3.2 The uncertain world of advertising today

The marketing world in which advertising agencies contend is as uncertain and unstable as ever. Increased competition among agencies over new and existing accounts has led to what some have termed a battle to capture the consumer’s share of mind. Concerned about losing market share to rival companies, agencies may increase spending on consumer advertising even in declining markets. But they do so for reasons that often have more to do with defensive strategies than gains in consumer margins.

The marketing climate breeds an environment of such intense competition that agencies and marketers may lose focus on the consumer and fixate on rival firms. Competition among rival agencies is not the only reason for uncertainty today. Client loyalty is not what it used to be. The average length of any given contract commitment between an agency and client has dropped precipitously in recent years. What once was an average commitment of eleven years in the US has now dipped to around two and a half years.

The disastrous events of 11 September 2001 have only exacerbated conditions. Overall advertising spending among corporations in the US has declined by 7 per cent, the worst decline in forty years. As a consequence, the top 200 US agencies in 2001 eliminated 21,750 jobs [5, p.154]. Agencies are therefore desperate to maintain current relationships with clients as they continue to seek new ones. To cope with increased competition and rising marketplace instability advertising agencies have figured out ways to attract new accounts while retaining existing clients. An agency cannot simply rely on its reputation. It has to position itself as offering the client something of added value, such as its proprietary marketing approach that differentiates it from rivals. Advertising agencies in effect resemble their advertised brands in how they market their competitive advantage to attract and retain their first customer – the client.

Making an agency sizzle, especially in the early stages of building client relations, is increasingly a function of the account planning department. Account planning helps generate new business by demonstrating an agency’s strategic competency through its proprietary marketing approaches and brand and consumer models. As corporations increasingly turn their attention to research that plumbs the depths of consumers’ relationships to products and brands, account planning becomes central to bringing the client’s brand and consumer to life. The planner’s role in adding value to the agency has become important because consumer focus has taken center stage in the marketing world.

Exploring consumer relations to products began in the 1950s, when research shifted from focusing on more mundane functional statistics of marketing to understanding consumers’ desires and in relation to products. Probing the inner world of consumer thought reveals the more imaginative properties of the brand than demographic numbers, and provides marketers with a richer source for inspiring creative and effective advertising. Current marketing literature is replete with consumer-focused books that offer how-to guides on targeting the inner world of consumers. The planner’s task in all of this is to unlock the rich inner world and discover consumers’ hidden emotional connections to products and brands.

Account planning came to the US from Britain in the 1970s – first to a handful of shops before its epidemic spread [6, p.214]. Contrary to earlier advertising research practices, which took consumer feedback more as a last minute check on creative work, account planning incorporates consumer input into every stage of the advertising process, from initial idea to finished execution. In this way account planners are said to bolster advertising’s emotional connection to consumers by acting as partners with them. By hiring psychologists, anthropologists or even hypnotists, whose techniques include psychoanalysis, in-home ethnography, hypnotism and metaphor analysis, planners probe the emotional depths of consumers for insights.

The planner’s role as insight expert brings us back to the purpose of the workshop. It is during workshop meetings that planners best demonstrate their persuasive skills, creatively positioning the agency’s strategic thinking and proprietary research tools in ways that add value for the client. Planners demonstrate their value not only in the insightful analysis they yield to the client, but also in the particular language they use with the client. Since most clients tend to be marketers themselves and are more comfortable dealing with the language of strategy than of advertising, they often identify more easily with an agency’s planner than with its account or creative person. Indeed, it is the way in which insights are communicated and presented to the client that is vital for creating connections, rather than marketing facts about the client’s consumer, brand or competition. By presenting proprietary models that engage social interaction and by expressing ideas in a language that evokes shared emotion, the agency hopes to draw the client deeper into long-term relations of affinity.