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

Part I

Planning: Role and Structure

The articles in this section give a very vivid flavour of the London advertising world in the 1970s. It is the definitive account of where the new discipline of account planning came from and what it aimed to do at a time when all advertising agencies were modelled on the typical structure of American agencies. The multinational agencies were relatively large and coherent entities in the sense that all the disciplines lived under the same roof.

The value of this historical perspective to readers in the fragmented world of communications planning today is enormous. Why? Because the job to be done is exactly the same in our more complex world as it was in what seems a much more orderly past.

The bitty, fractious media and agency environment together with the distractions of technology and social change often obscure this fact. Yet the intellectual logic that binds the whole process together is the same now as it was then and the themes in this section have important lessons for today.