A general lack of knowledge among American advertisers was the biggest obstacle to the widespread implementation of account planning in the United States. Many agencies thought that planning was just another name for the research department, and account executives feared their jobs would be lost to this new brand of administrator. In addition, converting an agency and all its accounts to an account planning system was costly, and clients were skeptical of the new system.

For these reasons, small and medium-sized agencies generally found it easier to implement planning. With a smaller, more flexible infrastructure, these shops must do less to adapt to a planning philosophy. The sudden and surprising success of these smaller firms drew industry-wide attention to this new technique.

Larger agencies often faced tougher physical and ideological obstacles to the adoption of planning. However, when megalithic agencies like Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson, whose London agencies were already familiar with the system, began experimenting with implementation in their American offices, other large and powerful agencies took notice and considered planning as well.

Still, in 1991, a decade after Jay Chiat introduced account planning to Chiat/Day, fewer than two dozen advertisers attended the first annual Account Planning Group &endash; U.S. meeting. Those who did attend primarily represented agencies outside the American advertising mainstream of the time, shops like The Richards Group and Kirshenbaum & Bond. The keynote speech, as Debra Goldman points out, focused on "How and Why to Start a Planning Agency." "That's where planning was back than," speaker Adam Stagliano recalls, "still in the justification stage" (Goldman November 9, 1998). Now, just eight years later, account planning is an institution within the advertising business. How did this system move so quickly from the fringe of the industry to become a central part of it?

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Account Planning