Malcolm White
Planning was never intended to be just about imaginative leaps or just about lateral thinking.
Great planning isn’t creativity. It’s grounded creativity. Great planners are those who can flip between logical analysis and lateral flights of fancy.
Planning today is too concerned with downstream creative interventions at the expense of big, strategic thinking which happens upstream.
Planning was, and is, a force for changing advertising and communications, and the way agencies think and behave.
Stephen King:
I believe in fact that the most fundamental scale on which to judge account planners is one that runs from Grand Strategists to Advert Tweakers. “Grand strategists” are intellectual, aim to see the big picture, are a little bit above the fray, and almost economists. At the other end are the “advert tweakers”, who peer myopically at advertisements, conduct group discussions, justify creative work to sceptical clients, and are almost qualitative researchers. Nowadays there are rather too many agencies whose planners’ skills are much too near the advert-tweaking end of the scale.
The planning process is one of learning and improvement, not of proof and magic solutions.
Jeremy Bullmore:
We need to be intuitive, instinctive, scared and lucky AND we need to be rigorous, disciplined, logical and deductive.
Taken from A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King, a book I can truly recommend for those interested in the past, present and future of account planning from a UK perspective.
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