These days, I found a very interesting article from Campaign in which an account planner, David Hackworthy, and a communications planner, Ivan Pollard, respond to a question of the magazine: if one could do the other’s job.
This was the spark to put myself thinking on a subject that I usually tend to think: the role of the account planning in today’s landscape of brand communications. I’m an account planner, I’m still guided by its principles on daily activities and this is my background since I’ve started my career, but I really think that we should learn some good things with comms planners.
Ivan Pollard’s words not just enlightened the question for me, but also confirmed some thoughts that I have. I think the essence resides in this quote: “the journey is as important as the destination”.
What I see is that for a long time the account planner job’s mission was to find the best destination for brands, to find a place where the brand could be positioned based on a powerful insight and that could differentiate it from its competitors. To position a brand, the planner could count on time to construct that and on an environment without so much “noise”.
But, as we all know, things have changed. To find these destination spaces are not just so easy; the dynamic to construct brands requires messages on multiple levels (and please, not just messages), we have no time to base a brand on one proposition with the same message to repeat it in just one perspective; and, not to mention, the new demand patterns of consumers.
So, when the destinations get crowded and surrounded by too much noise, the quality of the means that you use to communicate your main idea is as important as the idea itself. That’s why I think that we, account planners, should think and try to pursuit things more like comms planners even more.
We have to change our idea that our ultimate client is the creative team. It’s broader! I’ll put that even the comms planners should be our client as well, because, at the end of the day, we will just be capable of constructing something if we make people participate on the stories we aim to create or if we make people move for and through the worlds we develop as big brand ideas.
It’s in this sense that I think that account planners’ role will have to change or evolve. The creation of big brand ideas is, or soon it will be, not enough. We will need to make it big since the beginning, by the quality of the interactions (be it products, concepts, ads, social interactions, etc) of the things we will propose to consumers for them to participate within our brand worlds.
Finally, I feel that within our role, we need to claim for more responsibility of making things happen – getting out of our sage position and going to the warrior one.
