Account Planner Interview 2: Brenna Whisney
November 20th, 2010 • Interviews
(The second interview for this series featuring Account and Strategic Planners at advertising agencies worldwide was with Brenna Whisney a Planner, at Fallon based in Minneapolis.)
What is your job title? I’ve heard a number of different names for your role within the agency world – what are some of those names? What’s the most common job title for your role?
My job title is Planner. When I worked at Olson my job title was ‘Brand Anthropologist’ (which is borrowed from cultural anthropologist). Some other job titles include account planner, or insights manager/planner, but really all these job titles are confusing and don’t explain the job very deeply.
Now that we know your job title – what is your job or rather what do you do?
Planners are a bridge between the client and creatives. We figure out what the clients wants to say to their consumers and how to make their message relevant to them. And by trying to figure out a relevant way to communicate with the consumers we help our creative department get that message across.
Do you know much about the history of this role within the industry?
It started in Britain and developed from the 1970’s-90’s. The role was created out of a need for someone working outside of pure research and also outside of account services. Clients were starting to need more information on things that were not defined within the roles of other parts of the agency.
The job function continues to evolve. There is now a sort of classic school of thinking within planning. Russell Davies is an example of someone who is a part of that older school thinking. A lot of what planning is is following trends; trends in communication, trends in culture, on-line, in fashion, really we need to be tracking trends anywhere and everywhere — anything that might relate to the work our clients are doing. There are a ton of great websites I follow daily as a part of my job to be able to track trends. For example: PSFK, Trend Central, or Trend Watching to name a few.
(For a really good overview of account planning’s history check it out here.)
How do you work with or interact with other agency departments? -Specifically the creative department and art directors? Who or what departments do you interact with the most?
We work with the account team by co-authoring the client brief and putting in the mandatories. Such as, “Here is what we/(you) want to communicate…” Then the creatives take that information to build off of for the campaigns. We also check back in with the creatives to make sure their work meets the client message during the development process.
When doing research we might find that the word, ‘partnership’ is the right idea for what a given client is trying to communicate, but the word ‘partnership’ is the wrong term to convey that meaning in the ads because maybe in that clients’ industry it has a stigma associated with it or another reason along those lines. So we also spend time thinking about the meaning behind the messages we are trying to convey.
The account department is often thinking about things through the clients eyes while the creative department is thinking about things more from the consumers eyes. We sort of sit in the middle making sure the creatives don’t stray too far from what the client is trying to say and also making sure they have enough creative room to present what the client needs to say in a way that has impact.
The planner role is unique in the agency because it is one of the few roles where sometimes you need to tell the client that their message is wrong or a given approach will not work. Our clients have come to expect that as planners we’re the ones who essentially get to call them out on things that aren’t right. One of my former clients liked to call me the, ‘vegetables’ because our information was a part of what they needed to hear, but they didn’t necessarily like hearing it.
When working with clients our job is to get them out of their own heads an into their customers heads and we do this in between the account departments and the creative departments.
Are you involved in pitches?
Yes. When an RFP (request for proposal) comes in we do research and craft a strategy. This happens on a much faster timeline than the work we do for our current clients. We’ll put together a proposal strategy in one or two weeks instead of 4 months which is more typical for client projects. We also work very closely with the creative department on pitches.
How did you become a planner? What is a typical way to get a job as a planner?
First I had to learn this was a job that even existed since it is such a small part of the larger advertising industry. In college few people knew what this job was. Once I learned what it was I wanted to go straight into it, but there really isn’t a straight path into this role. Most people move into this role from somewhere else within the agency world or from a totally different angle like coming from academics. I was able to move straight into planning because I knew from the start it was what I wanted to do, but that is rare.
Are you ever contacted by photographers?
No.
Are you surprised or wonder why?
Yes. Sort of…. we use a lot of imagery in our work and working directly with higher level photographers could benefit what we do.
How do planners use images?
We use images for our presentations. So we do image sorts to find images we need for those presentations. Sometimes we will build an entire presentation around a single image because it represents so strongly what we are trying to convey. Images are really important for us in our ability to telling a story. We also create images when we do consumer profiles. We will often visit with consumers to learn about them and document these people and their lives with photos. Then often this imagery gets used as a reference for the creative departments and for the clients as well.