Response to “Is planning planning?”
Louise Kennedy, a „BrandRepublic blogette” (funny self-description) and junior planner (I believe a very clever one because she’s blogging interesting stuff) asked whether planning in different types of agencies is a different discipline in each area. She came up with the spontaneous opinion, that it is the same discipline, whatever the media is. And she wanted to get some opinions from other planners to see if she’s right.
Maybe her question should be transformed into “what’s the difference between a brand planner and an experience planner”? Because the planner I will mention below (digital, shopper/retail) are planning the brand within the particular channel and context. And the fact is, that classical agencies (which mostly create tv and print ads, I am trying to avoid the word ATL) are the basis where the typical job description of a brand planner is derived from.
Please note: Today, most agencies claim to work integrated and there is no classical agency anymore. But I don’t trust their promises since I haven’t seen a lot of integrated work by ONE agency yet. The reason is that when they say integrated, the actually mean “an ATL idea that’s transported and adapted into all channels.” I don’t think that’s integrated. It is, at best just an adaptation.
Anyway – my definition of classical agency is an agency that just creates ads for the channels tv and print. You might disagree, but it helps to figure out the answer for Louise’s question.
Since I have worked for a classical agency as well a digital agency for some years, I claim to know it better than Louise – it’s not the same discipline. And I will tell you why:
My experience as a brand planner in a digital agency was, that one has to think about brands in a more complex way. It’s not only about common brand models and architectures etc. It’s about how a brand can act or better interact with people. It’s about creating experiences, not messages.
Experience planning is not just about one brand promise or message anymore - you have to think about the whole dialogue. And this “brand act-system” is complex and it’s not possible to put it in one common universal model. Also the key difference is, you don’t start with the brand, category, product or marketing toolkit. You start with people’s goals and tasks, which is actually one of Leo Burnett’s HumanKind philosophy’s main points. People and behaviour at root of everything, not the brand.
Thus, I completely disagree with the opinion of one of the commentators who writes digital agencies act first and work out how things work as you go. That’s not true and devalues the work of a digital planner.
Furthermore, a creative brief in digital agencies contains much more than the typical elements. This is due to the fact that the receiver of this brief is not only an Art Director and Copywriter and maybe a media guy. There also designers, motion designers, interaction designer and technicians who have to build the website or the widget or whatever. And for all of these people of different disciplinary beground there a User Experience Planner (called Information Architect is some cases) who has to build the blueprint of the experience in the form of experience and solution models like wireframes, sitemaps and the user flow. These people need more information than a common creative brief.
To cut a long story short: experience planning is a different way of planning. It starts with people and their actually observed behaviour. And I guess that this behaviour is different in every channel – the job of a planner for shopper marketing for example is also different because people’s goals and task are different and they go about them differently in each channel.
The fact is, that clients often come up with an existing brand model and positioning and a description of the target audience etc.. But that doesn’t help much when it comes to experience planning since these elements have to be put into the context of the channel.
To give you some examples what kind of questions a planner has to deal with:
User Experience Planner: how do people behave as users, are they more a scanner or scroller or clicker or explorer or browser etc.?; Or how to initialize user-generated content that drives the campaign in a direction that supports the brand positioning?
Retail Planner: How does my brand positioning fit with the retailer’s brand and how can it act within the given environment?
To come to an end: The job of brand planner is the same, regardless of the channel, because brands should be channel-agnosic. But again, they do not plan the experience, the plan the message!
Three options for the future come up:
a) There won’t be any classical agencies anymore and every planner develops integrated campaign, including experiences. Thus, a brand planner has to be an experience planner, too.
b) There will always be channel-specialized agencies. Thus, the work of a brand planner (in the classical agency) is different from the work of the experience planner (in the specialized agency).
c) There will be brand planners and experience planners working on the same brand or project – ideally working in the same, integrated agency, too. And this is the way we try to work here.
I think either option a) or c) will be the future model. But I don’t know. Option a) needs an all-rounder, option c) needs a well organized coordination/process.
Everybody is invited to share his or her thoughts here. Many thanks to Louise for inspiring me to blog about that issue 
