A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King

6

The Media Planner’s Revenge

By Marco Rimini, Head of Communications Planning, Mindshare Worldwide

 

 

 

 

 

Media and Account Planning: One Job or Two?

Sounds dry, doesn’t it? It could be but it isn’t. By calmly, slowly and subtly peeling the layers off this question, Stephen King takes a discussion about the making of boring old media decisions and turns it into a treatise on how agencies should be organized. In the process he also lays out the thinking that led him to create account planning.

It was the single thing that Stephen King was most famous for and it is fascinating to see how he got there.

The article was written almost 40 years ago but the issues he discusses are suddenly very topical again. How do you get media researchers and media thinkers involved in the development of advertising to make sure the team produces the most effective advertising possible? In fact so topical is the issue that the era he is writing in peeps through only occasionally.

First, account planning. Whatever it has come to mean, the roots of account planning grow from Stephen’s intent, which was to simplify and codify a clear way of team working to produce the most effective form of advertising. By combining the skills found in the marketing function (then housed with the agency, and what we might now call market analysis) , and the media planning function within one discipline and one person, called the account planner, he believed that the team working to create effective advertising would be ...