Navigation trail

• Insights and inspirations planner: Mark

Insights and inspirations planner: Mark

This Case Study belongs to Advertising account planner.

Mark's first degree was in architecture at the University of Greenwich which he completed in 1999. He rejected a future in this area because he didn’t want all his creativity to be expressed as buildings. He wanted a wider scope and variety of outputs for his ideas and talents. He also wanted to start earning and the length and sacrifices to train as an architect were not inviting.

This led to him working initially for a small healthcare company as a graphic designer. He knew that this particular job would not fulfil the creative needs and enrolled on the MA Design Studies at the University of the Arts, St Martins.

This course was integral to orientating Mark to become an advertising account planner. The course encouraged students to think in an entrepreneurial way, to think differently and creatively about problems. It was here that Mark did his final year project on ‘marketing below the line and ethical business’ which was really providing a grounding for a job he had still not really heard of before. On the course he teamed up with a fellow student and did some consultancy work for ‘ethical businesses’ which he now realises was in fact ‘informal account planning’.

The epiphany came when he discovered through a fellow student on the MA a leaflet from the Account Planning Group on the profession and realised that this was the role for which he had been inexorably (and inadvertently) grooming himself.

He found his current job as ‘Insights & Inspirations Planner’ with Woo Communication through a recruitment agency. He feels that he was lucky that they were not looking for a traditional candidate with a background in research but someone who would challenge norms. His previous creative experience was definitely a positive for the role.

Marks day-to-day role is to: incentivise and inspire the account managers; work with clients; make pitches and brief ‘creatives’. He feels lucky to be what he calls a 'planner without a prefix'. He does everything. The joy in the job is that he never knows what will be the actual output of the creative process. Because he works in ‘below the line marketing’ the output will not be a traditional 30-second advertisement but might evolve as direct mailing, public relations exercises or sales promotions, or internet campaigns or something that has not been done before.

What Mark enjoys about the job is 'the constant stimulation' and having 'to think like ten different people'. For the moment he is doing exactly what he wants to do. In the future as he says if he was interested in the money he might look to become a creative director. It would be more likely that he would be interested in his own agency dealing in strategic brand activation.

Mark's advice to graduates who seek a career in advertising accounts planning is to develop the skill of questioning everything and be interested in everything. Ultimately, the judgements of planners are 'made on gut feelings built up from a wide range of experience'.

Case Study sourced by David Shacklady of AGCAS, 15 August 2008.