One of the services offered by many ‘full service advertising agencies’ is to bring a form of research and development to bear on the progress of converting guidelines in the client’s brief into a formal creative strategy.
The prefix ‘account’ is misleading in two ways.
First, it has nothing to do with financial accounts, but is explained by the fact that advertising agencies have always used it to describe one discrete project handed over by a client; ‘the Fairy Liquid account’, for example.
Second, the focus of planning is not the account itself but development of an advertising campaign. It is therefore no surprise that the description is nowadays more usually just ‘planning’.
Account planners are, the intellectual wing of business. Their goal is to understand consumers, audiences, market and society and to use that knowledge as a basis for the development of effective advertising message.
They do not play any part in the craft of converting those messages into the words and images that make-up actual advertisement, but are generally responsible for any comparatively pre-tests of alternative treatments.
In practice, even that modest level of involvement in the creative process can bring them into conflict with key people in the agency’s creative department, who may maintain that making advertisements is an intuitive skill, not amenable to design by committee and only inhibited by research based theorizing.
For that, the most logical job description would in fact be ‘creative planning’, clearly complementing the long-established ‘media planning’ discipline.
Account planning seems to be in prolonged adolescence at the turn of the century, not yet really widespread in smaller or less sophisticated advertising agencies. It originated in London, and remains something of a British specialization.
Advertising Account Planning
