Account Planner Interview 1: Heather Saucier
November 19th, 2010 • Interviews
(My first planner interview for this series featuring Account and Strategic Planners at advertising agencies worldwide was with Heather Saucier a Sociologist, at Periscope 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 ‘Sociologist’. My background and degree is in sociology. At many agencies, ‘Account Planner’ is the most common title for my role. And some agencies call planners, ‘Insight Specialists’, Strategic Planners’, or ‘Brand Anthropologists’.
Why are there so many different titles for your role within the agencies?
What we are doing now and what we study has changed over time so the title has changed as well. The role is more complex now than it has been in the past.
Now that we know your job title – what is your job? What do you do?
A way that I like to frame it is that I have to go up high and wide to then come back down to create strategy for my clients. This means that sometimes I’m out shopping, sometimes I’m reading the news, and sometimes I’m asking questions of specific groups of people. I take all this information and tell stories about people and their behaviors. A good way to think about it is that I’m gathering all kinds of information and acting as an information translator. I help brands understand people and their behaviors better.
How do you do that specifically?
At Periscope we use a proprietary tool that has 11 categories of cultural trends that we believe everyone thinks about or is a part of their lives now. The goal is to really get our client to think more about their consumers and less about their own products, services, or themselves. Most companies know and care about their own businesses so much they don’t realize their customers don’t care about their company as much as they do.
Do you know much about the history of this role within the industry?
Account planning started in Britain in the early 1990’s so it’s not a brand new role within the industry, but it’s also not that old either in relation to other jobs in our industry.
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 interact with the whole agency, but our time is fairly equally split between the account and creative departments. We have different relationships with each department. Account people tend to be more frustrated with our relationship because we are often challenging our clients to think in a new way and their job is to essentially keep the client happy. When we try to get them to change the way they think about their business this can upset the status quo, which makes the account departments job more challenging. On the other hand the creative department generally really likes working with our department because we are opening new avenues for ideas and helping back up their ideas with our research. I personally work a lot with copywriters and art directors. I provide them with research and information, which helps give them more of a voice in the creation of ads.
How is the information that your department generates used?
We tell stories about people and groups of people. We do this most often by creating visual representations of our information and we also use our research to help develop new products or services for our clients. All of our research is presented in a very visual way.
How are you connected to the client – do you ever communicate with them directly? Are you involved in pitches?
Yes, we communicate with all of our clients directly. And yes, we are also involved in most of our agencies’ pitches. We’re there to offer a fresh perspective.
How many planners does an agency usually have? Are there planners that play different roles within their own agencies or do some planners specialize in certain areas?
It depends on the size of the agency. At Periscope we’ve got 10 planners, which is about right for the overall size of our agency, but some places might have only person doing each aspect of our job and there are entire companies that only do planning – essentially planner agencies.
And yes, planners do have specialties. These specialties are usually around specific demographical groups of people like the baby boomers, millennials, or Hispanics. It’s really important that if a planner has a specialty in a certain area that they know it very well because it’s important the information they present around a specific type of group is well researched and legitimate.
How do you become a planner? Or what is a typical way to get a job as a planner?
My way into the industry was from a non-traditional path. I didn’t go to school for advertising or marketing. But, advertising is in my family. And it seems most planners also have a non-traditional path that leads them to this role. At its core it’s about fresh thinking. We have a hunger and curiosity to speak a truth. We are here to see realities as they are – not what our clients or we want them to be.
Do you ever work with photographers?
Yes, but we have an in-house photo studio and they usually cover our photo needs. But, there is more and more of a need for better and more authentic imagery to help us tell our stories. An issue we face in the photographs we use to represent our research is how do you interview and photograph someone and not disturb their environment? OR rather, how can we photograph people in the most honest way? A specific photographer’s eye or style of shooting can become really important in that process. We often use a sort of paparazzi style of photography to present our work. It helps us see and present what people are wearing and doing in their element. Good photography can make a huge difference in our storytelling process. Iphone photos are often just not compelling enough. Besides our in-house photographers we all use resources like Flickr and stock photo sites. But, these resources often don’t have images that represent the kind of photo opportunities we need. It’s very hard to find photographs of people in real life situations that are also high quality images.
Have you ever been contacted by a freelance photographer?
Never. (Besides me…)
Do you think there is a reason a planner could hire a photographer?
Yes. We could possibly hire photographers to take photos on the research side. It’s becoming more and more important for us to have better assets in our presentation. A photographer would have a more stylized way of presenting what we are trying to convey. Photographers could also be used to document events especially those that we organize within the community.
If a photographer could be useful to communicate with for a given project from a planner’s perspective how do you think that process could or should work?
Well, we would first need to create a space within the industry and within our own workflow for a photographer to get hired. And then we would need to figure out what that meant for a given project. Would a photographer be needed for a few hours, a few days, or weeks?
It is possible for a photographer to find a way to specialize in areas where we need good, honest, and compelling imagery like capturing boomers, children, or people eating in a natural way – like their daily food ceremonies, etc.
At a certain point photography becomes an investment for us as planners. In advertising, just like the culture outside of our industry there are individuals who want to hold on to what was, and some people who want to run right away into what is the new thing, and then there are people that fall somewhere in the middle. Planners are often looking and thinking about the future, but have to work in the middle because so many people within the industry want to think about things including photography and how it can be used in an old way.
Any other thoughts – related to photography or imagery in relation to your role?
Because a huge amount of our time is spent on research and thinking about how people communicate and connect I’ve become a fan of the work of Kansas State University professor Michael Wesch who teaches digital ethnography and cultural anthropology. A few years ago he created a YouTube video called, “The Machine is Us/ing Us” which highlights how text means something different on-line than it did before the internet and in that video he also starts to show how photos and video are now interactive things, not just static things. He’s done other projects with his students where they explore YouTube in a new way as well. It’s fascinating stuff.
When you really dig into Flickr & Youtube it reveals the scariness of being in front of a camera. There is a lot going on now culturally because of the truth we are all in front of or interacting with cameras constantly. This has an impact on the way people interact with brands and in-turn brands need to interact with people.