Is account planning dead?

Is account planning dead?
By Al Moffatt



Account planning has always been positioned and sold as being the voice of the consumer. Agencies had the iron grip of knowing the consumer and telling clients exactly what they consumers were thinking.
That was until technological, economic and social tends converged to hasten the evolution from push-marketing to user generated content, and now to digital and social media as the preferred way for consumers to talk with each other and to companies. Agencies started to lose touch with clients during the UGC phase, but it's really been ratcheted up now to such a point that clients have the ability to go direct to their consumers rather than having to go through an agency to 'understand their consumer'.

Thus, it seems perfectly logical that Unilever recently dumped their agency to go direct to consumers for their branding and advertising ideas (i.e., crowd sourcing). Whether this is a short-lived fad or a real trend is open to debate. But it is symptomatic of a larger issue that agencies and planners need to watch. Clients are saying, 'We don't need no stinking agency to be 'the voice of the consumer'. We can go directly to the horse's mouth without the agency filter and creative agenda getting in the way.' This is further evidenced by the fact that agencies are having difficulty finding ways to be fairly compensated for their social media thinking and executions because clients, in many cases, don't believe agencies add any incremental value to warrant better compensation.

In order to bring value back to account planning and the agency in general, agencies need to really understand what's going on when it comes to digital and social media. Digital and social media are not marketing or technological phenomena, they are cultural, generational, economic, social and intra- and interpersonal phenomena. Agencies that look at this through a marketing or technological prism rather than through a cultural / anthropological prism are missing the point. It's not that people are using social media, but rather it's why and how they're using social media.

Behind the 140 word 'I'm going out to lunch…' tweets, the 'Look at my kid's birthday pictures' on My Space and the ubiquitous 'Will you be my friend?' invitations on Facebook and LinkedIn is a desire for individuals to feel connected and to feel heard. For all its good, technology has isolated us from each other under the guise of bringing us together. What all these tweets, posting, forums, blogs, etc., are really all about is that people are silently screaming, 'Will someone listen to me?', 'Will someone care about me?', 'Will someone pay attention to me?'

Well, many clients are now saying, 'Sure, I'll listen to you. I'll pay attention to you. I'll make you feel important.' Thus, agencies have gone from being the listeners to the trackers while clients have gone from being the trackers to becoming the listeners. Agencies are now spending all their time on ROI, tracking clicks, hits, eyeballs, etc., in order to prove that digital and social media advertising work and to try to justify their fees. Clients, on the other hand, are saying, 'Screw that, why do I need to compensate an agency for information I can get myself, especially when we're hurting financially?'

Agencies / account planners can once again add value by telling clients how and why their consumers are using the kinds of digital and social media they are while simultaneously telling them exactly the right mix of messages, media and platforms to use and in what instances. While a few agencies are doing this, it's more from an isolated, analytics perspective, which by definition, looks in the rearview mirror. A more all-encompassing, predictive social science model is needed that helps guide where a client's consumers will go and how best to reach them, now and in the immediate future, especially as digital and social media platforms change so quickly. In other words, agencies and account planners are getting too caught up in the 'what' and not on the 'why'.

Digital and social marketing have allowed the social science and scientific worlds to collide, co-exist and become interdependent on each other like no other media in the history. Yet, in most agencies the two worlds never meet. The one thing that all agency departments now have in common is digital. And no one should be able to better understand this, integrate it, and execute it than account planning.

Thus, agencies need to restructure themselves so that planning sits atop the entire organisation and drives everything that happens in an agency, including media, digital, creative, research, and strategy, rather then just darting in and out to deliver sporadic insights. (Yes, this means that interactive is also under the planning umbrella.) Planning needs to become less reactionary and more prescriptive, preventive and visionary. In other words, account planning really needs to become agency planning if clients are once again to pay agencies for something they don't already know or know how to do.

Al Moffatt is president and CEO of Worldwide Partners, Inc.