98% what?

Congratulations to John Griffiths and Tracey Follows for their epic history of the advertising discipline of account planning, published today. I can’t make the party but wanted to say why I think it’s an important read. (I’m not going to explain the title – read the book to find out why).

The rather odd British invention of Planning (broadly speaking consumer-led insight stuff) may now seem like part of the furniture in Adland but it represents on of only 3-4 real innovations in the way the ad business has organised itself in the last 50 years.

The idea of a two-person creative team (art-director and copywriter) is a well-known product of the Mad Men years in the US and subsequently the idea of splitting off the people who choose the ad space from those who make the things that fill that space (the separation of media and creative agencies) are arguably the more obvious structural ones.

But this strange notion of “planning”, a curious and flexible mix of market research, marketing strategy, brand thinking and creativity, has gradually evolved from a minority interest in a couple of London shops, into a given in most advertising businesses around the world. I’ve been lucky enough to spend 25 years doing planning and learned a huge amount at every step. I’ve also trained lots of planners and would-be planners and opined at length about how to define it and how to do it better.

What’s different about this book is avoids the easy conclusions and simple history that the received wisdom contents itself with; instead, it goes back to the beginning: to Planning’s Big Bang. It’s based on a marvellous archive of interviews that the authors have conducted with those who were there at Year Zero and shortly afterwards  – interviews which John in particular has been doing doggedly and posting online for a number of years.

How did it happen? What was the thinking at the time (as opposed to what later generations of adfolk told each other)? What were the real influences? Who were the real players and what did they think they were doing? What were the ambitions and intentions behind the decisions made which led this thing from half a dozen to tens of thousands around the world doing it? Naturally, there’s quite a lot of what I’d call Copy Copy Copy-ing, but the story told here is fascinating and surprising.

Some of the detail may seem slightly arcane to those who don’t work in advertising or marketing; some of it may seem a little too historical for newcomers to the modern digital advertising world (which like all “new worlds” is much the same as the old one); fundamentally, though this should be of real interest to anyone who wants to understand how businesses and their practices change and evolve over time.

But particularly to those who seek to change how businesses do what they do. Because for Adland, planning is not a department; it’s a way of doing things differently. That’s why I describe it as one of the big 3 innovations in the history of this noisy and often bizarre industry.

At a party to celebrate the 30th Birthday of Planning, I asked one of its founding gurus, the late Stephen King, if he was pleased or proud with the success of his (and his peers’) idea. Modest, as ever, he shook his head. Well, yes, he said but I’m slightly disappointed that no-one’s had a better idea since. Personally, I have mixed feelings about this. I’m sure there must have been a number of better solutions to the organisational challenges that the industry has faced in the last 50 years but this was pretty good one and somehow – as the book details – Account Planning got lucky and got popular and gavee me and lots of other people more interesting jobs and careers than we might otherwise have had.

Highly recommended.