Wrote this in a response to queries by a mag; thought i'd put it up on the blog for people to react and respond.
It’s always tough for an account planner to explain in one line what he actually does for a living. However, that dilemma is probably becoming redundant, more so in the last five years.
The way it was envisioned is that there existed a place in the business for a person who had a sharp understanding of the client’s business, a keen eye for the consumer’s view and a means of getting it through to creative. They were, in a sense, meant to be bridge between business & consumer needs and the creative interpretation.
However, with clients going to specialists, the role of a planner got marginalized. Research gets done by research agencies; business consulting by clients…hence the onus on a planner is now on the “ideas” alone. Both within and outside the agency, planners are evaluated on the power of their “ideas” rather than the rigor of their work.
Planners today are used as the “ideas” guys, the guys who’ll come up with the idea for a brief, for an event, for a pitch presentation, for a way to sell the creative to the client. Given the sharp segregation of functions, the onus of “ideas” seems to always fall on the planner’s table.
Today, that role is metamorphosing. Given the emergence of new forms of media (digital, marketing services, blog marketing, channel planning), integration has become of paramount importance to all agencies. The reality is that few actually deliver it, the reason being that the onus for that integration does not lie with any one person. That’s probably the role that planners will need to take upon in their agencies. From being just “idea generators and sellers” to being “integrators of ideas and solutions” across media.
Planners have had to think of innovations even around the execution and that’s probably a sea change in the way planners perceive their jobs. A place of pride exists for specialization within planning (channel planning, creative planners, data planners) but the reality is that a good planner can play all these roles with equal ease.
In a sense, while a planner would always be about the “why and the what”; today his/her role is also a lot more about the “how”!! Or put differently, the role is evolving from “One I 2 another I” – from being just about ideas to being about “ideas integration”
That being said, the currency of a planner, knowledge and varied influences, still remains pretty much the same, it’s just the manner in which we tend to use that has made all the difference.
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