An intentionally contrarian essay on the future of planning submitted to the Admap Essay Prize in 2012.

1. ‘Planning 3.0 - The Planning Landscape in 2020’
A Punter’s View, by John Shaw.
Any prize that is a lifetime’s supply of anything is clearly designed
to attract younger contestants, unless it’s slippers or denture
fixative. If current projections are fulfilled, a twenty-five year old
winning the prize would receive about six hundred issues of
Admap, an unimaginable luxury, whereas at my age I would only
receive two hundred and seventy-six, a very pleasant trophy but a
considerably smaller one. It’s clear, then, that I’ll be competing
with planners who are young, smart, hungry, and so digitally
native they’re practically a lost tribe. It’s a daunting prospect.
The only unusual weapon I have is experience. I started in the
planning department of JWT in 1985, when every day began with
an erudite coffee-fuelled discussion on what was in the daily
papers and no busy work was done until at least 10.15. So in
looking forward to what planning will be like in eight years’ time, I
can at least offer a twenty-seven year historical perspective on
planning. And this could be quite useful, if the intention is to
predict the actual future rather than simply a fanciful notion of it.
That’s because eight years is really quite a short time. Things might
change much faster in the next eight years than they have in the
last eight, or even in the last twenty-seven, but if you were a betting
man, which I am, you’d have to say it’s unlikely. The things we
expect to arrive tomorrow often take a little longer than we thought
they would. I’ve been dreaming of a ‘smart fridge’ for years, since
1997 in fact when a Microsoft product guy told me that they were
just about to put fridges on the Internet (for some reason I never
fully understood.) A couple of weeks ago the LG Smart Manager
Fridge finally arrived, fifteen years late but admittedly with a few
extra features. According to the press, it has been described as like
having ’your own Nigella Lawson.’ Disconcertingly futuristic as this
sounds, it’s basically the Internet fridge I was promised in 1997.
We tend to overestimate the speed of short-term change.
It may be that planning should change really, really fast in the
next eight years. But planning in 2012 is still recognisably similar
to planning in 1985, apart from the virtual eradication of pipe-
smoking. It didn’t change all that fast from 1996 to 2004, despite
the onset of digital, and it hasn’t changed all that quickly since,

2. despite the arrival of social media and the mobile Internet. If
planning has evolved only gradually through these spectacular
upheavals, it’s a fair bet that it’s unlikely to transform itself
completely in the next eight years either.
This relatively slow pace of evolution means that for the (relatively
short-term) future of planning, we can use prediction techniques
that are based more on evidence than hunch, more on observation
than prediction, more on Moneyball than Dr. Who. Because
although it may not sound so impressive, that’s how you’d do it if
you had money on it. Or even if you had two hundred and seventy-
six issues of Admap on it. The most likely real-world future of
planning will be based on several good bets:
1. That the things that haven’t changed much in twenty-seven years
are unlikely to change in the next eight.
2. That the inexorable trends of the last twenty-seven years are
likely to continue in the next eight.
3. That the things that have been roiling seas of confusion for the
last twenty-seven years will still be roiling seas of confusion for the
next eight.
Of course, some new factors will emerge. But if we understand
what each of the above three categories contain, we’ll have most of
the picture of what planning will actually be like in 2020, or at
least a better picture than that produced by conventional hunch-
based techniques, however sexy and imaginative they may be.
The things that haven’t changed much in twenty-seven
years.
The first three fall into what you might call the Bateman category,
in that if they get messed up, they produce horrified looks in the
direction of the planner. These aspects of the planner’s role are so
ingrained into the consciousness of the advertising world that
they’re unlikely to disappear. (And when I say ‘advertising’, I’m
using the term in its broad sense so I don’t have to say something
like ‘multi-layered media-neutral marketing
communications/behaviours/memes.’)

3. 1. We’ll still be the ‘voice of the consumer.’
Many planners have sneered at this description, either because
it belittles their role or because it seems to imply that we are
letting consumers develop advertising. But although we’ll be
using different methods to understand the consumer and we’ll
be spending more time with the client’s data (see below), we’ll
still be the people everyone looks at when the question arises of
what real people actually think about things. Business pressures
make it harder to spend time snooping around in the
consumer’s world rather than showing off in the client’s one.
But it’s time well spent.
2. We’ll still be writing creative briefs.
John Grant pointed out a while back that, having criticised
unimaginative creative briefs in the past, when he actually had
to write one himself again he resorted to a fairly conventional
format. The basic categories on the briefs that most agencies use
haven’t really changed all that much for thirty years, so it’s
unlikely they’ll be entirely abolished in the next eight.
There is a nuance, though. Although it’s the planner who tends
to write the brief down, I think it’s a fair bet that by 2020 more
briefs will be written as a record of a discussion than as an input
into it. As business has become quicker and brand-building
more multi-faceted, it’s simply saved time and been more fertile
to get people together to discuss direction before crafting a
jewel-like brief.
3. We’ll still be experts on effectiveness.
This is one of those categories that has been too fundamental to
planning to make a sudden exit from the job description. It
could be argued that the increasing variety of data ought to
make this a specialist function. But one thing we’ve learnt over
the years is that effectiveness is not simply a bolt-on: an
understanding of effectiveness is a key part of developing a
compelling strategy.

4. 4. We’ll be dealing with an enormously wide variety of
problems.
This doesn’t fit quite so neatly into the ‘hasn’t changed much’
category as the topics above, but it was true before 1985 and it
will be true in 2020. This is partly because a modern CEO can
sense cost and inefficiency from a long way off, and doesn’t like
to see too many agency people cluttering up Reception. He or
she would prefer to have three agencies, not fifteen, and this
implies a need for planning departments that have a voracious
problem appetite.
Although this diversity of problems has increased over the last
few years, it’s really just a return to normality. My hazy
recollection of Stephen King’s substantial planning document
for the launch of Mr. Kipling is that it didn’t mention
advertising until about three quarters of the way through, after
discussion of what the product range should be and how the
delivery vans should be painted. Although there was a period,
the late 80’s and 90’s, when it seemed that problems were more
contained and we spent much of our time developing
advertising briefs, those years were an aberration. The long-
term norm for planners is to be sticking our fingers in all sorts
of pies.
The inexorable trends that will continue.
1. We’ll be spending more time with clients. We may even
be clients.
Thankfully, this isn’t all about the need to be impressing clients in
order to be paid for, and thus be ‘secure.’ It’s also for the less
depressing reason that clients now fully realise the power of data,
and they are more reluctant to make agencies the custodians of it
than they were twenty years ago. So if we want to know consumers
at least as well as our clients, we’ll be very plugged in to their data.
The other rather scary factor is that increasing numbers of clients
see the planning role itself as something that is too important to be
farmed out. Think about the job description. We are expected to be

5. expert not just on a brand’s communications, but on its purpose
and behaviour. We are working across multiple disciplines and
helping to connect them. We understand how brands connect with
culture in general and often with multiple different cultures. In
addition we’re still expert on consumers, on creative development,
and on effectiveness. It’s not surprising that increasing numbers of
clients are deciding that if this is ‘planning’ then it’s something
they’d quite like to have inside their own organisation, and in more
and more cases they’re hiring planners from agencies to bring it in.
2. Planner titles will keep multiplying.
There will be more titles. The blurb for this competition mentioned
seven separate strands of account planning and there are many
more out there. There will be as many titles as there are different
disciplines in the marketing landscape, multiplied by about three,
and then some. I’ve come across planners (some of them very
good) who called themselves ‘imagineers.’ It’s very good that
different disciplines want their own planners. My only wish would
be that those planners don’t become too myopically channel-
evangelistic, because that is counter to the objective belief in
effectiveness that is at the heart of planning philosophy. (I can’t
believe that I just confessed to being scared of myopic channel-
evangelism.)
3. We’ll continue developing our social skills.
There’s still some room to improve, sure, but the need to work fast
and across many specialisms and possibilities is unlikely to
decelerate. That tends to place the planner at the heart of groups,
and to give the planner great opportunities to pull them together
and get the best out of them. Eventually, planners will be trained
in this to a greater degree than is the norm today. The term ‘rock-
star planner’ can occasionally be heard nowadays in the
advertising lexicon. Don’t flatter yourselves, methinks. But perhaps
it hints at the increasing opportunities for planners to be very
comfortable as frontmen.
4. We’ll be drawn more into our clients’ internal issues.
Information has been becoming more widely available for years.
That means that the boundaries between ‘internal
communications’ and ‘external communications’ are now very

6. weak. It’s safer to assume that an internal communication is
available to all. Clients woke up long ago to the idea that employees
and business partners could act as brand ambassadors.
Conversations can’t be separated. But in this context, are we seeing
‘internal communications’ that are as brilliant as some of the best
advertising? In general, no. There is still some catching up to do.
So it’s inevitable that agencies will get drawn more into this area,
and understanding how to motivate staff and partners will become
another important part of what planners do.
5. Planners will be in more demand than ever.
I really hope this is true. But it’s not just a hope: history is on my
side. Headhunters would confirm that demand for the best
planning candidates has been steady to increasing over the long
term, probably more so than for some other roles. There aren’t so
many creative directors saying ‘planning has been dead from the
neck up for years’, as one famously did many years ago. When you
think about the sort of things planners are doing, it’s easy to see
why our skills are in demand. And what’s reassuring is that in a
world where communications are getting more complex and new
possibilities are emerging all the time, there is a premium on being
smart and being curious. And the best planners are both of those
things.
The things that will continue to trouble us.
1. We’ll still be debating whether we’re tweakers or grand
strategists.
This one has been around since the beginning and it’s unlikely to
go away. There are more disciplines than ever which demand
intimate understanding to make them work really well, but there
are still vast opportunities for planners to be involved in chunky
strategic issues. The degree of stretch in the role seems unlikely to
lessen. And it probably doesn’t matter much as long as we learn, or
at least deploy the social and organisational skills to make sure
both ends receive proper attention.
2. We’ll still be arguing over who gets to choose the
media.

7. There will always be a tension between a more creatively-led
approach to media/channel/engagement planning and a more
logical one. And because there’s so much money at stake, there will
always be different constituencies arguing about whose decision it
is. Planners will continue to be swept up in this since the solutions
we’re looking for are partly channel, partly creative. But we’ll only
have a valid point of view if we create enough time to have a
current understanding of how people are interacting with various
channels. This can be quite a big ask and will cause us stress. It will
be easier if the ‘media’ and ‘creative’ worlds come closer together
again. I miss my Media Research Department.
3. We’ll still be wondering what to wear.
Planning has always occupied an uncomfortable dress code
hinterland between the large sartorial blocs of account
management and creative. The tendency of each of these blocs to
appropriate and subvert the other’s codes, for example through the
wearing of suits by creative directors, has made the situation for
planners even more difficult. Guidance is impossible. It’s a jungle
out there.
So in summary, if I was in the uncomfortable position of having to
put money on what planning will be like in 2020, I’d say that it in
several key respects it will still resemble the planning we knew in
1985, or earlier, with a few key modifications. But that doesn’t
make it weak or unduly conservative. It simply means that the
people who started it got the fundamentals right. For which we can
all be grateful.
Admap 2012, published on Slideshare with permission.