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

Part II

Planning: Craft Skills

Tim Broadbent observes in his piece in this section that “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.”

As a “made” thing, it clearly needed guidelines as to how it should work; or put more accurately, how individuals aspiring to be account planners should approach the various problems and dilemmas the task involves. No one thought harder and more coherently about the intellectual underpinning than Stephen himself and this section details some of the specific features that should live in the planner’s mental tool kit.