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

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Short-Term Effects may be Easier to Measure but Long-Term Effects are More Important

By Tim Broadbent, Regional Planning Director, Ogilvy & Mather Asia Pacific

 

 

 

 

 

The standard advertising agency functions such as the creative department, for instance, or account management, evolved messily over time from the primordial ooze of Victorian media agencies. But account planning is a made thing. It was deliberately designed to meet an agency need that in-house research and marketing departments did not meet.

King put effectiveness at the heart of account planning. His Account Planners Toolkit is the manual J Walter Thompson circulated to all its offices in the 1980s when it adopted account planning globally. Its first sentence reads, “This manual contains J. Walter Thompson’s views on how to plan the most effective advertising.” That is what account planning is for: to get “the most effective advertising”.

How can we tell whether a particular campaign is effective? What do we mean by “effective”? – do we mean a short-term increase in volume sales, or a long-term increase in the strength of the brand? Questions such as these come under the general heading of “evaluation”, and make evaluation central to account planning.

 

Evaluation is a Dynamic Activity

Evaluation is often seen as dry and backward looking, a bit like doing last year’s accounts. However, Stephen saw evaluation as a dynamic activity. He took evaluation out of the backroom and thrust it into the hurly-burly of creative ...