98% Pure Potato by John Griffiths

Author:John Griffiths
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-06-14T13:35:48+00:00

Working with clients

‘It was a totally collaborative team effort, so you would have the planners, the creatives . . . the account director would run the meeting, you as the brand manager would have your junior brand manager, the junior would have an assistant. For some huge big meeting you would have the marketing manager in the room too.’ Peter Dart

The account planning idea was consumer-led not client-led. Stanley Pollitt’s Pritchard Wood experiment, taken over to Boase Massimi Pollitt, was carried out in the interests of the agency to ensure that the agency’s work was not hostage to research techniques he didn’t believe in. And after the failed Smash commercial, qualitative pretesting became a hallmark of the BMP style of planning. It came about to prevent clients losing confidence in the agency and the power of its work. ­Stephen King founded the J. Walter Thompson planning department in part as a preventative exercise, as he saw budgets and power leaking away from the agency’s marketing department. The planning department embedded marketing thinking inside the account team to make it possible to sell advertising campaigns to the marketers that would build their brands.

So it is interesting to hear how much contact the first planners had with clients. There is some overhang from the marketing department days. Planners carried out marketing activities for free that the client company was unable to do themselves or lacked confidence in. John Bruce, in his early twenties, even wrote the Bowater Scott marketing plan (including Andrex toilet paper). Planners routinely conducted product research and either worked in parallel with the client research department or performed the research buying function for their clients. They also worked in new product development, whether conducting desk research to find gaps in the market for entirely new products or line extensions, or getting involved in brainstorming new products. This has been part of the service from the beginning. And BMP, J. Walter Thompson and CDP all did this kind of work. The actual research might be conducted by third-party research companies so the planners acted as research buyers, but all of the agencies had researchers who could carry out fieldwork themselves.50 Each of the agencies was simultaneously a research agency and a buyer of research from third parties on behalf of the client. This would give the agency more contact points with the client and kept them close to market intelligence, strengthening their position when it came to the development of advertising.

The planners from J. Walter Thompson don’t give specific examples of persuading clients, because their work with marketers was much more like being a permanently connected brand consultancy. Peter Dart, as a Unilever brand manager working with JWT in the 1970s, talks about the strategic leadership the agency took: ‘You spent Thursday in J. Walter Thompson – one day a week was the agency day. And you’d arrive at nine o’clock every Thursday and you would go through a sequence. In those days of course we had good market research of our own.

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