Hizzonah's Blank Stare

So, one of the first posts I've wanted to write about is DEFINING ACCOUNT PLANNING. I know what it means, and most people in the advertising and marketing industry know what it mean. Actually, as I write this I realize this is NOT true; that is precisely why I'm writing this post - so many people in our industry DON'T know what it means to be an account planner. And lay-people? FUGETABOUTIT! In any event, this topic has been on my mind A LOT lately. It started a while back, and it was reinforced last weekend. Some background:

1) I work for an agency where account planning is relatively new. Over the past two years we've put the discipline and people in place such that Planning is now a part of our creative process. Thus, it's still a novel concept, and one that our youth-heavy agency does not truly understood, or embrace.

2) My Dad's Blank Stare. So, I had a nice impromptu evening with my dad last weekend, let's call him Hizzonah. He's a judge, but you probably guessed that. Very rational, logical, process-oriented, but only relatively comfortable with my industry. He loves talking about what he's read about advertising from the Wall Street Journal. (He thinks I work for Omnicom and he loves to tell people that). So we were having a lovely dinner out, and got to talking about my job, and the recent promotion I had gotten. And he's inquisitive (it's where I get it) and so he starts asking me about my job and what I do and all that. And, of course, I am so excited to prove myself to my Dad, show him what I've learned and how smart I am. But as I explain to him what I do, how I do it, what it means, I slowly come to realize I might as well be speaking Arabic, for all he can understand about what's coming out of my mouth.

So, then I give him what I think is a truly brilliant answer. "So Dad, you watch 60 Minutes, right? Andy Rooney? Well, I'm like Andy Rooney."

Well, the blank stare ensued, but I still think it's a fairly interesting way to talk about planning. Here's why:

Andy asks questions.

That's what a planner does. Always inquisitive, always, wondering, pondering, musing, percolating, pulling things apart to better understand them in the end. I think that's what makes being a planner so great. You never rest until you can make sense of something, and will use amazing tools to get at those answers.

My boss likes to say that planning is "defining the path that is yet to be" for a brand. Another colleague says it like this: "we are responsible for understanding the consumer first, and the brand, and where those two come together."

Wikipedia defines Account Planning as "the discipline that brings the consumer into the process of developing advertising. To be truly effective, advertising must be both distinctive and relevant, and planning helps on both counts."

I think the APG defines it the best, and when I moved into planning and read the APG's specs on planning, I realized how utterly lost I'd been up until that point in my life. I did not know why I could do these things, or how to harness them, but then "Planning" came along and I had a purpose.

So I will try to figure out how to upload this APG article written by Merry Baskin, and originally developed by Stephen King and Stanley Pollitt.

So, when it comes to talking about planning at my agency, and what planning can do for our clients, I might still get blank stares, but slowly and surely, one by one, when planning is involved, and people see how it helps and why it's so important and how it gets us to better ideas, that's how I define planning. It's me knowing what planning is, doing it everyday, asking the questions, plugging for more information and being smart about using it to to the best of my ability.

But I still stick to my Andy Rooney analogy about asking questions, the right questions, questions that make you think and open up more questions and doors and take you to a place that, once the answers are applied, are beneficial to your clients business. Blah blah blah...That is still the answer I will tell Hizzonah and maybe one of these days I will no longer get a blank stare.

One last thing that does make me feel better was Hizzonah's question to me... "so, where did you learn all this stuff?"