had with him about why planners are called planners. As I remember it his view was that planning was a rather boring name that conjured up town planning, a grey and dismal calling responsible for destroying the fabric of most British urban centres with soulless tower blocks, dangerous shopping malls and community-splitting dual-carriageways. He argued that researcher would be a better title as research was concerned with exciting discovery, I guess he had in mind the sort of research that Albert Einstein and Marie Curie did.

There are two problems, however, with the name “researcher” in the agency context. The first is that “account planning” and the name account planner was a conscious reaction against the sort of market research that was done in the 50s and 60s; the sort that David Ogilvy said is a lamppost used by clients, like drunks, for support rather than for illumination. And remember that Ogilvy started life as a researcher!

The second reason is more philosophical, and it is that research is necessarily backward looking; it tells you what people think is, not what could be. It seems to me that the key skill of a great planner is to be able to imagine a glorious future and to be able to show his or her creative colleagues and clients how to get to that future. This is what town planners do, but no matter how baleful the results, it doesn’t gainsay the need for the activity. Science tells us that one of the defining characteristics of human being is this ability to imagine the future and plan accordingly, and without it nothing coherent or new ever happens. Of course in that sense creatives are also planners, and planners are also creative!

It is a testament to the rightness of the initial insight about account planning, by Stephen King and Stanley Pollitt, that the concept has metastasized, there are Media Planners and Communication Planners, some agencies have Creative Planners and clients have Brand Planners. If you look at my CV you will see that I have been called a Strategic Planner, which is the preferred term in the US, and a Brand Architect. Well an architect is a step up from a town planner, but in essence it’s the same job, imagining the future and constructing a plan. So, no Dave, I should have said, account planner is the right title.