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

About the Book: How it Happened

The collected wisdom of Stephen King already exists – but not in one piece. If no-one steps forward to perform the task of publishing the Stephen King Collection it will be the ultimate proof that ours is a truly trivial trade.

Campaign, 24 February 2006

Stephen King had a very big idea, and that very big idea changed the way advertising agencies were structured, how they thought, and even what they produced. He changed our lives and the lives and careers of many others both in the UK and around the world where the idea of account planning has been adopted. Although Stanley Pollitt of BMP had a similar idea about the same time, Stephen did the most to codify and explain what this new discipline was and how it worked.

Like many original thinkers, he documented his ideas as they evolved in a number of articles and books published over a 30-year period-a total of about 40 or so. When he died in February 2006, there was, naturally, a flurry of talk about re-publishing his work to make it available to a wider and younger audience.

We felt we should do more to make the ideas described in his work relevant to today. After all, much has changed in the media, marketing and consumer environments over the last decade, never mind a 30-year period.

The solution was to choose a range of his articles that seemed to offer most guidance to readers today. For each, we chose an eminent practitioner to comment on what has changed in the intervening years and how the ...