Did the strategic planner just kill the advertising agency?

Keep your eye on the pontificating strategic planner, they may have just killed your agency. Or at the very least they’ve got your agency by the throat and are sucking the life out of it. I know what you're thinking ‘What, Sam? I didn't think they had it in them! They’re so lovely and liked, and make us look smart and strategic. How could they be killing our agency’?”

The ‘strategic planner’ is indeed a much  loved and revered discipline within the advertising agency ecosystem, linked to the point where the role, or the value it creates is rarely challenged. Unfortunately, it’s possible that the much loved discipline created by J Walter Thompson and BMP in the late 1960s is, at least in its traditional form, actually killing the advertising agency. The fact that neither agency that created the discipline now actually exists is a bit of a clue, but there’s much more to consider here.

Now before I go on, I want to reinforce my love of both insights and strategy, invaluable bedpartners. Insights has spun off into a massive industry in its own right - market research. Strategy as a consultancy is thriving too, with most strategic consultancies experiencing strong growth. Both insights and strategy are also critical for a successful agency, but maybe not the role of a traditional strategic planner (or many  strategic planning departments, depending on how they are structured - either). It may be time for the strategic planning profession to be laid to rest or at the very least redeployed, before they finish the job of killing the agency. Here’s the argument in 5 parts.

Strategic planners are killing the agency because:

1. Strategic planners disempower account service: If they do the strategy, and the creatives do the creative, what do the account service people do? Just account service and administration? The strategic planner's presence can have a disempowering effect in many agencies. My first ever job at my first creative agency was to be rolled into an account to ‘save it’, by talking confidently about a new creative direction (already developed). I was wheeled in to be the smart person, completely disempowering all the others on the account. I haven't worked in a traditional advertising agency for years. Is this still the case? Does this still happen?
    
2. Strategic planners infantilise creatives: Creatives shouldn’t be treated as monkeys kept in a dark room at the end of a food chain, waiting for their brief to be handed to them before they are allowed to apply their creativity. However, that can be what happens when a strategic planner gets involved in the process. Creatives are not allowed to be ‘turned on’, until after the strategic planner has done their bit in the process. This focus on the brief written by the strategic planner keeps creatives in the dark, waiting.
    
3. Strategic planners don’t create valued outputs: Strategic planners are expensive and the role of a traditional strategic planner in a traditional advertising agency is thin. They get to shine in that little moment between the client brief and the actual idea, writing what most advertising agencies refer to as a ‘creative brief’. Unfortunately, to my knowledge this is an output that has yet to have any proven financial value attached to it. Does any client, anywhere, actually pay for a ‘creative brief’, or does its value often go undetected, as part of the output of a creative idea?  So many strategic planners believe their value lies in writing a good brief, if it does then they need to get better at proving the economic value of that brief.
    
4. Strategic planners make the agency less efficient:  Here’s what happens to agencies that have strategic planners. Account service gets the brief, the brief then goes to the strategic planner to write an internal brief, the internal brief then goes to the creative director to get signed off, it gets rejected. It then gets re-written and then gets represented to the creative director (repeat as needed depending on the size of the creative director's ego), then signed off. The strategic planner then gives it back to the account service person and then they give it back to the client. The client then gives the ok, and then the creatives can start working on a solution. 
   
   Without a strategic planner the client gives the agency a brief and then the creatives start working on it. Obviously, there is a risk to this too - but if the thinking can be done, and the objectives are clear - it can be a far more efficient way to operate. 
   
   Perhaps it’s the fetishisation of the actual brief that is one of the biggest agency killers I’ve seen. Endless discussions about the briefing document, an artifact in an agency that has no commercial value in its own right - yet can keep an agency bogged down in pontification for months.  
    
5. Strategic planners make the agency less creative: The role of strategy extends much further up and down stream than most strategic planners are trained in. From business strategy, to segmentation and category understanding, to positioning, to new product development (NPD), into platform idea development, to design, to communications strategy, and then communications strategy within specific channels, then into measurement. All of these are rich areas for creative output to be applied to all manner of business problems. However, strategic planners in advertising agencies focus primarily on advertising as the output, and limit the creative possibility of the agency.

If we are to kill the strategic planner before they kill the advertising agency we need an alternative way of doing things. Here are five solutions your agency should consider implementing as soon as possible (each numbered solution matches the issue raised above):

• Solution 1: Train account service in strategy. The account service people should also be the strategic champions of the business. Like they were before J Walter Thompson invented the strategic planner. They need to take more responsibility for the client's business and the recommended direction it’s heading, like people within consultancies currently do. 
   
• Solution 2: Bring creatives up the foodchain. Your re-trained account service people  should now work hand in glove with creative people, not in front of them, but side by side. This should be the driving force, and driving partnership of a modern creative agency. Many agencies talk about the value of this partnership, but few put it into practice or have formalised the working model.
   
• Solution 3: Ensure ‘strategy’ has tangible and valued outputs. If strategy is important to your agency, then give your clients strategy they can buy. This is unlikely to be in the form of a creative brief - as the strategic planner has trained the industry to not value (pay for) this. There are plenty of tangible strategic outputs before the creative idea, and after the creative idea people are willing to pay for. Segmentation, category understanding, positioning, brand architecture and portfolio management, innovation and NPD, communications (and CX, social and earned and media) strategy, design, measurement and optimisation, and so on. There’s so many strategic output clients need help with, I’d ensure strategy focuses in these areas.
   
• Solution 4: Kill the brief, have conversations instead. Talk to your clients and ensure they are able to write strong and succinct briefs. If you do have to write internal briefs, make them the exception, save them for the jobs that really need them, and whatever you do, don't fetishise the brief. The words on the brief are important, but they are not holy tablets delivered from on high. It’s quite possible an idea could be ‘off brief’ but still completely right for the client - just in a way no one had previously thought of. A culture built around internal briefs also creates a reactive, not proactive culture of ‘waiting for a problem to solve’, rather than working with the client to find opportunities to build their brand.
   
• Solution 5: Expand the strategic remit. I'm incredibly bullish about the value of agencies moving forward, but I think they are going to look more like creative consultancies, offering creative solutions right through the clients business. They’ll continue to look less and like a traditional advertising agency, and more like a creatively driven consultancy working on more fundamental projects, embracing owned channel solutions across the EX and CX with as much fervour as they currently apply to paid channels. 

So there you have it. If advertising agencies want to survive then they may need to look at that most unsuspecting role within the agency, the traditional strategic planner. Of course their role and importance in the agency structure is already changing and they are diversifying their services, and doing their best to remain relevant. However, I have not heard of many agency models formalising a different approach to ensure the agency maintains a strategic approach to creativity.   

It’s also worth noting here that at Thinkerbell we have a) implemented the suggestions above and b) we have some of the best strategic thinkers I’ve ever worked with, and many far better at what we do than I’ll ever be. Some run accounts, some focus in media others in CX, some bring a business lens, some are brand obsessed. But very few practice ‘strategic planning’ as it once was on a daily basis.

Adam Ferrier is the chief thinker and founder and Gerry Cyron is the executive head brand thinker of Thinkerbell. 

What do you think of this opinion piece? As this is one view in a nuanced debate, Campaign Asia welcomes alternate views and rebuttals. Email our editor Nikita Mishra.