AAAA's: The Many Shades of Planning

Just returned from a jam-packed 3 day session at the 4A's in San Diego. Got to hear a lot of great presentations. While my head is still swimming as I try to digest the mass amount of info, one of the things I went to the conference curious to hear conversations about was the many "divisions" of planning- account vs connection vs channel vs etc, and what people thought ideal relationships might be...

I leave the conference with more or less the same conclusion I had going in- there doesn't seem to be much consensus when it comes to how these various roles of planning work together. Some believe connection is wholly separate, and should be formally, from account, while others see them as two peas of the same pod...

But one theme popped up that probably makes the clearest case for me as to how they could work best as two separate roles. I heard from a few people the idea that a connection and account planner could ideally work together in a model similar to that of writer and art director teams: both responsible for different yet related parts of the process, bouncing ideas off one another until the best possible solution is reached. Not saying this may be the best in all cases, but a clearly defined partnership the way creatives work could be an interesting approach.


But in general, conversations I heard were few about connection vs account vs etc, and there tended to be little commonalities between them. Though, if any readers out there who attended were privy to some good convo on this, sound off...

On that note, keep up on the Connection Planning Conference in October to hear the plannerly conversations continue.